My 2000 words on Roe V. Wade

I will start this article by saying that I am personally firmly in the pro-choice camp in terms of a woman having the right to have an abortion, but not because of some ideological virtue, rather because as horrible as abortion is, it has proven to be ‘less-bad’ than the alternatives. However, I also never felt right about abortions being a federally-protected right, enforced upon States filled with people for whom abortion is an identity-centric issue. And in my usual non-conforming manner, I will explain that I am equally opposed to the recent campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, as it has now stirred a pot of shit that in the end serves only to further polarize and divide our nation, as well as not really accomplishing much for those who’d pushed for it.

Federal involvement in our laws was always supposed to be strictly limited to specifically those things that are clearly listed within our constitution. We as a people agreed to reaffirm our natural rights to:

• Practice any religion, or lack thereof, to free speech, a freedom of the press^​*​;
• The freedom to retain the tangible power over our self-defense, the ability to retain power to physically and violently oppose our government (as a final check in the system of checks and balances) and to organize for this purpose, if we so choose^​†​;
• To never be forced to house soldiers or anyone else we don’t welcome into our homes^​‡​;
• A right to be secure within our persons, homes, and property from unreasonable search or seizure^​§​

READ: a man’s home is his castle! And the 19^th amendment affirms retroactively that we may substitute the female pronoun within the preceding statement.

We then finally agreed that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”^​¶​

This was done specifically due to the belief that people should be most directly in charge of their government and those laws that affect them most on day-to-day basis. Governments are much easier to keep in check on a smaller local scale where one does not feel like a meaningless ant in an enormous anthill. It is easier and more effective to plead for your rights on a lawn in Olympia than it is in Washington D.C. This model of limited core power and delegation to localities is often carried through in State constitutions that set state-wide preemption laws, but allow counties and municipalities to decide the bulk of governance while within close reach of their citizenry. This system allows most direct control by the people over their legislature and it is something that we ought to strive for.

Most Americans seem to think that the Roe v. Wade supreme court decision was based on some constitutional amendment probably passed sometime around the 1973 decision date, because by law it has to be, right? Yet most Americans don’t realize that the highly liberal bench which decided on that case, based their 7-2 decision upon the 14^th Amendment,^​¶​ which entered our constitution at the end of the Civil War to effectively give citizenship to former slaves, solidify power in the hands of the more populous northern states by establishing how many federal representatives each state got “according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians”^​#​ and reaffirmed that all men (exempt Indians, apparently) have equal protections under the law (in case the reader ADD’ed while reading the first 10 amendments). I challenge anyone reading this to explain to me how having an abortion is in any way, shape, or form is a part of this 1866 amendment! In 1973, it was a clear case of federal overreach, and anyone actually interested in preserving what has proven to be the best governmental framework that humanity has ever seen, ought to admit that.

That said, I am less concerned about the legality of Roe v. Wade and more about, why it and so many other divisive issues are things that our ‘free’ media bombards us about in an effort to outrage the cattle to into stampeding to action and trampling everything in their way. Since I’d mentioned the Civil War earlier, let’s use a convenient example from that timeframe: When the southern states formed a confederacy in order to cede from the northern-controlled union, they received immediate and very material support from England, France and virtually every other major power at that time. These other powers gave arms and munitions, issued loans, armed confederate vessels of war and in late 1862, there was real talk in both England and France of those nations entering the war on the side of the South. Think about it! England and France, who’d just ended decades of very bloody warfare with one another, suddenly came together to aid in splitting the United State in two. Why? Because they saw “These United States” as an emerging threat to their roles in the global power balance. Splintering The States, or chipping off a chunk, makes the whole weaker and less of an opponent to their own domineering ambitions. History going back to antiquity is full of these examples long before the Romans made “divide and conquer” one of their maxims. The policy was carried out to great effect and misery by the British empire in both Africa and the Middle East, resulting in the utter clusterfuck that future generations were left to deal with. In the 1980’s the US did the same thing when we empowered and effectively created the Taliban to splinter off the Soviet-allied state of Afghanistan. We created Osama Bin Laden, literally paid for the camps where he trained, and many others like him. We’re doing the same thing today with the long-going campaign which has alienated and splintered the Russian-allied nation of Ukraine into alienation from Russia, which provoked their unjustified aggression there.

How does this tie into the abortion issue? Simple: many foreign powers are forever attempting to divide us, to cause in-fighting, to destabilize us, because from their point of view, over the past century the US has become too powerful. Our serving as an example that fairly-managed capitalism gives rise to innovation, allows for greatest opportunities, and provides better overall standards of living, are threatening to those who’d forced their populace onto government-controlled welfare and run 80th percentile income taxes on the middle class to fund that welfare, while preserving generational oligarchies whose stratospheric economic levels can never be reached by mere plebians. Our showing that a free republican democracy, as flawed as it may be, works generally better than the totalitarian form of government. Do you realize that over half a billion people in the world today live under a monarchy? And that farther billions have no real option within a totalitarian dictatorship?

Our media sources are owned by international conglomerates and they are using our freedom of speech against us to get us to fight one another on numerous issues whose actual root effect on us often amounts to a ‘statistical zero.’ Among many others, Russia, Israel, Turkey, the EU, and China are all contributing in different ways to the purposeful division and destruction of our nation. Even the liberal favorite Noam Chomsky is recently on record railing on the undue influence of Israel in our politics^​**​ and on this issue Mr. Chomsky and I are in rare agreement.

“Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.”

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now, July 27, 2018^​††​

Foreign powers are not the only ones pushing us to the precipice. Many enemies within know full well that times of crisis give uncanny opportunities for a few to steal from everyone else. The net total of money taken out and thrown into the wind over the covid crisis, amounts to about $42,000 per man, woman, and child in America. Did your unemployment and stimulus welfare amount to that? If not, who got the rest? And they are seeking a shakeup that will make covid seem like a footnote. We’re being played people, and seemingly my entire facebook friend-o-sphere is posting inflammatory memes about the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade; and what’s more discouraging is that even the smarter among my friends posting about this, have thus far contributed almost exclusively by rebroadcasting canned, divisive, and non-constructive political propaganda without bothering to come up with a single original idea of their own. If this is how we deal with issues like this, it is only a matter of time until These United States are doomed.

What does the recent decision really mean? Well, some states may pass the dreaded outright abortion bans. For every such state, there will be 3-4 others that will be reaffirming their abortions laws to lay in view of their citizens. What is so terrible about that? Can we agree to disagree and stop the division over this issue? And guess what? If we keep the federal powers where they belong, the laws of the bible belt can’t really affect the rest of us. If you’re outraged in the name of someone else, please empower them to take charge of their lives and give them room to speak for themselves. A bus ticket across a state line costs as much as a case of beer and just like casinos that were built on the Nevada state line, states that are backwoods enough to pass abortion-blocking legislation will find their borders populated by abortion clinics. They may pass laws prohibiting such travel, but enforcement will be a joke. That 4th amendment I listed above gave our government the power to enact HIPAA, which makes all medical procedures private. Those of you who supported the effective suspension of this law for sake of covid paranoia, should go knock your heads into a brick wall for a while and maybe get a tattoo that says, “I shall not speak from both sides of my mouth” on your foreheads in mirrored letters. Furthermore, if the bible belt is too aggressive with implementation of their new rights the citizens there will start to vote with their feet, like the Pedarii of Ancient Rome, simply walking over to stand with those who they agree with – after all, legal residency in any state takes 30 days, or less.

Why does our generation have such a strong desire to force their beliefs on others?

To my conservative friends: yes – I fully realize the horrors of abortions, even the worst ones. But the fact is, abortions and infanticide have been a part of the human history for as long as we’ve existed. To fight core human nature is akin to trying to drain a swamp. What will restriction cause? Think it through. At minimum, let’s push for alternatives that we can all agree with. For one, I have close friends, both doctors and awesome parent material, who’d had trouble conceiving naturally. I learned through them the utter hell of legal obstacles and absurd shortages of babies available for adoption. Many people spend more than a decade on waiting lists and never have an opportunity to adopt. How do we permit this to happen while making abortions more difficult? Let’s fix this first along with other sensible steps and see how much of the divisive problem is solved and what it is that’s left to argue about.

So, because I said that Roe v. Wade was a federal overreach, does that mean that I support it being overturned? Well, no. That wrong was done long ago and although it is a topic that should have at some point received attention, and been properly reaffirmed on more righteous legal grounds, we have a very long list of things that actually matter, that we should’ve been focused on. There are issues that need fixing that could help us unite as a nation and reaffirm what we truly value. A prime example would be the repeal of the highly unconstitutional and oxymoronically named “Patriot Acts”, as well as the The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly called FISA, which is used by our government to spy on us without ever once stopping an actual terrorist attack. We need to fix our election system – the voting for the ‘less bad’ candidate will cause the collapse of our Democracy – we need runoff elections, or tiered voting as it’s sometimes called! Campaign finance reform… All of these things and many others should be on our discussion blocks and not abortion, or gun control, or covid. YOU ARE BEING PLAYED! Furthermore, if we are about ‘saving lives’ here – imagine what we could have done to help underaged mothers, orphanages, or propagate contraception, parental planning and education, had we spent just 10% of the money and effort that we just wasted on this nonsensical debate, into those areas.

So how would I like to federally reaffirm a woman’s right to choose? Well let’s first start the conversation with the biological fact that “life” starts at the moment of conception and unless we are OK with redefining the word “life” the way we redefined “cause of death” during covid, we must start there. Let’s discuss the aftermath of unwanted and dangerous pregnancies. Are we, as a society willing to absorb the results financially, and otherwise? People in Iceland are publicly proud to have solved trisomy 21, and today they don’t have a single living case of a person with Downs Syndrome because they simply aborted every single one of them – are we ok with that? Are you personally willing to help pay for a teenage girl from Alabama to have a child that she’s unable to care for? And if your answer is “no”, what is your proposed alternative other than preaching unrealistic chastity? If we allow abortions, let’s have a conversation with eyes open about the fact that we’re medically terminating a human life and given the common scenarios, how late is too late and what the options ought to be after that point. If we are going to say that we have the right to control and choose what happens to our bodies, let’s reaffirm that right in the stone of our constitution and while we’re at it, lets gather unity and support by stating that this right is universal for men and women – that we cannot be prohibited from seeking a medical procedure, nor can one be forced upon us for any reason, nor can we be discriminated against in any manner, or be completed into making this free and unforced choice. And if you disagree with that, please re-read the paragraph 4 above this one about talking from both sides of your mouth.

In the meantime, if we are going to talk about this, let’s stop with the canned memes and party-affiliated slogans. That shit is destroying us!