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Here’s the thing about abortion: it is murder just the same as stabbing someone in an alley and just the same as sending young people into combat.

It isn’t about how many weeks or how many centimeters or how many heartbeats because you can’t have a person without that zygote and so you can’t say the zygote is not alive, or a being. Cells that are reproducing and growing as rapidly as the zygotes are, more than qualify anything – plant or animal – to be ‘alive’.

No, it is about 1) who gets to murder legally and 2) who gets to decide who gets to murder legally. The answer to both – generally speaking, in dangerous generalizations – is old white guys. Politicians, influential businessmen, henchmen and cronies that think in grandiose terms, where lost lives are anticipated, computed and accepted as part of the game; the price of doing business.

Who doesn’t get to murder legally is everyone else, and the guys running the show will do anything to keep it that way, lashing out at the very idea of what and who they fear most: empowered women.

That abortion is a topic largely debated about and decided upon by men is ridiculous in the first place. That our elected officials cannot comprehend that like prostitution, gambling and seeking the meaning of life, abortions will occur as long as humans exist – regardless of the law – and that procedures performed in clean medical facilities serve everyone better than the alternatives, is disheartening at best. That the discussion is still raging almost a half century after Roe v. Wade indicates that to some degree it is purely political – just something to rouse the rabble and gain notoriety by beating the drum of an emotional issue.

What must it feel like to be raped? To have something so precious stolen and violated? Something intangible yet supremely personal and intimate? Something that should only be given and never taken? How does that feel Brian Kemp? Phil Bryant? Matt Bevin?

Guidelines, restrictions, regulations and constraints should be defined and overseen by qualified members of the medical, psychiatric and psychological communities – not the old white guys!”

What if one of your Lilly-white daughters was attacked, raped and impregnated by … let’s say a non-white guy? Are you going to encourage her to carry that baby and have it serve as a many-times-a-day reminder of that vicious attack? And when the baby comes will you expect her to give it up for adoption so she can spend the rest of her life wondering, or shall she raise the child and deal with her assailant on a regular basis? … (how cruel can cruel get?) Or will you ship her off to a better state than yours to take care of the problem? To kill your grandchild?

And we’re back!

…to who gets to murder and who gets to decide.

Women choose to have abortions for reasons less awful, it’s true. Some know they can’t properly take care of a child. Some are too young and don’t want their entire lives altered/’ruined’. Some know the baby will be born deformed or severely handicapped. Some are addicts and don’t want to bring another into the world. These reasons and the countless others that result in aborted babies may or may not be ‘good’ reasons; but they are often more sound than the reasons the old white guys can cite for sending our brave young men and women across the globe to kill. And just for conversation’s sake, is it more cruel to kill an unborn baby or an eighteen year-old that has developed into a fine young person, ready to live their life? The first might be done out of (albeit perhaps misguided) love while the second is only done out of hubris.

The fact is that ordering our young people to kill serves the old white guys and abortion does not – other than to enable them to project a political view when they are very likely too ignorant to have a rational opinion on anything else. Notice how distracted we in America are right now by these redneck states implementing archaic, hillbilly-ish laws, while the ongoing preparations to send our young people to go kill in the Middle East are barely getting an ‘oh, by the way’. Coincidence? Sure! And why is the only answer the old white guys ever have is to ‘put an end to it by making it illegal’ though it has never, not once ever, worked? Are they simply stupid or merely inconceivably blinded by ambition?

Any way you look at it, an abortion is a medical procedure. It should be discussed and decided upon by a woman and her specialized and certified doctor. The governments (state and fed) have no more business interfering with that procedure than they have interfering with my colonoscopy. End of story. Guidelines, restrictions, regulations and constraints should be defined and overseen by qualified members of the medical, psychiatric and psychological communities – not the old white guys!

Women will continue to assert themselves and their rights. More women will run for public office, and women will become a bigger part of the legal, judicial and law enforcement establishment(s). It won’t be long before the old white guys look around the room to see it filling up with empowered women determined to no longer allow others make decisions about their bodies, their psyches and their lives.

On that day, America will be a better place in which to live.