No frivolous April's Fools jokes this time, white-knuckled readers! Once again I shall address one of the most vexing, dividing issues of our time: ABORTION. But fear not, for I'll treat the issue with my usual sensitivity.
For the last couple of days, a group of Pro-Lifers have been toting about 20 massive photographs (about as high as me) around campus. What did these happy pictures depict? Well, they came in sets of three, and most of them had a distinct theme. The first square showed a bunch of stiffs and said something disparaging about the Nazis. The second showed a bunch of good ol' southern boys lynching a black guy. The third showed various pieces of aborted fetuses. Not the kind of thing you want to see on your way to lunch (for most people, anyway--I've got a stomach of steel). They were pretty damn graphic and generally unpleasant. The message was kind of obvious, that abortion equals genocide.
Of course, that isn't technically true. Genocide is, according to Webster's dictionary, "the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. Not to be a nit-picker, but I can't help but notice that, right or wrong, abortion is not genocide because 1)it is not sytematic, and 2)fetuses hardly qualify as a national, racial, political, or cultural group. It is, however, usually deliberate, but one out of three does not a genocide make.
Whoa, I just had a hit of deja vu. Creepy.
So anyway, the use of the word genocide is typical of those political groups who have to rely on evoking rabid emotion rather than common sense and reason. The problem is that it dilutes the meaning of the word. Hell, in a couple of years they'll be using the word "genocide" to describe the pox of daytime television. That's actually a pretty cool idea: "The Genocide of Brain Cells: A Couch Potato's Story". I also just realized that I'm overqualified to be Vice-President. To get back to the point, you'll notice that people, particularly those vanguards of common sense, journalists, use words like "catastrophe", "massacre", and "cataclysm" to describe mlld disturbances in everyday life. Kinda weakens the meaning of the words, doesn't it? I just thought of what I'm going to write next time...
So to get back to my MAIN point, if you brought some chick from 200 years ago to today and presented her with the abortion debate, she'd laugh at you at the pure absurdity of it all. Only in the latter half of this century have children actually MEANT something. If you've got a child mortality rate running at well over 50%, you don't invest a lot of time or energy into your kids. That's one of the reasons why Europeans were so mean. If all you know is pain and misery you're whole life, you become indifferent to your own and anyone else's suffering...but dammit, that's another entry. Up until VERY recently, life was cheap, and kids' life was K-Mart Blue Light Special. So it's all relative.
Now, let's TRY to look at the facts of the whole issue. Abortion IS ending a potentially viable human life. On the other hand, most of these people shouldn't be having children anyway. Sure, those Pro-Lifers say that there are 1.5 million abortions a year (a number that sounds implausably high, BTW) and 2 million couples waiting to adopt. What they don't mention is that that 2 million includes a large backlog and after the first year you've got a surpluss of babies. And then a lot of those are crack-addicted alcohol-fetal-syndromed mutants. The alternative, though, is that all those babies end up in the dumpsters behind the hospitals. So the choices are: a bunch of dead babies, or a bunch of babies raised by ludicrously inept and bitter parents that grow up to become murderers, thieves, or lawyers.
So now, I will give you THE answer! This is THE solution to the entire abortion problem!
DON'T GET PREGNANT IN THE FIRST PLACE!
I hope that this contributes to peace in our time.