With the just completed introduction of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius as Obama's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, the neoconservative and pro life right are out in force and in full attack mode.
The issue is as always, Sibelius's pro choice record and her supposedly tight association with one Dr. Tiller, the neo con equivalent of Dr. Mengele. While there is real confusion on just what Tiller's association was with Gov. Sebelius,---The Governor's office states he was at a reception at the governors mansion in 2007 because he bought it in a charity auction, Operation Rescue defines the reception as given in his honor. There is no dispute that Dr. Tiller has his hands full with legal issues over late term abortions.
There is also no dispute abortions in Kansas have dropped by almost 10% while Sebelius has been in office. One would think that would at least merit some recognition if the pro life crowd really cared about reducing abortions and saving lives. Their real agenda is becoming clearer the longer President Obama is in office and I personally don't think it has anything to do with reducing abortions. It has everything to do with forcing pregnancy on women who don't want to be pregnant. Otherwise there wouldn't be the pro life paradox regarding birth control.
The Guttmacher institute, which both sides in this issue routinely cite, stated recently that access to birth control reduces abortions by nearly 40% in low income areas. That's a pretty staggering percentage. So why aren't pro lifer's on board with free access to birth control if they really care about reducing abortion? Because ultimately it's not about abortion, it's about sex and who gets to have it and who gets to pay for it.
Guttmacher also has some other interesting information. For instance, the countries whose legal system follows the pro life sexual agenda by limiting access to birth control and criminalizing abortion also have the world's highest rate of abortion and highest rates of over all poverty. The countries with the lowest rates of abortion have the easiest access to birth control and legal abortion. The same is true in states in the US. The lowest abortion rates are in the states with the most liberal abortion laws and easy access to birth control.
The pro life movement is not about reducing abortions. They are about forcing their vision of appropriate sexual behavior on society, and if women and their children get caught in impossible situations, it's their own fault. Here's the thinking of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:
Feb 24: Tony Perkins, President of the formerly anti-abortion Family Research Council, admitted to the Associated Press that the organization's previously stated mission of saving the "unborn" had been ceded to other priorities. Perkins, who opposes preventing abortion through contraception, says, "The issue is whether taxpayers should fund, and thereby encourage, behavior that's risky and morally questionable," by which Perkins means having sex.
The trouble is that the Guttmacher Institute also calculates that for every tax payer dollar spent on birth control, four dollars are saved by tax payers in other medical and social welfare costs.
Perhaps this isn't a paradox at all. Perhaps it's only an incredible lack of integrity on the part of pro life groups. Perhaps abortion is only a way to keep their 'cultural' issues, which are all sexual, in the forefront of the political debate.
The other argument which is beginning to give me heartburn, is this insistence that birth control is really another form of genocide aimed at impoverished people and the darker races. This is coming from the same thinking which sees the West's prevalent use of birth control as a form of self inflicted white racial genocide. Birth control isn't about race or genocide, it's about empowering families, but especially women, with the means to control the number of children they can responsibly raise. Nobody benefits from birthing children mothers can't support, not the children and not society. Of course there are exceptions-- like the sex trade, illegal human slave factories, and war lords whose armies are composed of kidnapped children. Some of us consider those the real cultures of death.
