I had a conversation with a fellow prisoner about a woman’s Right to Choose. He confided that he once had a child violently aborted against his objections and was therefore strongly against the procedure. Now, I do not know exactly what a “really violent abortion” entails, but it sounds bloody terrible, and I really do appreciate that he is very deeply emotionally invested as a consequence of his experience. However, none of that conflicts with my belief that no one should have something inserted and grown in their body against their will. No woman or girl enjoys the operation and nobody in their right mind “wants” abortions to happen, but, remember, if it is not your body then it is not your say. We do not know their circumstances and experiences, and assuming evil intent is in itself an act of bad faith. Think of it in terms of organ donation, it is not considered ethical no matter how many lives it may save to force someone to cultivate and donate organs against their will, and the usual organ donation is FAR less likely to result in the death of the host than childbirth. Even in the best possible cases, carrying a fetus to full term takes a tremendous toll on the body. Mandating that people endure organ donation against their will would be considered abhorrent by any modern, moral, or medical standard. Not even the organs of dead bodies may be harvested without express permission (the only current exception being the ongoing dissection of our nonhuman slaves). This means that women in our modern world have less rights to their bodies than a corpse, or, to put it another way, women are allowed more autonomy once dead.

I find the fact that the vast majority of anti-choice legislation in this country is written by MEN to be quite abominable. These so-called “pro-life” people, by the way, enthusiastically support the murder of our prisoners by the state. There are of course many women who oppose abortion, and I respect their right to make their choice for their own lives, but they should not have the right to impose their decisions on all other female citizens. Meanwhile, men who are against abortion should do their part and get vasectomies (or if they are distrustful of medicine, they are welcome to exercise their much beloved “second amendment right” and perform the operation on themselves). The facts are that criminalizing abortions invariably leads to more death and gruesomely botched home attempts or “back alley” chop shops (the reason roe v. wade didn’t last is because it attempted to treat the symptoms not its theocratic cause). The Best way to prevent abortions, therefore, is access to widespread and reliable contraception. Effective medical contraception allows for the exercise of our natural and healthy sex drives but prevents pregnancy (and therefore abortions as well). However, the same lobbyists who are against abortion are perversely against both Contraception and Factual Education. This leads one to the inexorable conclusion that they want women to be broodmares to the state with or without their consent. Even their authoritarian religious doctrine demands SLAVERY (exodus 21:7/Deuteronomy 21:11) RAPE (numbers 31:18/Deuteronomy 22:28) and orders to multiply. They are also not above GENOCIDE of other’s babies (Deuteronomy 13:15/Hosiah 13:16), and, actually, they are often fine with murdering their own children too (Leviticus 20:9/Matthew 15:4) while women are ordered to shut up and OBEY (1 Corin 14:34/1 Tim 11:12). These are the foundational principles of all Three Abrahamic religions (Matthew 5:17/Al Baqarah 2:85), and so these theocrats are constantly projecting their “twisted morality” onto the motives of others- afraid the beliefs of other people are just as bad as their own. Luckily, free from the worship of evil gods, most people are Far Better than that. The theocrats prefer to see women Die rather than Actually prevent abortions! Such people should not be writing the policies that affect us all. Theocrats like to wax poetic about “preserving the innocence of children” all while terrifying them with stories of vengeful gods, and the horrors that happen to disobedient children, but how exactly is learning about biology going to destroy innocence unless, like in their genesis stories, what they mean by “innocence” is Ignorance. They act as though learning about sex is somehow going to turn everyone into crazed “whores,” but we all know that the reality is exactly the opposite; it is much easier to fool people if they are kept away from knowledge.

Most unwanted pregnancies happen because of “carelessness” and carelessness is a byproduct of Ignorance, so we can either believe the dismissive fiction that all those conservatives are morons, which we know is untrue since there are plenty of clever theocrats out there, or we can realize that what they really want is to keep girls ignorant. Why? Because they want (in their own words) “for girls to get married and start a family,” which they think is a good value, but what does it really mean? It means that girls are trapped in a marriage and impregnated before they ever find out what they actually want out of life and out of love. Education is freedom and the theocrats want to keep women perpetually enslaved; meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of born children already living homeless in this country. Additionally, foster youths are proven to be two times more likely to develop PTSD than war veterans and as many as 1 in 30 children are living homeless in the United States. They are in real and immediate need of a loving family, but again such conservatives are against social programs -so much for being pro-child. If someone wants to raise a child, the Most ethical choice is to let them Adopt. A primitive desire to “spread our genes” should not dictate our morality any more than a man’s preference should dictate our policies regarding the medical options available to our female citizenry. Medical science (as opposed to some knee-jerk intuition) defines a “pregnancy” as occurring not during insemination but during the successful implantation of a women’s fertilized egg, and, as any doctor knows, a heartbeat is not the measure of consciousness; Brain Activity is. Unless we want to charge every man who creams himself with mass murder, we need to realize that we were never our father’s sperm; we were always our mother’s egg. The (often literal) demonization of women and girls in the unfortunate situation of needing to choose (for lack of access to effective contraception and other factors outside of their control) between gestating yet another unborn child into the world or terminating a clump of their own cells before it has brain waves is another example in our long history of persecution towards the female half of humanity.

The bottom line is that hormonal contraception blocks ovulation; no ovulation means no conception; no conception means no abortion. While no contraceptive method is flawless, all of them have far less side effects or mortal hazards than pregnancy. Affirmative Informed Consent for that life-threatening 9-month-long process should only ever be in the hands of the “host”. Men who stand in the way of access to contraception (often in conjunction with hateful colloquialisms such as bitch or slut) are often motivated by a bigoted desire to punish female promiscuity (that is free sexuality), preferring to create a world in which women are more likely to become pregnant before they’re willing, and, therefore, that much more likely to seek extreme measures such as abortion. Women are especially biologically predisposed to having unfettered control over their much more costly process of reproduction. A women’s agency over her own sexuality is Natural and Evolutionarily paramount. Women must be left free to decide when, where, and with whom to make that costly investment, so a loss of that natural autonomy is literal Agony. All mammals control their conception through abortion at-will. It is perfectly “natural” to have them and extremely unnatural to deny them.

The fact is that people against factual education and effective contraception cause abortions. Further, I would add that acting as though the development of a women’s own protoplasmic cells somehow trumping the rights of our female citizens is tantamount to a treasonist betrayal of our people. The thirteenth amendment, with its ban on forced servitude, constitutionally guarantees the right to abortion. Around the world high female literacy is directly associated with contraceptive use and lower birth rates. Educational attainment decreases the number of children a woman is likely to bear and is defined as the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). In Ghana, for example, women who complete high school have a TFR of 2 or 3 compared to a TFR of at least 6 for their contemporaries without an education. The cure for both poverty and overpopulation has a name- it is called the empowerment of women. In conclusion, while abortion is a painful issue it is not a complicated one, effective and hassle-free contraceptives (such as Implanon arm implants) should be strongly encouraged and adoption made readily available to every qualified adult. This would greatly reduce all-around suffering, protect female autonomy, and prevent abortions altogether. Only those ready and willing to become parents can offer children the kind of home that both our current and future citizens deserve.