The supporters of the Right to Life doctrine have a very valid principle to guide them. The supporters of the Pro-Choice doctrine also have a valid platform on which to stand to defend their point of view.
Terminating a life under any circumstances in our society is a painful and difficult decision to make, whether it be the developing body of a human being in the womb, a criminal suspect by a police officer, the removal of life support by a relative or of a convicted heinous criminal by a judge. Each of us has varying degrees of compunction, or the lack of it, in each example cited. Our pureness of heart and greatest of intentions to protect one or other's rights is soon co-opted by factions that have an agenda to promote and not to fully and singly support the original goals.
Whereas, when the pursuit was to save the lives of unborn humans and only to save those lives, the movement was pure. Seeing a good thing, like seeing a stock price beginning to rise or seeing the widening of the currency exchange rate gap, political investors entered the market. Each Senatorial and Congressional candidate up for re-election or attempting to unseat the incumbent has to align him or her self with that single issue in order to establish the "side" he is on. The candidate buys his committed constituency by buying the abortion issue on one side or the other. The voters choose their candidate on that issue alone. While not every voter is a one issue voter, most are. The problem with choosing the candidate on one issue, in this case abortion, is that the voter has to accept all the other positions that the candidate holds without examining them. Few people are capable of learning about all the positions their candidate takes and defers to the most volatile one.
The Pro-life candidate may also support NAFTA, CAFTA, selling of Social Security to the private investment interests, and degrading the environment in favor of corporate interests. Although those positions are not related, the emphasis is always placed on the most volatile issue.
Corporate interests that want to influence the legislature to write laws that benefit their bottom line, can easily identify the proper candidate based on one or two of his primary stances. The corporate support provides the capital to mount the campaigns and the voters align themselves on their pet issue. In this way, the individual voter plays the corporations' game by actually casting his vote in favor of the business interest. The outcome of the abortion controversy is less important than all of the ancillary business that is generated in the process. In the retail trade, it is called a "loss leader." They sell one or more highly demanded items at a loss just to entice customers into the store where they purchase other items while they are there. It is also called "bundling" as with software packages that have one main attractive installation to buy but with it comes all the other applications that cannot be sold separately. The bundled items typically are the Lite versions that either expire or are missing important functions that can of course be accessed, if the upgrade is purchased.
Far more candidates have reached or maintained office by declaring him or herself a Pro-life Candidate than have human lives been spared the fate of an abortion. The political parties in this Democracy (a Republic actually) have marginalized the human lives they pretend to protect by opposing abortion by using abortion as the platform on which they stand to enter office and pursue all their other agenda items.
Eliminating legal abortions in this country will only accomplish two things. It will increase the number of illegal abortions, and "accidental miscarriages" that were in fact induced by the reluctant mother. Secondly, it will increase the frequency of infanticide. When viewed from a global perspective, the number of infant deaths increases in direct relation to the number of live births. This is hardly surprising when one considers that infant mortality is primarily a function of economics rather than of the availability of medical services.
Where the infant mortality rate is very high as in sub-Saharan Africa so is mal-nutrition and starvation. The number of children a woman has determines how well fed those children will be. Family wealth is inversely related to family size. Female children are considered a liability. They are not as economically valuable as males and they are yet another source of more children. In the Capitalist West, children of both genders are important to maintain the growth of population. Elsewhere in the world too many children create an overloading of the available resources. In the West we have the luxury of being able to support all the children that are conceived. We have such resources to support children that we import them from poor countries that cannot afford to feed and clothe them. We insist that abortions are immoral while also insisting that developing countries slow their population growths.
Infant mortality rate statistics around the world do not differentiate between intentional and unintentional deaths. Not surprisingly, neither do we in the West. A total of 22 out of 24 nations with infant mortality rates above 90 per 1000 live births are on the African continent.
For some reason, the ratio of men to women range from 1.22 up to 1.89 in the most affluent Middle Eastern nations. From a statistical genetic standpoint the numbers should be closer to 1.00 until the higher age brackets are counted alone and the number of women should begin to be higher than for men.
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