Abortion Is Murder, But That’s OK With Me

I think abortion is murder, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s wrong.

I once read that all societies condemn murdering other humans; they only differ in whom they define as “human.” In war, they will find a way to dehumanize the enemy to justify murdering them. When it comes to abortion, the argument hinges on exactly when a fetus crosses the rainbow bridge and magically metamorphoses into a human. I think it’s an irrelevant question. From conception, a fetus is a life form. Aborting it requires killing it intentionally.

Still, I think it’s OK to murder a fetus. It’s at least ethically better than putting a child through the slow death of being unwanted.

Abortion is such a sticky, gory, bloody, unfathomably complex topic, any discussion of it inevitably ends in a twenty-car pileup of conflicting ethical issues.

The problem with discussing it is that nearly everyone is so wildly emotional about the topic that they all wind up sounding insane. Watching the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” camps duking it out, you’d never know there were more than two possible sides to the issue. Each of these two artificially constructed sides tirelessly jockeys to appear more morally hysterical than the other. One side focuses on screaming fetuses ripped from wombs, while the other zeroes in on rusty coat hangers and shredded uteri. It’s quite the distasteful, emotionally laden spectacle.

Politics is truly never about right and wrong, it’s about power. So kindly put your emotions and your phony morality aside, squeeze your eyes real hard, and strain to think logically for once.

The terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are both deceptive. The only real issue here is whether you’re pro-abortion or anti-abortion. I think the “pro-choice” camp tends to avoid calling themselves “pro-abortion” because it pricks their consciences a tiny bit. Very few people are willing to come right out and admit they favor ending any form of human life.

It’s true that many if not most of the self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” often have no moral problems with the death penalty or with slaughtering millions in war or with an angry God who kills everything he creates. This is because they are jackasses with stunted comprehension of their howling hypocrisy.

But though I realize what I’m about to say will cause a million labia to bark at me simultaneously, I think the term “pro-choice” is even more deceptive. For all that you scream about “choice,” you deny the sperm donor any choice in your decision. And if you choose to carry the fetus to term, he has no choice but to fork over 18 years of child support or face jail time. He has absolutely no choice in the matter. And since an estimated 1% or so of abortions involve rape or incest, the overwhelming quotient of abortions involve women who chose to have unprotected sex. If you’re of breeding age and don’t know that unprotected sexual intercourse causes pregnancy, you shouldn’t be breeding to begin with, but that’s a whole ’nother topic. But it’s obvious that you’re only concerned about your own power to choose. So pipe down about “choice,” because your hypocrisy is even more egregious than that of the moronic Christian pro-lifers. It’s ethically homely.

Those who claim a fetus isn’t “viable” because it can’t survive without its mother are correct. Where they fuck up is in assuming that once a fetus pops out of the womb, it’s suddenly able to go to college and start an Instagram account. Children are dependent until at least the age of 18; many adults stay abjectly dependent on others their entire lives. The whole world is one codependent mess. So the “viability” question is a red herring. A fetus is still a life form, and aborting it involves intentionally killing it.

Another largely irrelevant issue is whether fetuses can experience pain. If you shoot someone point-blank in the head, they die instantly and likely don’t feel one twinge of pain. But you’ve still murdered them. Same goes if you intentionally inject a junkie with enough heroin to kill them; they drift into nonexistence rather blissfully. Again, you’ve murdered them.

A squeamish topic for the “pro-choice” camp is the fact that abortion disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet they never seem upset about all those impoverished and/or black fetuses that are stopped dead before they even get out of the starting gate. Somehow they’re able to justify this wildly lopsided instance of racial “disparate impact.”

Medical advancements have also made it possible for potential mothers to abort fetuses based on their sex or their likelihood to be mentally or physically disabled. Yet they have no ethical problem with this sort of proactive eugenics. If you choose to abort your fetus because you don’t want a female baby or one with Down syndrome or one that has flippers instead of hands, you’re consciously practicing eugenics, which was supposedly “discredited” when the Nazis were outgunned in World War II. In almost all modern contexts, speaking favorably of eugenics is an unmentionable heresy—except when it comes to abortion. I have no idea how these people are able to live with such contradictions. Better ask them, because I’m drawing blanks.

As the story was told to me, my father tried to abort me by punching my mother in the stomach while she was pregnant. I’m glad he failed. I also probably entered this world with some form of PTSD because of that incident, and it’s taken me more than a half-century to start untangling those wicked knots. Then again, I suspect I may be a little tougher and stubborn than most. Many others seem to wind up mentally mangled for life, their souls shredded as if they were damaged through the vacuum method.

So from my ethical standpoint—and I believe ethics are entirely subjective and things such as objective “good” and “evil” don’t exist—I think it’s better to abort a fetus if you don’t intend to raise it in a loving environment. It’s a form of preemptive euthanasia, perhaps the most merciful form of mercy killing there is.

There you have it, ladies. Abort your fetuses until the cows come home. But at least be honest and admit that you’re murderers. If it makes you feel better to view yourself as a mercy killer, then run with it. Fly with it. Swim naked alongside the dolphins with it. But you’re still a killer. And that’s still OK with me.