This post was originally written on 4/25/2012
A couple of weeks ago I was driving from my house to the library with
my girls. This is a trip that we make on a regular basis, and it
usually doesn't hold any big surprises. It's just a ho hum drive north
through my neighborhood, watch out for kids in the street, hang a left
at the first light between the Catholic church/school and the elementary
school that my daughter wishes she went to, and head west for
about fifteen blocks. I could probably drive it in my sleep, although I
don't just in case one of those kids is actually out in the street. I
do however usually space out and not notice much if it isn't a kid in
the street.
On this trip, it wasn't my
attentiveness that was at issue, it was Thing One's. Normally she's
pretty oblivious to her surroundings; however she does surprise me
sometimes by catching random little details as they pass by outside her
window. This time it was a whole bunch of crosses on the lawn outside
of the Catholic Church. She asked what they were there for, but I was
focused on trying to gauge what my chances of making my turn were in one
green light by counting the cars that were lined up on the other side
of the intersection. So it went completely over my head what the
context of where we were, coupled with her asking about a whole bunch of
crosses, meant. I didn't even bother to look and see what crosses she
was referring to, because it looked like the old lady who was first up
at the light over on the other side might be the type to be slow off the
starting line and I was thinking about making a bold turn just as the
light changed. I muttered that usually crosses are a symbol that
someone has died, and shifted my grip on the wheel.
I quickly realized the error of my inattention when, right after I made
my turn, Thing One asked from the backseat "What is Abortion?" Ah
shit. Better pull over real quick and see what prompted that. Turns
out all the crosses (165 of them would be my guess) were accompanied by a
great big banner facing the intersection which read "Last year in XXXX
County alone, 165 babies were killed by ABORTION" Wow. That's quite a
statistic. And now, thanks to some idiot's idea of what freedom of
religious expression means to them, I get to explain to my not quite 9
year old daughter what abortion means. Gee, thanks for that, and by the
way, wasn't the last big ass banner on your lawn all about how parents
have the right to control their own child's education?
I merged back into traffic and launched into a fairly technical
explanation of what abortion is, trying to explain it in terms that are
appropriate for a child her age, all the while thinking that there
really isn't a way to describe this to a third grader. Luckily I'm
pretty liberal in my parenting, and Thing One has known the basics of
human reproduction since she was 4. I can't even imagine how
uncomfortable that conversation would have been for a parent who had to
cover the whole birds and bees and where do babies come from questions
first just to get to the meat of the abortion question. Since that
banner is pointing at a fairly busy road and literally hundreds of
elementary school children are seeing it twice a day during the whole 40
days for life campaign, I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that some
other parents and teachers were hit with that little query recently.
That's the bad thing about teaching children to read- they turn around
and do it after they've learned, and then we adults are the ones who
have to explain the meaning of all the words they can now sound out.
As usual, I managed to ramble on about the topic for way longer than
Thing One was interested in listening, so she was over it by the time we
reached the library and passed on my offer to find a book that would
explain it in language geared to someone her age. It kind of disturbs
me that I probably would have been able to find such a book in the
children's section of the library. Thankfully I didn't have to approach
the nice librarian down there to ask; I'm sure that woman already
thinks that I'm a freak. She's been giving me funny looks ever since I
checked out that book on Hinduism. This time we both made selections of
the more mundane variety, and headed home along a different route just
to avoid the conversation getting brought up again. Call me a coward,
but I really hadn't planned on rehashing the sex discussion until my kid
has made it through elementary school. Frankly, right now she needs to
be saving space in her little brain so that she can memorize the
multiplication table.
By time we got home, I'd
worked up a pretty good mad. It doesn't really bother me that these
people think of abortion as murder. What bothers me is the way they
bitch in an advertising campaign- cause face it folks, that's all that
it is. You can call it freedom of speech, giving voice to your
conscience, advocating for the unborn, whatever, but waving signs around
and hanging banners and billboards and all that is no different when
you do it for a cause than when someone else does it to draw business to
McDonald's. The only difference is that a McDonald's ad has a point. A
person is driving down the road, feeling just a little bit hungry or
thirsty, and that ad convinces them to eat or drink a McDonald's
product. Both the hungry person and McDonald's get their needs met, and
everybody is happy. Other causes that advertise do so to raise money
to fix the problems that bother them. Cancer research, buying
artificial limbs for the needy, Doctors Without Borders- Now those are
some valid ads about a cause. Anti-abortion just tries to make people
feel like shit and get kids to ask uncomfortable questions. None of the
money raised in the name of stopping abortion goes to try and cure unwanted pregnancy.
Anti Abortion signs and slogans and advocates don't accomplish any goal
with their advertising. What exactly is their point? Best case
scenario they are going to be preaching to the choir and riling up a
bunch of people who already agree with them that abortion is murder
until they all go out and vote for some political candidate who makes
promises that he or she will work to change the laws that make abortion a
legal choice for women in this country. Or they may succeed in scaring
or shaming a woman out of making the choice to have an abortion. They
may even manage to block a woman's access to medical professionals who
will perform an abortion and deny her the ability to make that choice.
That isn't successful advertising, because it isn't persuading someone
to choose your product, or in this case choosing your point of view. So
who is getting something out of this deal? Basically a whole bunch of
people who already bought what you were selling, and the folks who are
really looking for something are still there, but they aren't getting
anything from you.
Now, in my opinion, if these
people were really concerned about abortion- about all those poor
innocent babies who are being murdered- they would be devoting their
time, energy and money to actually solving some problems. It's pretty
obvious what the problem is after all- there are 165 women in XXXX
County every year who don't want to be pregnant for 9 months and have
babies. The problem isn't access to birth control or sex education,
because if a woman is considering an abortion, then those things have
already failed. The problem isn't that more people are behaving
immorally in the sexual realm, because people have always done that. It
just so happens that now there are more people to do it, and women are
free to make the same poor choices that men make when it comes to sex.
You can't unwind that clock without killing off a bunch of born people
and starting our society over from scratch. The problem isn't that
these women don't know that they can choose adoption, or that having an
abortion is "killing" their baby- they get that, and they are choosing
to have abortions anyways. The problem is money and time.
When a woman chooses to have an abortion, she is making an informed and
conscious decision to not be pregnant, and to not be a mother to the
potential child that is growing inside of her. Seriously, there are
probably less than one tenth of one percent of women in the US who are
of childbearing age in the US who DON"T know how babies are made and
what all their options are if that act results in an unwanted
pregnancy. This is the era of Teen Mom and Bristol Palin after
all. There may be some Amish girl living on a farm in the middle of
Pennsylvania who still believes the old Cabbage Patch story, but she
isn't going to be walking into a clinic to get an abortion when she
learns the truth the hard way, so you can stop with the campaign to
"educate" her. The women who are choosing to have abortions are not too
stupid to figure out whether they want to spend 280 days or so
gestating a little human. When they decide not to, they make that
decision after considering a whole lot of factors that are relatively
unique to her and her situation.
It could be that
she has a job she cannot financially afford to lose that depends on her
being in peak physical condition. Maybe she doesn't feel up to the
challenge of raising and providing for a child, and the child she would
deliver isn't going to be one of the ones that is so desirable to
couples looking to adopt. Perhaps she already has several children and
doesn't want her ability to care for them impeded by the demands that
pregnancy and a newborn would make on her physically, emotionally and
financially. It could even be that her health is poor and the demands
of pregnancy and delivery might kill her. There are tons of reasons,
but what all of them boil down to is that each woman in this country has
her own life, and the right to decide how she's going to spend her time
and money while she's living it. She is responsible for her own life
and the lives she chooses to bring into this world, not the ones that someone else wants her to bring into the world.
What the anti abortion advocates need to do if they want to stop all
these "unnecessary" deaths is put their time and money where their mouth
is, instead of dumping it into all those signs and crosses and paper
that the anti abortion legislation is written on. If you want to take
personal responsibility for stopping women from having abortions, then
you should be prepared to take personal responsibility for the choice to
keep that child alive. This would actually be a goal worth working
towards, and it would go a lot further towards stopping abortion than
the plan you're working from now.
So let's see
some numbers on this; something more substantive than just "165 dead
babies EVERY YEAR!" There are 11 Catholic churches in my county, so I'm
going to just divide whatever total I come up with by 11 for now, but
they can certainly go out and convince churches of other faiths to join
them in this righteous project if they'd like- they already have a good
ad crew to put to work on that task.
In order to
save 165 babies a year, we first have to pay for them to get born. The
cost of a normal pregnancy and delivery is going to run at least $8000,
compared to about $500 for an abortion. Since people in this country
don't seem to be willing to foot the bills for a woman to not be
pregnant, I'd safe that it's a safe bet they also don't want to foot the
bills for their maternity care by paying into an insurance plan that
covers that either, so let's figure on the Catholics picking up $7,500
of that tab in order to get these babies born. No sense in making a
woman pay more than the cost of an abortion just to give birth to a baby
that she didn't want to have anyways, right? So we'll start with the
number $1,237,500. That should cover the bills for bringing these kids
into the world, assuming that all of them are perfectly normal and
healthy and some sympathetic medical professionals can be found who will
agree to negotiate their fees. Of course, that amount is per year,
since you can only get 165 babies for that price. Start praying that
they are all born perfectly and inexpensively healthy.
Just paying for the costs of the baby doesn't really remove all the
barriers those pregnancies are throwing up for the incubator ladies.
Gotta remember that these women are free citizens, and they need to have
a good reason to rent out their uterus' to you just so you can benefit
from the sex they had. No forcing them to live by the tenets of your
religion just cause you like the idea- this is a transaction, you're
buying lives so don't get chintzy on me now. I'll be conservative and
figure that loss of income or increased costs associated with spending 9
months or so walking around with a person in your gut only factor into
about half of the abortions that are received every year. For those
women who are opting to terminate for reasons that include the financial
hardship of pregnancy, we'll say that they should get the assurance of
getting at least the federal poverty limit income to make sure this
pregnancy doesn't bankrupt her. That would be $10,890. Prorate that
just to cover the time that she is pregnant from weeks 12- 38 (most of
these women abort by the end of their first trimester) and you're
looking at $5445 per woman, for a grand total of $446,490. This should
take care of the strippers who would lose their jobs if they got fat,
students missing a semester of classes, mother's who have to hire extra
help to care for the kids they have, and all the women who lose hours at
their minimum wage jobs because they can't meet the demands of their
employers while pregnant.
Now we're talking.
You've saved some unwanted babies by getting them born. What do you do
now? Well, you have to take care of them. Obviously all of these kids
are going to need loving homes (since their mothers were such horrible
people who were going to kill them) so you'd better get busy recruiting
families from among your churches to adopt them. But you can't expect
that all these good people are going to be able to keep adopting another
kid every year, especially since if they are really good Catholics they
are probably giving birth to one of their own almost that often. No,
this is going to take a guarantee that your whole congregation will help
carry the load. First you have to cover the costs of making all those
adoptions legal. Don't want to burden the American taxpayers with the
cost of your pet project, so you can probably count on the paperwork and
fees running us about $5,000 per adoption. Total= $825,000.
Next up, now that these kids are here and adopted, is to keep them
alive. The costs are getting pretty steep, so we can't really expect
for you to do that in style- but since you've taken responsibility for
them you at least have to meet their basic needs. Food, clothing,
shelter, medical care that kinda thing. For this part I'm going to
cheat a little bit and use a calculator that I found on the internet.
Here's the link if you want to bitch about the numbers: http://www.babycenter.com/cost-of-raising-child-calculator.
Basically this puts the cost of raising a child at about $8,500 a year
in my area, for the bare bones variety of raising up. Sounds about
right to me, when you figure in the costs of food, clothing, rent on a
place with one more bedroom than you would need otherwise, transporting
them, paying for the six new teachers that the local Catholic schools
need to hire each year to man the classes full of an extra 165 kids a
year, taking them to the doctor for shots and colds. I'll even play
devil's advocate and say that they can get by without anything in the
misc. category and about half the clothing, so we can bring that number
down to $7,500 or so per kid. Looks like that adds up to another
$1,237,500.
Finally, you can't be expected to send
all these kids to college, they probably won't be smart enough to make
the grade anyways, but you do have to figure that them being alive is
going to require some changes in our local economy. You should expect
to dump at least enough extra money into purchasing things from local
businesses to ensure that our local employers can afford to pay each of
these kids a full time minimum wage salary without going into the
poorhouse to do it. It is up to you, since after all, they are your
responsibility. Tack on another $15,600 for each child over 18. Figure
that you can deduct the amount being spent each year to get a new crop
of 165 kids through their first year, and we'll knock that down to $8100
per child, or $1,336,500 worth of additional spending each year to
boost the economy and make sure that there are enough minimum wage jobs
for all those poor unwanted babies.
Time to add it
all up. We've got $1,683,990 per year to make sure that the 165 extra
unwanted babies get born every year. Then another $825,000 each year to
get them all adopted into good loving homes. That's not too bad,
$2,508,990 a year to save lives. Time to start organizing those bake
sales. Between the 11 Catholic Churches in the county, divided equally,
that's only $228,090 that needs to be raised every single year by each
congregation from now into infinity (or at least until the zombie
apocalypse ends life as we know it.) That can probably be raised just
in the offering plate, without anybody having to do anything the whole
rest of the week!
But wait! Don't forget that it
isn't enough just to make sure their born- you're responsible for them
now. So add on another $1,237,500 each year for every year's worth of
babies saved to raise them, and the spending required to keep them
employed was $1,336,500 per set per year after age 18. Hmm. carry the
one, divide by pi... Looks like you guys need to come up with an
additional $2,574,000 every year, for each group of 165 babies saved. I
guess since it's starting now you'd only have to worry about raising
them for the first 18 years, then switch to making sure that they have
employment opportunities, but after the first set graduates high school
then you're going to have another set of kids to start feeding and
clothing... Wow. This calls for a mini spread sheet. Better plan on
starting with next year, cause this may take some time to get off the
ground:
2013- $2,508,990 + $1,237,500= $3,746,490
2017- $2,508,990 + ($1,237,500 * 5)= $8,696,490
2022- $2.508.990 + ($1,237,500 * 10)= $14,883,990
2027- $2,508,990 + ($1,237,500 * 15)= $21,071,490
2031- $2,508,990 + ($1,237,500 * 18) + $2,574,000= $27,357,990
2049- $2,508,990 + ($1,237,500 *18) + ($2,574,000 * 18)= $73,212,990
Holy Mackerel that's a lot of cash! Good thing that you guys will be
adding all those new Catholics to your congregations to dump money into
the offering plate and help support your cause. Hopefully the cost of
everything doesn't go up, ever, cause it looks like after just 36 years
of working hard to save those babies each of your 11 churches is going
to have to be able to raise $6,655,726.37 in one year to get ready to
pay for the next years 165 babies that would have been aborted. No
wonder you guys spend all your time just telling other people what they
should be doing- having to back up all your concern with action and cash
would be exhausting! I have faith in you though, since God is on your
side, so get busy raising that money and then us pro-lifers won't have
any reasonable arguments against you getting abortion outlawed. After
all, it won't be our problem any more- it'll be yours.
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