300,000 Dead and Counting
 
 

During the Clinton years, a number of international aid groups received funding from the United States to assist women in under-developed countries in maternity and child-birth situations.  The success of these groups was remarkable.  In addition to the millions of women helped to carry their pregnancies to term, it is clearly documented that every year, more than 600,000 women's lives were saved from dangerous complications arising from their pregnancies.  These women would have died, instead most are now mothers.

Because these groups received money from the U.S., they did not perform abortions themselves.  They did, however, include the subject of abortion in the information stage of their family planning counseling, and if an abortion was desired or deemed necessary by the expecting mother, they offered information about the procedure and the names of private, outside clinics which could help them.

If you will remember, and I hope you will, our newly elected (hmmm) president's first executive order was to cut funding entirely for these aid groups, on the grounds that they 'advocated' abortion.  That was six months ago.  The math is not difficult.  At the present time, about 300,000 women, and their unborn babies, are dead because of that order.  These are women who wanted to carry their pregnancies to term, who wanted to have children.  Dead.

These are women who had families, who had experiences, memories, loved ones, who were themselves loved.  There is no doubt that they were living human beings.  They were not microscopic cells in a womb, which could be conceived as a living human being only if one is taught that they are.  They were women who until early this year could stand before you and speak of hopes, fears and dreams.  Now they are dead.

Right now there is a huge media conundrum over the hideous actions of the American terrorist McVeigh.  This anger is fed by the fact that women and children were among the 168 killed in the bombing.  I don't understand.  Our president has now killed about 600,000 living humans, all of them women and unborn babies, and the toll mounts every day.  Understandably, they are not American women and children.  We don't have to look at their faces.  But they died all the same, and more gruesome deaths than the instant death offered by McVeigh - or do you think that dying in childbirth is fast and painless?

Mr. Bush said that the issue of abortion is one in which 'good people can disagree'.  He is wrong.  Good people can not agree with his decision that women should die in childbirth for the sake of a philosophical argument.  Good people can not reconcile the attempt at saving the future life of a bunch of (American) cells in a womb by murdering (non-American) women and viable babies wholesale.  If you think the action taken by Bush is good, or could in any way be conceived as good, then you are simply not a good person.  You are the enemy of all that is good.

If your religious belief brings you to the conclusion that this murderous action is good, then your religion is evil.

I spoke with a woman the other day, who offered the only defense possible in this case.  She said that we should not require our government to help.  If we want to help, she said, we should go there ourselves and do the work, instead of asking the government to fund humanitarian efforts.  In other words, we should not have been in third-world countries trying to help.  These women and children would have died without our help anyway, so we're just back where we started from.  It is not our fault, then, that these 300,000 women have died this year.  We've got to look out for Americans, and let the others fend for themselves.

I tried again and again to bring the discussion with her to a conclusion, not to argue her to my way of thinking, but to understand where our thinking diverged, on what grounds we find our disagreement.  I went back further and further.  Her thinking did not make sense to me, I could not understand the basis.  Finally, after more than an hour, I discovered the difference.  She asked me to prove to her that human suffering and death is a bad thing.

I, of course, could not do so.  There is no way one could prove such a thing.  If one doesn't think preventable suffering and death is a bad thing, then there is nothing else to say.  At least, I thought, I've discovered our difference in belief.  Then I went home and cried.  I cried for the humans who had died and will die - roughly 3,000 women and children every day and counting - as disposable pawns in our culture war, and for the teeming masses of soulless people infesting our country, who spout vapid political catch-phrases and will never understand that their indifference and thick-skinned self-righteousness is the reason these people have to die.

I can understand why the religion of our leader and his minions puts such a high value on mercy and forgiveness - they are going to need it.  Perhaps there could be conceived a god who would forgive such murderous acts as this.  But I am no god, and I will not forgive them, any more than I would forgive the Nazis or Tim McVeigh.  If I am ever, somehow, confronted by president Bush, I hope I would have the courage to spit in his face.  And if there exists a god who would forgive someone like him... I think I'd rather take my chances with the devil.
 

May 22, 2001