Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I’m getting tired of protests; not because people don’t have reason or right to be angry enough to protest, but rather because most protests are about dumb things. The violent protests by red-and-black clad Bernouts surrounding Trump’s inauguration were exceedingly stupid. The massive demonstrations by women right after Trump’s inauguration were even dumber. In both cases we had wrong-headed people who were all up in arms, but didn’t know really what they were so angry at.
It appears this past weekend saw another round of protests and counter-demonstrations where both sides were dead wrong. On Saturday, anti-abortion demonstrators rallied at Planned Parenthood clinics around the country to urge Congress and Trump to strip the organization of its federal funding – which is a good idea, but not for the reasons the protesters cite.
According to Lacey Johnson and Rich McKay’s piece for Reuters, Planned Parenthood supporters organized 150 counter-demonstrations of their own.
“’As long as they are going stay in the abortion business, that is an organization that shouldn’t be getting one red cent of federal tax money,’” Reuters quoted Monica Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society. She is, of course, half-right. The sentence she uttered was exactly a dozen words too long, the first twelve needing axed.
“’Saturday, and every day, Planned Parenthood advocates and activists show that they refuse to be intimidated and they won’t back down,’ Kelley Robinson, a leader of Planned Parenthood Action Fund Support, said in a statement.
Planned Parenthood receives federal funds from Medicaid reimbursements and Title X, a federal program that supports family planning and preventive health services. Planned Parenthood says cutting off those funds would make it more difficult for women to get birth control, Pap smears or testing for sexually transmitted diseases,” Reuters reported.
So, here we are again where we have passionate protesters and equally determined counter-protesters and they’re all wrong.
Pro-lifers want to defund Planned Parenthood only because they hope doing so will prevent a few of God’s children from being aborted so they can go up for adoption and languish between being wards of the state and foster children.
Planned Parenthood supporters want the federal funding to keep coming in so women can get free or deeply-discounted reproductive health services and other medical needs addressed on the taxpayer’s dime.
Obviously, both sides are idiotically wrong.
I’ve written about the imbecility of the pro-life movement at great length and there’s little need to belabor the point here other than to say what goes on inside a women’s body is her concern and hers only. Full stop. Period.
In addition to being a cut-and –dry matter of human rights not up for debate, there’s a practical effect to abortion as well. There are presently 107,918 kids waiting to be adopted in the U.S., more than the total population of South Bend, Indiana where a whole bunch of pro-lifers go to school. Further restricting access to abortion services will only make that number grow; adding real tangible human misery to the world under the guise of “saving babies’ lives.”
On the other hand, while everyone has the right to access an abortion, no one has the right to have one unless they can somehow perform it themselves. Otherwise, an abortion is a service, and there is no such thing as a right to a service or good that must be provided by someone else’s labor. So, yes, it is only right to defund Planned Parenthood – just like it is only right to defund everything else the government does and give all that stolen loot back to the people who produced it in the first place.
Of course, in the world of hyperbolic idiocy we inhabit today, trying to stop stolen money from going to Planned Parenthood equates to an “attack on women’s rights,” which it of course isn’t but rather a reaffirmation of individual property rights – not that those matter much in the USA as that stolen loot would just be used to fund some other dumb shit if it is taken away from Planned Parenthood.
That’s what makes these sorts of protests so galling to me. On the one hand you have pro-“lifers” with their laser-like focus on one issue. They moan and wail to see Planned Parenthood defunded because they’re “pro-life,” and love them some Jesus, but you never see them demonstrating outside Air Force bases to protest the use of drones to murder people all over the world. The myopia and disingenuousness of the “pro-life” movement is as disgusting as the counter-protesters demanding other people’s money be stolen and used for the things they want.
This, however is the country we live in; one comprised of people so thoroughly brainwashed and indoctrinated into the ways of the state’s violence that they turn on each other ; incapable of recognizing their true enemy. Just the way the state wants it.
This sort of tension in society is a direct and natural result of living with the cancer that is government. The issue of abortion itself is a settled matter philosophically and in U.S. law thanks to Roe v. Wade. What the fight about here is how to waste money stolen from useful people by cancerous government. If we didn’t have said government, it would have no stolen money for people to fight over. Women could simply go to a doctor and get an abortion, and theoretically the “defund Planned Parenthood” folks would be mollified knowing their money wasn’t being used to pay for the abortion.
Ignorant busybodies who still felt compelled to protest would be free to do so, so long as they stayed off of the private property belonging to the clinic. Life could be beautiful and simple, if we could all just wake up and realize that government is the problem.
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