The only thing worse than not voting at all is voting without even taking a look at who’s really running for office. Vote Smart.

From what I can tell, this is the closest thing to true news we’re likely to get on the election. Where all of the news agencies are biased one way or the other, this seems to be nothing more than a collection of facts about the candidates, and the source seems reliable. (Anyone know anything about the group, other than what they say about themselves online?)
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A while back, This Is True contained a story about two men who’d somehow obtained a bullet-resistant vest. In an attempt to demonstrate how well the vest could protect someone, one of the idiots donned the vest and allowed his friend to stab him. For various reasons (it’s not the kind of attack the vest is designed to stop, they’d used the vest more than once for this sort of demonstration, etc.), the knife penetrated the vest and the wearer died. His friend was arrested on charges of murder. (As I recall, both of the idiots had a not insignificant amount of alcohol in their systems, though I could be misremembering that, and it hardly has an effect on the story anyway.)

Given the opportunity to say what he wanted, I’m sure that the vest wearer would’ve chosen not to have actually died from a wound inflicted by the knife, and that the stabber would’ve chosen not to kill his friend or to face charges of murder. However, they knew (or should have known) that these risks existed when they chose to take the course of action that they did.

God granted humans a lot of leeway in choosing the paths that we take in this life. In the United States and countries with a similar amount of freedom, we’re even given a lot of freedom to choose to do things without a lot of fear about being punished for our actions by the government. (Granted, we still have to fear too much, but it’s much, much better than it could be.) Neither the founders of our governments nor God intended that freedom to indicate that we’d never have to face the consequences of our actions.

I realize it isn’t true of all (or even most) women who get abortions, but I get the very strong feeling that a large number of abortions are given to women who simply view them as “after-the-fact contraceptives,” something to be taken nearly as lightly as The Pill or a condom (which, due to the fact that it protects against a large number of things potentially more devestating to one’s life than a pregnancy, really shouldn’t be taken lightly at all, if one chooses to engage in sex outside of a monogamous, preferably married, relationship). I wish that people could discuss it rationally and listen to both sides. People on the pro-life side are quick to call pro-choicers “murderers,” and the pro-choice people are quick to accuse pro-lifers of trying to tell a woman what she is or isn’t allowed to do with her body.

Abortion is, in my opinion, a very bad thing. Even if two people can’t agree on exactly when a baby should be considered something more than just a parasitic lump of cells imposing itself on a woman’s body, they should be able to agree that the exact cutoff is open to a lot of debate. Since the importance of one’s right to life is much greater than the importance of one’s right to choose, I prefer to err on the side of caution and think of the fetus as a “baby” VERY early (no later than, say, two weeks after conception, and preferably even from the moment of conception).

That said, I don’t necessarily think abortion should be outlawed. As I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s the government’s job to legislate morality, and without a clearcut way of defining “this is when the baby is to be considered alive,” it’s not easy to write a law that appropriately balances the woman’s control over her body with the baby’s right to live. However, I think that, as a society, it behooves us to attach a stigma to the use of abortions as a contraceptive. When the woman’s health is in danger (mental or physical), or if she’s the victim of rape, that’s a completely different story, but when the pregnancy is the result of actions that the woman chose, society should frown on the elimination of a viable human being simply because the woman want to choose to avoid the consequences of her actions. As with the two men in the story at the beginning of this post, she has made a choice. Society wouldn’t be forcing her to be pregnant, it would be pushing her to face the consequences of the choice she made.

According to this page, Former Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey once said: “President Clinton says he wants abortion to be safe, legal and rare, but he’s helped make it safe, legal and everywhere.” The government’s job is to ensure the first two — I think that society is doing a great disservice to itself if it expects the government to regulate the third. We need to make our fellow citizens realize that freedom implies responsibility. It requires responsibility. There are those who will tell you that we have no right to frown on those who shirk responsibilities but wish to flaunt their freedoms*. I agree. We don’t have the right. We have the duty.

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*AGAIN, I’m not saying this is the case with all women getting abortions. Even discounting victims of rape and those who choose abortion because there’s an extreme risk to their health, I KNOW some women agonize over the decision, and that they feel it’s the right thing not to bring a child into the world in their current situation. I think they should’ve considered that before risking it with the having sex decision, but my problem is really with those women who seem to think that the ability to have an abortion excuses whatever sexual actions they choose to take (and I have known a couple of these…)
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On local radio for the last month or so, there has been a series of commercials about “EC”. My memory is notoriously bad, but I think they say it stands for Emergency Contraceptive. The typical commercial goes like this:

Male #1: “Did you see that girl at the bar last night?”

Male #2 (excitedly): “That really hot girl you were talking to? Yeah. What happened?”

M1: “Well, I took her back to my place, and things got a little hot and heavy, and I forgot to use protection!”

M2: “Way to g… I mean… Oh, no! Well, you’ll need to get her to go down to the Family Planning Clinic and get some EC — Emergency Contraception. It works for up to 72 hours…”

Every time I hear one of these commercials, it drives me mad. Let’s face it, the real message should go something like this:

Female #1: “So, I met this guy at the bar last night. I was with him, and we didn’t use protection.”

Female #2: “You… what?! You idiot! What’s the heck is the matter with you? You just met this guy, you sleep with him, and you don’t have enough common sense to at least make him wear a condom?! You don’t have any idea who he is or what he’s carrying!”

F1: “Yeah. I’m worried I might be pregnant.”

F2: “Oh, yeah. That should be your biggest worry. Never mind the fact that this guy you just met could’ve had any number of diseases… Warts, Herpes, AIDS…”

F1 (flustered): “Wait… why are you acting like I did something wrong? Shouldn’t you be telling me about Emergency Contraception, the Family Planning Clinic, and how that’ll solve all my problems??”

F2: “I’ll take you down there, but I think you need to hear this. The clinic isn’t going to solve all your problems, because as much as they’d like to, they can’t fix that hole in your head. Being overly excited is no excuse for not taking a few fairly simple precautions to protect yourself — EC might prevent a pregnancy, but it’s sure as heck not going to stop all of those billions of viruses you could’ve exposed yourself to. Of course, you’ll be able to feel better when you’re lying on your death bed because of the AIDS virus — at least you didn’t get pregnant.”

F1 (worried): “Viruses? Don’t talk about those!! They’re such a downer, since I can’t take a pill the next day to get rid of them. Let’s just drive down to the clinic.”

F2: “I wish we didn’t have to talk about them, but you kind of opened yourself up to it, what with the acting like an idiot and having unprotected sex with someone you just met… at a BAR, of all places!”

F1: “Would you just shut up? This is a free country, and I can do what I want without worrying about consequences. Drive me down to the clinic.”

F2: “For the love of…! Yes, this is a free country, and that freedom means that you have a lot of choice in what you do, but you have to face the consequences — that’s all part and parcel with the whole ‘free woman’ gig! You’re such an idiot!”

The first time I complained about one of these commercials, I was asked if I was opposed to a woman’s right to choose. My opinions on abortion have NOTHING to do with the problems I have with these commercials, but in case you’re interested, I’ll hit that tangent first.

Abortion is a very complex issue, and in every argument between thinking people, it comes down to exactly when the unborn child is considered a person unto itself. While it’s obvious that a woman should have the right to choose what is done with (or to) her body, when we decide that the baby is, well, a baby and not just a “fetus”, her right to choose has to take a backseat to the baby’s right to live. While I’m prone to believing that the baby is a separate being very soon after conception (if for no other reason, I choose to believe this because I feel it’s better to err on the side of caution), I’m willing to accept the fact that most abortion activists don’t feel that way. I could write a lot more on the subject, but like I said, that’s not really the point to this post.

What really annoys me about these commercials is that the way they’re written doesn’t even try to touch on the idea that these people should take some kind of responsibility, or that they should worry about something besides the idea that there might be a baby that they’d have to take care of. I understand that, in the heat of the moment, one’s better sense might temporarily flee. I’d probably be fairly kind about it if this kind of situation came up with a friend (more so than the woman in my sample commercial, but since it’s a commercial, there’s no need to mollycoddle the imaginary stupid friend. Fear of having that kind of reaction from their friends might make people think twice about what they’re doing, but I doubt it), but I don’t think I’d completely whitewash his/her responsibility in this matter.

The message that these commercials give is: “Unsafe sex is cool now, because you can fix any problems it may bring about as long as you come to the clinic within 72 hours.” The message that I’d like them to be spreading would be something like this: “Sex isn’t this fun little thing that has no consequences. Everyone makes mistakes, but you need to use your brain just a bit. In addition to the risk of your having a child, there are a myriad of diseases that you need to be concerned about, and not even the BEST protective measures are 100% effective. There are emergency measures that can help deal with a potential pregnancy, but we can’t help protect you from disease, and it’s better to just not put yourself in this situation to begin with. If you’re not ready to deal with the consequences, why don’t you just try abstinence from now on?”

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