Election 2012

I, like many others in the USA, am glued to an election map watching the updates.

My state (Idaho) is pretty much a guarantee for Romney, which is disappointing, but hey – left-wingers do exist in Idaho and I did my part!

I didn’t receive a sticker for voting, which was also disappointing to me as this is the first election where I’ve voted in person – Oregon is entirely vote-by-mail. I loooooved vote-by-mail and I think we should adopt it nationwide as a method of improving voter turnout. It’s so much easier to vote in the privacy of your own home than it is to try to find time in your work schedule to physically make it over to a polling location. (I think the voting ballots should come with “I voted!” stickers though.)

……

For your consideration:

How I Lost Faith in the Pro-Life Movement

As I sat there in the student union reading over my lunch, I found that making birth control widespread and easily accessible is actually the most effective way to decrease the abortion rate. Even as I processed this fact, I knew that the pro-life movement as a whole generally opposes things like comprehensive sex education and making birth control available to teenagers. I knew this because I had lived it, had heard it in pro-life banquet after pro-life banquet, had read it in the literature. The pro-life movement is anti-birth-control. And opposing birth control is pretty much the most ineffective way to decrease abortion rates imaginable. In fact, opposing birth control actually drives the abortion rates up.

As I mulled this over, I realized how very obvious it was. The cause of abortions is unwanted pregnancies. If you get rid of unwanted pregnancies the number of people who seek abortions will drop like a rock. Simply banning abortion leaves women stuck with unwanted pregnancies. Banning abortion doesn’t make those pregnancies wanted. Many women in a situation like that will be willing to do anything to end that pregnancy, even if it means trying to induce their own abortions (say, with a coat hanger or by drinking chemicals) or seeking out illegal abortions. I realized that the real way to reduce abortion rates, then, was to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. And the way to do that is with birth control, which reduces the number of unwanted pregnancies by allowing women to control when and if they become pregnant.

This post articulates so many of my feelings on the subject of the “pro-life” movement – it’s well-written and level-headed, and I would wholeheartedly recommend reading it, no matter what your position on the issue is.

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