Health: STDs and Abortion: Toward Safe, Legal, and Realistically Rare Abortions—By Health Choice
I am appalled that self-serving charlatans and opportunists are exploiting the serious, deeply personal issue of abortion to create enormous pain and division in this country, and to allow serious and dangerous diseases to spread widely among vulnerable young people.
Why aren’t “pro-choice” people who talk about “women’s reproductive health” loudly warning young women—and men—about the health dangers of catching sexually transmitted diseases when they use abortion as a first or desirable means of birth control?
Why aren’t “pro-life” people who say they want to reduce the number of abortions loudly warning young women—and men—about the dangers of catching sexually transmitted diseases when they use abortion as a first or desirable means of birth control?
A big public emphasis on preventing sexually transmitted diseases, by using condoms and other methods, would improve women’s health and reduce the number of abortions—by women’s and men’s health choices.
STDs
The scourge of STDs is worse than you may think.
One in five Americans had an STD on any given day in 2018, according to the CDC; half of them in ages 16-24, and rising.
Take special note that “one in five” is for any given day.
That means far more than one in five Americans have had a sexually transmitted disease each year. It also means that some people get more than one STD each year. And some people are stuck with incurable viral STDs all their lives; while gonorrhea and other bacterial STDs develop antibiotic resistance, making them harder to treat. Worse, some infections can go undetected because they have few or no symptoms while they are doing serious harm; and the symptoms that do appear can be awful. Hideous. (Click here for my post on how nutritional substances can help fight infections.)
How could STDs become so widespread? Evidence is strong that abortion is widely used as a first option in birth control.
CDC data show that one abortion occurred for every five live births in 2019 in the U.S. (Hat tip to Naomi Wolfe for her Substack post “On Losing ‘Roe’”)
Worse, more black women in NYC between 2012 and 2016 aborted their pregnancies than carried them to live births (Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2018, summarizing NYC Health Dept. data).
Why aren’t “black leaders,” especially black Christian ministers, speaking loudly and persistently about avoiding using abortion as a first means of birth control? Or are they doing so and are being ignored by the media? Are they intimidated into silence? Are they bought off by Democratic Party money to be silent about it?
Is it that hard to get teenagers and 20-somethings to pursue really safe sex? Highly addictive cigarette smoking was greatly reduced. A comparable reduction in infection-prone sex ought to be achievable too.
Note: Birth control pills also don’t protect against STDs, but I presume that a woman who uses such pills is much better informed about, and better able to avoid, STDs.
The Phony Fight over Roe v Wade
Contrary to activists’ and politicians’ loud claims, the reversal of Roe v Wade means that more abortions might possibly occur; certainly, a great reduction won’t happen (unless checked by avoidance of STDs).
Blue states can now go beyond Roe’s restrictions and allow all abortions. They are rapidly moving to do so, even to the point of considering how a live baby that survived a botched abortion may be allowed to die. And they are soliciting people from other states to come and get abortions.
Abortion pills are already in wide use, and better and cheaper abortion pills are likely to come along. These pills are not without risks, but neither are birth labors and abortions without risks. Again, the only way to “stay safe” from disease—the corona virus mantra—is to use condoms or other means of avoiding actual transfer of sexual fluids.
Expect women in blue states and blue cities in purple and red states to get abortion pills one way or another: from the internet, or without a prescription (as Tennessee does with ivermectin for Covid), or from traveling to blue states or cities, or from smuggling in abortion pills, or from blue cities that refuse to enforce state antiabortion laws.
And some employers will pay for trips to places where abortions or abortion pills can be gotten, or employers may find workarounds for employees to get abortion pills at home.
In other words, activists’ and politicians’ public presentations to keep or reverse Roe were self-serving scams, pulling in money, votes, and political power. And it’s no secret that media profit from selling sex and sowing strife (besides big media’s interests in aligning with the left-wing of the Democratic Party and other socialists). They create a dynamic in which each extreme—all abortion or no abortion—drives the other. This generates huge emotional turmoil, mental distress, and enormously destructive consequences.
At Root of Anti-Abortionists’ Failure
What accounts for anti-abortionists’ very likely failure to substantially reduce the total number of abortions?
To those who genuinely oppose abortions on deep religious faith or principle, I observe that some abortions have always happened even when banned legally, socially, and religiously; and they have been brutally unsafe.
Therefore trying to abolish all abortions is trying to play God, and that is doomed to fail.
Banning or trying to ban abortion only deepens already well-entrenched pro-abortionists, with profound political consequences that go way beyond abortion.
With some women casting single-issue votes for “pro-choice” talkers, these consequences are already making life worse, by strengthening big-government socialism (and fascism). Potentially catastrophic consequences loom as big government shuts down necessary fossil fuel energy sources, imposes restrictions on land and fertilizer use with resultant shortages and higher prices of food, imposes future lockdowns or “relocations” of law-abiding people who don’t obey medical orders, while letting rioters and criminals run free, and opening the border to millions upon millions of people of totally unknown ability, disease, and intent to “collapse the system” (the Cloward-Piven Strategy on steroids).
Toward A Successful Pro-Life Strategy: Put the “Human” Back in It
The practical problem for honestly motivated “pro-lifers” is how to pursue a policy that seriously reduces abortion while leaving women free to have reasonable abortion choices.
You know my choice—focus on cutting sexually transmitted diseases—but a lot of faulty ideas have to be thoroughly refuted first.
Some say that the fertilized human egg and what grows from it have new human DNA, and that makes it a new human life. Therefore, abortion is murder.
The first part—that DNA is new—is true, but the new DNA points only to a potential, not already actual, human life.
Miscarriages happen. A miscarriage means that the fetus, with its new DNA, was never capable of becoming a living human being; or that some problem with the mother’s biology, or incompatibility between mother and fetus, caused the miscarriage. Whatever way, the fetus died and no one says that was murder.
(Incidentally, I do write the word “mother” because as long as a woman remains pregnant, we must presume she intends to have a live baby, and that qualifies for using the word “mother” in the meaning of “nurturer.” And, for my money, it means that the death of a pregnant woman must be treated as two deaths; because of her intent to invest human life into the fetus; because she, and only she, is able, and has “standing,” to do it; and for the sake of further protecting pregnant women, who are uniquely vulnerable in pregnancy.)
The reality of miscarriages discredits the notion that a fertilized egg and developing fetuses are lives deserving all the protections of babies who have been born live. In particular, the mother’s health also matters—for her own sake—even in very late-term abortions. Her risks of serious harm must be given priority.
Nevertheless, the idea of a fertilized egg being a full human life remains seductive in theory; namely, that nature or God may choose to end the pregnancy, but humans are not qualified to do it. Yet the theory produces logical absurdities that discredit it further.
Absurdity #1: If the fertilized egg is a human being in good stead, it has no right to live inside the body of another; that is slavery and is unconstitutional. It must be evicted. The act then is eviction, not abortion.
Absurdity #2: Yet, also, if the fertilized egg is treated as a human being, then any act to terminate its life would constitute a homicide. As such, police would be obligated to investigate every termination of a pregnancy, even miscarriages, even in the first moments of pregnancy. To do that, police would have to monitor for pregnancy all women capable of becoming pregnant, to know when a pregnancy ends. And they would have to do it on a continuing basis. Also, absurd.
Absurdity #3: Absurdity #1 and absurdity #2 contradict each other.
What Would a Successful Pro-Life Position Be?
Accept that abortions can’t all be abolished, and that trying to outlaw them all is counterproductive; but, be encouraged too, that constructive actions can go to greatly reduce the number of abortions, which would be a very good thing, a vast improvement, and the best that human limitations can achieve.
Form broad alliances to:
Emphasize the threat of sexually transmitted diseases to women’s—and men’s—health.
Return schools, education, and religious thought (where applicable) to the job of equipping young people to be successful in life. The opportunity to form large coalitions is huge because of how badly schools have been wrecked.
Besides teaching the basics, this means stop driving boys out of school by punishing them for normal boyish behavior. Instead, return attention to teaching them how to harness their energy so they can be productive in life—as used to be the case when fathers were seen as necessary and strong authority figures.
As for ADHD, disruptive behavior of the kind currently being reported simply did not exist when I was a boy in the 1950s’, industrial-worker town of Bayonne, N.J. Parental authority was much greater. Teachers graded and enforced “deportment” and did not drug boys into submission. And food was much more wholesome and unprocessed, with less-ubiquitous sugar and refined carbs, chemical additives, and factory-like production of meats, fruits, and vegetables. Now we are seeing an increasingly strong global push to remove animal foods, especially red meat, from the diet. This is crazy denial of evolution and science. Humans have evolved to be omnivores, which means we eat—and absolutely need—both animal and plant foods for full health. For info on nutritional supplements to help with ADHD and ADD, search for ADHD here. It’s a podcast with a transcript by Amanda Williams of InviteHealth. Jerry Hickey replies to questions at jhickey@invitehealth.com. A lot of what I wrote on brain fog is relevant too because it goes to basic health and functioning of the brain and nervous system.
Equipping boys and girls for adulthood also means teaching virtues of character that allow us to build and enjoy life. Part of this is teaching the ways and means to form and maintain healthy marriages and healthy roles for men and women, moms and dads, in marriage. (For a wonderful story of lasting love and friendships, with good triumphing over great evil by virtue of superior character, go to my play Penelope and Odysseus. Distilled from Homer’s classic Odyssey, it is dramatic, inspiring, satisfying, and surprising whether you know the Odyssey or not.)
Return “physical education” to its primary job of building boys’ and girls’ healthy bodies. (Look for my coming posts on physical fitness.)
Improve young women’s and young men’s economic prospects by educating them about opportunities in free enterprise and capitalism, so that they won’t feel economic needs to abort pregnancies. (See my posts on the virtues of capitalism and the harms done by big government socialisms.)
Develop private social organizations to help young mothers cope with their new situations, which could include adoption. (I’m sure some of this happens, but I just don’t know what and how much.)
Pulling Beats Pushing
When people say “don’t put the cart before the horse,” they usually mean a time sequence: do first things first, don’t get ahead of yourself, etc. A much more profound truth lies beneath this saying: Pulling pulls in and in line. Pushing pushes out and out of line. Therefore, instead of trying to push down the number of abortions with punitive actions, focus on empowering and enriching lives to reduce the need and/or the desire for most abortions in the first place. And allow what remains: Safe, Legal, and Realistically Rare Abortions—by Choice.
Good Health to You!