timeimmortal

To be fair, I understand that for almost all women, menstruation is not a pleasant experience. That’s no surprise: cramps and bleeding are, pretty much by definition, unpleasant things to have to endure, especially for extended lengths of time (such things are bad enough if they last but five minutes).

I get that. Being male, I don’t experience it myself, so I probably don’t have an accurate sense of scope about the issue, but I get that it’s uncomfortable, painful, annoying, and all the rest.

Equally, I understand that it is part of the physiological reality of being female; it’s a part of how women’s bodies are designed to work. One would think, then, that in our enlightened Western culture that ostensibly values (and regards as equal to men) women, that things like menstruation would be…well, not promoted, but understood in a proper context. One would think that little girls fearful of getting their first period would be consoled and taught that it’s part of growing up, that it means their body is healthy and that while it is uncomfortable, it doesn’t make them any less a person. One would hope that girls would be told that, in essence, being a girl is a good thing.

One would further hope that any little girls who were so fearful of getting their period that they demand to undergo a sex-change operation would get a bit more counseling, rather than a cheque from the government to cover the expense of the operation.

Have we come to the point where certain aspects of the normative function of the female body are regarded as so repugnant that we regard it as permissible — and perhaps even acceptable — for women to take even extreme measures to avoid them? This is especially true in regard to menstruation, one observes — birth control methods like the pill are often marketed on their ability to reduce the yearly number or severity of menstrual periods. Apparently there is even research being done on birth control supplements that reduce the yearly number of periods to one, perhaps even to zero.

In short, the view that is coming to prominence seems to be that women are biologically flawed somehow, that it is better to circumvent, diminish, and/or attempt to avoid certain natural realities of the female body.

How utterly hateful.

It turns out that the pill — that ubiquitous birth control method — is responsible for a potentially massive number of pregnancy terminations every year.

And yes, I realize that the point of taking the pill is, in most cases, to avoid getting pregnant. That doesn’t change the fact that a potentially massive number of implantations are being prevented, in essence aborting perhaps millions of unborn children at the very earliest stages of development.

Women on BCPs [birth control pills] have 28-day cycles and thus have 13 cycles/year (365/28 = 13.3).

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute , 10,410,000 U.S. women are current pill users, a figure that constitutes 26.9% of all those using some method of contraception.

Gambrell notes that there is a 14% breakthrough ovulation rate in females taking the 50 microgram pills (10,410,000 x .14 = 1,457,400 ovulations each cycle). (1)

1,457,400 x 13 cycles/year = 18,946,200 possible exposures to pregnancy each year.

Since the normal fecundity rate (chance of pregnancy without using contraceptives) for the average couple is 20%, and if we were to suppose that the cervical mucus change cut down the sperm reaching the ovum by 50% (a very generous allowance), that means that there would be 20% x 50% x 18,946,200= 1,894,620 fertilized ovums that would have otherwise implanted in the walls of the uterus.

Of this number, the accepted rate for “pill pregnancies” is 3-5 per 100 women years i.e 3%-5%. (2)

This means that 95-97% of these unborn babies were prevented from implanting in the lining of the womb because of the oral contraceptive’s thinning of the endometrium (#3 above).

In other words, approximately 1,800,000 (95% x 1,894,620) babies die every year through the use of oral contraceptives.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legally induced abortions in the US in 2003.

Therefore the ratio between BCP abortion vs. conventional abortions is 2.2:1.  This means that for every  ONE women aborting through conventional means in the U.S., more than TWO women are aborting through the use of oral contraceptives.

Culture of death, indeed. God help us.

If you’re not reading ProWomanProLife, O Reader, you’re missing out. Case in point:

I once read that abortion was the right to kill in order to protect the right to copulate. Since then, I have never ceased to be amazed at the lengths we are willing to go to protect these “rights.”

Case in point: We worry more about the effect of estrogen from contraceptive pills on the smallmouth bass of the Potomac river than on the women who take it daily.

Would that women’s hormonal health was as significant as that of the smallmouth bass of the Potomac watershed.

One possible response to the above is that, quite simply, we value the lives and well-being of other (non-human) animals more than we value the lives and well-being of other human beings. After all, it would be a terrible thing if all the smallmouth bass went extinct. Equally, it would be a terrible thing if, for whatever reason, men and women started taking responsibility for their own sexuality, or started acting with moral reasoning in regard to said same. That might imply that they were something more than animals, and that there was something more relevant to our moral decision making than raw desire and animal instinct…and in our secular world, we wouldn’t want people thinking like that! Besides, we have to save the smallmouth bass!

For twenty years, under five prime ministers, Parliament has failed to reinstate any restrictions, with the result that Canada continues to have the world’s most radical abortion regime. The unborn child has, in this country, to this day, no protection in law whatever. This child is ruled a “foetus” who may be disposed of at any point up to and including the moment of live birth — a moment that can be as vague as any that occurs after the precise moment of conception.

Under Canada’s system, it would be perfectly legal for a doctor to plunge a pair of scissors into the chest of the baby pictured above (notice how the child’s lower half is still within the mother’s body). Twenty years ago today, we made it legal for that event to transpire, in the Crown v. Henry Mogentaler decision, ruled on by the late Justice (I use the term loosely) Bertha Wilson.

In the reasoning of the late Justice Bertha Wilson, no man could respond to the abortion dilemma, “even imaginatively … because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche.”

But which women decide? For polls have fairly consistently shown, that women are more troubled by abortion than men; and few women are radical feminists.

The 1988 ruling was the most significant in a string of cases in which the same Puisne Justice and others wrote this principle — that a woman’s subjective judgement may trump objective facts — into the heart of Canadian law. In the Crown v. Angélique Lavallee, 1990, she extended this reasoning to hold that a woman who had been abused by a man could be excused for killing him, even if the man was defenceless and she came to the encounter armed. In such a case, the courts could employ the testimony of feminist experts on “battered wife syndrome” to discount witnesses whose view of the facts might be contaminated by “myths” and “stereotypes.”

I am speaking today in defiance of the 1988 ruling, being that I am in fact a man, and therefore should not be able to discuss the issue of abortion “even inaginatively.” Let me say, then, that as a man, I think Bertha Wilson — and all of feminism — has missed the point.

I am Catholic, and believe that abortion is the taking of a human life (and is therefore immoral). However, my view of the nature of the unborn is justifiable solely on the basis of biological fact. In my view, the abortion issue is really, honestly, only concerned with at what stage of development it is permissible to end the life of a genetically unique human being. As noted above, it is legal in Canada for the doctor to end the life of the infant human being pictured even further above. That’s the crux of the debate, right there.

But when Bertha Wilson wrote that a man can only relate to the issue by objectifying it (and, by extension, objectifying all women), she missed one important point: there has been no development of the sexual revolution or our progressive, secular society which has benefitted men more than the mainstreaming and/or legalization of abortion. In making abortion “safe and legal” (that sentence should normally be concluded with “rare”, but cannot be if one is speaking in truths), and in making abortion an issue of “choice” for women, feminists have stripped men of any and all responsibility for the outcomes of their sexuality. They have liberated men from any need to worry about the consequences of hooking up with one woman, or a series of women, for the express purpose of having sex.

Previously, a man was beholden to marry a woman whom he carelessly impregnated; men who abandoned such women were derided and looked down upon. Now, since the woman always has the choice to have an abortion open to her, it is not the errant man who will be looked down upon if he departs from the side of a woman who has proven just a tad too fertile for his tastes. After all, she has a choice; keep the child or keep the relationship. Why should men still be beholden to women who do not choose in such a manner as is conducive to sustaining the relationships on terms both partners regard as acceptable?

Nothing — not condoms, not the pill, nothing — has aided and abetted the continued and enhanced objectification of women by men as much as abortion has, because nothing has done more to eliminate any sense of responsibility from peoples’ understanding of the sexual act. Though condoms and the pill do much to chip away at the bedrock of maturity one would hope to find in a sexually active couple’s psyches, condoms and the pill are not 100% effective, and do sometimes fail to discharge (ahem) their proper interdictive role — one can, despite having used the pill and/or a condom, become pregnant (if female) or make one’s partner become pregnant (if male).

But abortion is the “final solution” to that uncertainty — it is (almost) always effective, and in a way that is both sudden and final. Depending on which research one chooses to believe, it may have some harmful physical, mental, or emotional side effects…or it may not. But that is rarely discussed anyhow; the important thing is that women have “choice”. And out of that regime of “choice” comes the final releasing of the human person from having to have any notion of consequence, any measure of responsibility, as far as the sexual act is concerned. Because even if all one’s other precautions fail, one can still sweep the mistakes under the rug with a simple outpatient procedure.

And unfortunately, a system like that benefits only men in the long run — after all, any man (or at least, the average post-modern man, more or less unmoored from any sense of personal responsibility or righteousness that Religion brings) is free to leave the side of any woman who does not make choices that are in line with his own lifestyle. And all this is to say nothing at all of how abortion has benefitted those who demand for themselves a male child first — abortion is used, in many places around the world, as a tool of gender selection, and even in Canada this practice is becoming common. That is eugenics, plain and simple.

But then, most of the early proponents of abortion — Margaret Sanger comes readily to mind — were racists and eugenecists, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that in the most permissive implementation of a system which they lobbied for, we see that eugenics is readily, and all too easily, practiced.

Twenty years ago, all of this was enabled in Canada by one careless court ruling. Perhaps in another twenty years, we will have begun to rebuild what was torn down so many years ago.