Anthropomorphizing a cluster of cells

Like many people, I was appalled at the decision of a state in which I will never again be a tourist to ban abortion after six weeks, even in cases of rape and threat to the mother’s life or health. I, too, think it is terrible to contemplate that a woman would be forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term and that she could be punished more severely for aborting than he for raping her.

But that’s not the point.

NO WOMAN should be forced to carry an unwanted baby to term. NO LAW should ever attempt to enforce the religious beliefs of any group or individual on anyone else. Every single unwanted pregnancy WAS CAUSED BY A MAN EJACULATING IN A VAGINA. No exceptions. Deal with that problem.

The so-called ‘heartbeat law’ has no basis in actual science. An embryo that doesn't have a heart can’t have a heartbeat. It is just a vibrating cluster of cells, the equivalent of a cancer attached to the fertile environment of a woman’s womb. Even in advanced medicine, a being isn’t considered ‘living’ just because it has a heartbeat. The most fundamental of all determinants, going back to ancient times, was whether it was breathing. In more modern times we have looked for brain activity. You can easily pull the plug on a loved one if it is shown that he can’t breathe on his own and has flatlined as far as brain activity goes.

These laws attempt to anthropomorphize a zygote (not even considered a fetus yet) with the feeling, emotions, and life of a middle-aged white man. Most teens don’t even have the self-awareness being presumed upon a zygote.

Next, the old white men will be requiring the naming of tumors and religious burial for them. At least those that grow in women. We wouldn’t think of regulating men’s bodies like that.

I try to live my life without shame, but of everything that I have done, the one thing I am ashamed of I can’t do anything about. I’m an old white man. I continue living because perhaps my votes will counterbalance the radical Christian terrorist relatives who are so consumed by their religious values, they have ceased to be human beings. Perhaps my vote will offset the high school classmates who have come to believe that Facebook memes are the same as ‘just common sense.’ Perhaps my voice in my fiction, will awaken even a reader of erotica to the stupidity of their blindly held binary beliefs and determination to force everyone in the world to adhere to them. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wiccan… Your religious beliefs ONLY apply to you! Live your life according to your so-called values. Don’t try to legislate them on the rest of us.