Roe vs. Rounds: Cage Match, Bitch!

3/6/06

South Dakota doesn't want abortion. At least, Governor Mike Rounds and his supporters don't want it around, cluttering up the place with excess fetuses, apparently. On Monday Gov. Rounds signed legislation banning all abortions in the state, save those necessary to save the life of the mother. As a female, before you move to the "Under God the people rule" state, you might want to ask yourself if you are:

1) Planning on getting raped

2) Currently engaging in or considering incest

If you answered "yes" to either of these questions you might want to give your relocation plans a pause, rape and incest are not legal reasons for abortion under the new law. That's right ladies; should you be foolish enough to become impregnated by either a random attacker or, say, your father-brother, you'll just have to carry that little present from your prince around for nine months or so before you can shovel it off for the state to deal with. Or you could jaunt off to another state to get the procedure, as proponents of the bill like to point out. This should be especially convenient for the women who most commonly receive abortions, namely the poor, who should have no problem whatever taking two to three days in a row off work.

I don't want to harp on this one particular portion of the issue, but putting aside the attack on the precedent of Roe vs. Wade, what precisely are we striving to achieve by saving the children of rapists and child molesters? Lord knows the hereditary score of a sexual criminal should be a real boon to our society, not to mention the numerous Nobel Prize winners spawned from the genetic wildcard of family copulation. I guess I just don't understand the logic here; it's alright to kill the baby if the mother is in danger but not if that same woman is impregnated because of a crime committed upon her? Why not just go the whole hog and leave the danger of the mother up to God who you think seems so keen for us to cram the planet with bodies until we're packed in here like disgruntled sardines fighting over whose turn it is to eat the dirt and who gets stuck with rocks.

There's a controversial theory put forth by economists Steven D. Levitt and John Donohue that states the legalization of abortion directly led to reduced crime rates. In the eighties crime had been rising for some time and showed no signs of stopping. Almost unanimously the experts were predicting to a Mad Max-style future where roving gangs of adolescent "super criminals" prowled the streets just stabbing people in the face. Then all of a sudden in the nineties the crime rates plummeted. Levitt and Donohue propose that the core criminal group which would have come of age in the nineties (15-20 years after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision) were greatly reduced since most criminals come from unwanted children of poor, uneducated and disenfranchised single mothers. You can read more about this and other theories in the book Freakonomics; I highly recommend it.

Whether it led to a decrease in crime or not, it's impossible to argue that all abortions are performed by women who don't want children, be it by rape, incest, accident or irresponsibility. Whatever the reason, most of these potential children wouldn't start out with a great hand in life, and a disproportionate number of them would turn out to be less than pillars of society. Fuck the rest of us that are already here having a rough enough time of it on this rock; we have to "save" the unborn.

When did it become fashionable to put the needs of the potential over the needs of the actual? You don't like abortions? Don't have one, okay? It's the woman's body, the baby couldn't live without it, ergo the woman has the choice of what she wants to do with her body while the fetus is still little more than something inside her that resembles a newt.

The real danger of this legislation in South Dakota is that the conservative Juggernaut in control of the country has finally found the means to make everyone else live by their moral code. Those of you more than just a touch concerned with the direction of the country can take heart in the fact that we have some mid-term elections coming up soon. I wouldn't be so brash as to recommend one party over the other, but on a completely unrelated note I heard that donkeys can spin straw into gold with their minds.

Somebody much better with words than I once said that selfishness is not living how you want, it's expecting everyone else to live the way you want.