How can you be anti-abortion and not anti-gun?
There are many articles, blogs and editorials written about how government attempts to restrict abortion as an attack on women’s health care and right to privacy. While I agree with these arguments, they miss the main point of the real reasoning behind the anti-abortionists’ religious — or should I say “pseudo-religious” — fanaticism.
What is abundantly clear is that the “pro-life” speech that “life begins at conception” is just a cover-up for the religious right's maniacal zeal to prohibit sex for any purpose except procreation. Their basic authoritarian, patriarchal zeal holds that sex is a “sin,” even between married couples. If one engages in this forbidden activity, the consequence, or punishment, if you will, is you must bear a child. That is it, in a nutshell.
This anti-sex, puritanical stance is further played out as the religious right’s frequent opposition to contraception because it may block the pregnancy that is supposed to follow from the forbidden act. Likewise, failure of contraception does not justify abortion. This extreme, intolerant, antiquated view motivates the endless, intensifying, insane drive to stop abortion.
Another fact is the so-called “pro-life” stance is pure hypocrisy. All the people who are against abortions want or are interested in is that sex results in a pregnancy and a birth. Beyond that, they have absolutely no interest in the life that has been created. These same people are adamantly opposed to public funding or other forms of assistance for housing, medical care, education and food for families in need. Once a child is born, they turn their backs and assume any child can then fend for itself. In other words, it doesn’t matter to them if the birth of another child hurts the quality of life for the family it is born into. What should matter is not life, but quality of life. Every child born should be a wanted child.
What is even more shocking is that most of those who are anti-abortion have absolutely no interest in limiting the amount of harm caused by firearms in private hands in the United States. The extent of gun ownership and gun violence in this country is shocking, yet the government’s measures to limit or reverse this is pitifully ineffective. From their absurd point of view, governments should prosecute women who have abortions but do practically nothing to limit gun violence.
Witness the massacre that just occurred at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Statista reported that 42% of U.S. households own at least one firearm, and some have many more because the total number of guns and rifles in private hands in the U.S. is 393 million, which is substantially more than the entire population of the U.S. It seems in their view, owning guns is just as important a right to protect as the right of a fertilized egg to be born.
The absurdity in this entire situation is mind-boggling. If people who are anti-abortion were really interested in protecting life, they would be taking major steps for the government to confiscate virtually all guns and ammunition in private hands and not allow the production of more. Instead, all the government can do is namby-pamby around about background checks, gun registration and advice to keep firearms locked away from children. Whoop-de-doo.
Meanwhile, the NRA and gun manufacturers make billions of dollars selling instruments of death.
We can’t have abortions, but we must live with a society that allows random shootings and massacres of innocent children? What a sick society this is, and unlikely to get better.
Karen Reid is a retired environmental scientist who now runs a bed and breakfast, McKenzie Orchards, with her husband, near Springfield.
Submit a guest view by emailing bomeara@registerguard.com your draft of either 525 words or 725 words, not in between. Include any relevant links to resources and research. Also, be sure to include a short biography explaining who you are, what you do and where you live. Writers may publish one guest view per 90 days.
Letters should be 200 words or fewer and sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to rgletters@registerguard.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and maybe published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Guest view: How can you be anti-abortion and not anti-gun?
