Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

What the fuck America? Seriously, WTF? You've banned a woman's right to an abortion?! That right folks, as you'll be aware, the American federal legal system has thrust women's rights back into the dark ages (which was only 50 years ago), where apparently they think they belong. What's next, removing women's right to vote, or even bringing back slavery?

We're well into the 21st century, and although still no flying cars or vacations on Mars, in the area of human rights we are generally seeing movement in the right direction, although some less developed cultures and countries are resistant and will need some help up the evolutionary ladder. Then America, who many of its more arrogant citizens tell us is the greatest country on the planet, a country who has long positioned itself as the role model to the world in terms of democracy, equality and free speech and just freedoms in general, decides to do the unthinkable, retreating into the past to embrace an injustice against women. In a more enlightened time, back in 1973, American law makers agreed that women should be empowered to determine their own reproductive choices, that men and the government, state bodies and the Church (all male dominated) shouldn't make decisions that affect women and their desire to be, or not be, a mother. They apparently realised that a ban on abortion is just another name for forced pregnancies, that it strips the freedom from women to decide their own destinies. But now they've decided that decision was wrong, women (as has long been maintained) are not responsible enough or intelligent enough to make that call and so safe reproductive care in the US is no longer a woman's right. It has become something each woman will have to fight for on a case by case basis. In some US states it will be achievable, although not effortless, in many others it will be nigh impossible, and for many women their reproductive choice will now be between a safe, legal, but prohibitively expensive out-of-state abortion or a risky, illegal but affordable backstreet abortion in their home state where abortions are banned.

• A leap backward for women in America
• Abortion and the US Constitution
• For the Bible tells me so
• Abortion is murder
• God the abortionist
• When does life begin?
• Abortion destroys potential life
• Abortion and masturbation
• And what about those gays?
• You've killed the next Mozart
• Abortion, free will and your God-given purpose
• Life — God giveth and God taketh away
• Can Christian morality be trusted?
• Be fruitful and multiply ... but don't have sex
• Babies, and souls, are there from day one
• All life is sacred and in God's image
• Pray to End Abortion
• Anti-abortion lies
• Where to from here?
• For your viewing pleasure
• Conclusion
• Readers' Comments
• References

On Friday, 24th June, 2022, as this BBC article explains, a legal ruling was made where, 'Millions of women in the US will lose the constitutional right to abortion, after the Supreme Court overturned its 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision'. But that said, this new ruling doesn't make abortions illegal per se, it just means that a majority of the Supreme Court justices have changed their minds and now believe that the US Constitution (the highest law in the country) doesn't give women an inalienable right to abortion the way it gives them the right to free speech, the right to freedom of religion and the right to carry guns into a school. The US Supreme Court, which Americans sometimes refer to by the acronym SCOTUS ('Supreme Court Of The United Sates'), has taken away their automatic, no-questions-asked right to an abortion, and has said that rather than have a federal law that applies to the entire country, each of the 50 US states must now decide whether abortion will be legal or illegal within their state. It's noted that this reversal will 'leave abortion policy up to individual states and would likely produce a patchwork system where the procedure would remain largely available in Democratic-led states, while Republican-led states would pass extreme limits or outright bans on it'. Note that the court hasn't given the choice to the women, the very people that abortion affects, it has given the choice to their local state government. And if you don't see a problem with that, consider the sign this woman on the right is holding up.

As the above article goes on to note, the Supreme Court 'judgement paves the way for individual states to ban the procedure. Half are expected to introduce new restrictions or bans. Thirteen have already passed so-called trigger laws to automatically outlaw abortion'. Labelling this ruling 'a tragic error', President Joe Biden 'told women in states where it was banned to travel to those where it was not'. To counter that advice some states are already looking to see if they can ban women seeking an abortion from leaving their state or from ordering abortion drugs or the 'Morning After' pill online. In most of the states that now ban abortion there won't even be exemptions in case of victims of rape or incest. Donald Trump's Vice-President Mike Pence, a born-again evangelical Catholic, has 'urged supporters not to stop until "the sanctity of life" was protected by law in every state', meaning until abortion becomes absolutely illegal everywhere in the US.

And while we were only half-serious when we wondered if the emboldened US Supreme Court might next remove women's right to vote or bring back slavery, we now see that one of the Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas, has said that in the future they should reconsider past court decisions 'on the right to contraception, the repeal of anti-sodomy laws, and the legalisation of same-sex marriage'. Maybe when they've corrected those wrongs then they'll circle back to the mistakes they made with voting and slavery.

We first became aware of this looming disaster for American women (and started writing this essay) last month when, according to this article, a leaked draft opinion strongly suggested that the US Supreme Court was set to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the landmark ruling which gave American women the right to a legal abortion, that finally gave women the right to control their own bodies, and effectively wrestled control away from religious old white men. We hoped that good sense would prevail (umm ... in hindsight maybe we should have sacrificed a goat) and they wouldn't get the numbers to squash the fifty year-old ruling, a ruling that has been working perfectly well and is accepted by the majority in the USA, as the article went on to note:

'According to a CNN Poll ... most Americans oppose overturning Roe, with a majority saying that if the decision was vacated [overturned], they'd want to see their own state move toward more permissive [lenient] abortion laws. Just 30% of Americans say they'd like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe v. Wade decision, with 69% opposed — a finding that's largely consistent both with other recent polling and with historical trends.'

'The Supreme Court has gone against the will of the people, the majority of whom polls consistently show back abortion rights. That conservative justices did it anyway says everything you need to know about American politics in 2022 and its festering divide.'

'In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, women procured abortions and had them forced upon them. Single and married women, both elite and non-elite, had abortions when they believed enduring pregnancy and childbirth to be harmful: abortions were had to conceal sexual relations, avert social and material hardship that could accompany children, and alleviate potentially dangerous health issues. A variety of healers provided services and sold products to these ends. Sometimes abortion was procured intentionally through medicines and physical traumas; sometimes it was an accident, caused by unintended interventions, labors, violence, illness, or health-related complications. Sometimes abortion worked and recovery was swift; other times it didn't work and women continued their pregnancy to term; sometimes it resulted in physical harm and death, not unlike childbirth. In some circumstances, abortion was considered a sin and a crime; in others it was not. Sometimes abortion resulted in scandal, prosecution, and punishment; often it was responded to with sympathy and support — it was forgivable, acceptable, deemed necessary, and relatively problematic. More often than not abortion was ignored, something individuals, communities, and authorities turned a blind eye to. Despite increasingly heated rhetoric and new legislation seeking to change its meanings and regulate its practice, abortion remained widely sought, accessible, and generally tolerated. In early modern Italy, abortion was a fact of life'.

It wasn't until the 20th century that some modern countries finally started to liberalise abortion laws, and surprisingly (to us anyway) the Soviet Union was apparently the first in 1920, followed by Ukraine in 1921. Countries such as Poland, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Mexico made law changes in the 1930s, Japan legalised abortion in 1948, and the UK in 1967, Canada in 1969, the USA in 1973 along with Tunisia, France in 1975 and finally NZ got on board in 1977. (Although it must be noted that NZ granted access to abortion via a loophole amendment to the Crimes Act, and did not decriminalise abortion until 2020, when it was sensibly argued that abortion should be treated as a health issue and not a criminal justice issue. As American singer Miley Cyrus proclaims in the photo below, 'Abortion Is Healthcare', and a right to abortion is something all rational, intelligent women want.) Abortion is now legal in most European countries, but not — surprise, surprise — the Vatican, and Ireland and Northern Ireland, thanks to powerful opposition from the Catholic Church, didn't allow abortions until 2018 and 2019 respectively. According to this article, abortion is still prohibited in 24 countries worldwide and 'More than 50 countries and regions permit abortions only when the woman's health is at risk'. In countries that allow abortion, the exact laws and conditions vary greatly from country to country, with abortion being barely accessible to being freely accessible. This move by the US is an aberration (although unfortunately it's not the only country to go backwards and become more restrictive rather than more liberal, for example Poland reversed its law and now bans abortion in almost all cases). Overall though we sense that much of the world is slowly becoming more liberal regarding abortion and has accepted the arguments for its legality. It's now more widely accepted that:

'Abortion is one of the most common gynaecological procedures, and one in four women internationally will have an abortion
in their lifetime'.

Abortion and the US Constitution

So why have the US Supreme Court justices turned the clock back a half century and thrust their citizens back into an era when abortions were unsafe and a crime, even though the majority of Americans want abortion to remain legal and accessible? Shouldn't the justices have considered and respected the wishes of the society they represent? Of course we're not experts on US constitutional law, but we imagine their argument will be one of complex legal technicalities, insisting that their job, regardless of public opinion, is to follow the letter of the law. To them it is a matter of law, not a matter of justice. That said, the US Constitution is actually a very short, simple and in many places vague document, written for a specific time and place, and this means that (centuries later) it is now (like the Bible) hugely open to interpretation. Bring on the lawyers. In the leaked draft by Justice Samuel Alito, he wrote that:

'The Constitution makes no reference to abortion and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision' [and therefore the] 'right to an abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions'.

But here's the rub, not only does the US Constitution not mention abortion, it doesn't actually grant a right to free speech, religion and assault rifles either. Using Justice Alito's logic we could rightly argue that, 'The Constitution makes no reference to free speech and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision'. So that's the end of free speech. Before you race to correct us, let us explain that reference to free speech is in the First Amendment to the Constitution, not in the Constitution document itself. Just as the right to bear arms is in the Second Amendment, not the Constitution. And yes, the amendments now carry the same authority as does the Constitution, but these rights are most definitely not referenced in or protected by the actual Constitution. Just as abortion isn't. Lest you think we're being pedantic, Justice Alito's argument is that for abortion to be a constitutional right it must actually be referenced in the Constitution, and if it's not, then no such right exists, with the implication being that it can't simply be added after the fact. Sorry folks, it's just not in there, and we can't change an historical legal document. But what are these amendments to the original Constitution if not additions made after the fact? They're new statements made at a later date to correct omissions or oversights in the original Constitution. My dictionary defines an amendment as: '(1) The act of changing for the better; improvement, (2) A correction or an alteration, (3) Formal revision of, addition to, or change, as in a bill or a constitution'. And to date they have made 27 amendments to their 'perfect' Constitution (the last in 1992, with 6 more waiting to be ratified), all to account for situations the original 18th century authors hadn't thought of. The framers of the Constitution even included a provision to allow for such amendments. So while Alito's argument that abortion is not referenced in the Constitution is correct, as these 27 later amendments prove the Constitution itself has no problem with new rights, like for abortion perhaps, being added later. To further show how Americans are perfectly willing to add to their Constitution to reflect changes in society, in 1919 they added the 18th Amendment which effectively banned alcohol (beginning the Prohibition Era), even though their lord and saviour Jesus H. Christ enjoyed a drink and even had a party trick of turning water into wine and distributing it to others. Then in 1933 they again changed their minds and added the 21st Amendment which cancelled the 18th Amendment's alcohol ban. In between these two amendments they added the 19th Amendment in 1920 granting women the right to vote. Rights regarding alcohol and women voting were never considered in the Constitution, but Americans later realised that attitudes had changed and saw no problem with making amendments. Laws are not set in stone. So the question the Supreme Court should have been considering is not whether abortion was referenced in an historic document called the Constitution (or its later amendments), but whether that right was justly allowed back in 1973 and should still be defended now, and might we suggest, even added as a new amendment, since clearly this is no longer 1787, and, well ... things have changed. A lot.

But even the Constitution's take on equality is troublesome and a matter of interpretation. The famous statement that we've all heard, that 'all men are created equal', is not actually part of the US Constitution but the 1776 US Declaration of Independence, a statement that is not reiterated in the Constitution and clearly does not include women, nor even all men in fact. Just white men. In 1857 the US Supreme Court ruled that the rights and privileges conferred by the US Constitution does not apply to people of African descent, free or otherwise. That wasn't corrected until they added the 14th Amendment. Even being white didn't make you equal, since white men could vote, white women could not. Even that's not strictly true, since the white men had to be property owners, meaning that when the US Constitution was written only 6% of "Americans" could actually vote. A true belief in equality would have meant 100% of the adult population got to vote, not a mere 6%. That said, the US Constitution was in our opinion a brilliant document for its time, it was a good founding document, but considering the crucial changes that they had to later make, like adding the right to free speech and finally allowing women to vote, society's traditions back then were clearly quite different to now, and later deemed unjust. Let's remember that arresting, imprisoning, torturing and executing people accused of witchcraft (think Salem, Massachusetts) is 'deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions', as is forcing Native Americans onto reservations to free up land for white Christians (it was called Manifest Destiny), even the sale or ownership of sex toys was illegal (and still is in some places in the US). And do we need to again mention the American Nation's shameful history and tradition of enslavement and then apartheid? The current 'Black Lives Matter' movement shows that many Americans still aren't accepting of racial equality, many whites still fight to hold onto certain traditions, no matter how heinous.

One problem is that too many Americans treat their centuries old Constitution as an infallible and inspired document that must still be obeyed as written without question and the very thought of changing it is anathema, the same way that Christians treat the Bible (and Muslims the Koran). Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's latest addition to the US Supreme Court, identifies as an Originalist, a judicial philosophy she shares with at least 3 other justices, where Originalism is, 'A legal philosophy that the words in a constitution should be interpreted as they were understood at the time they were written'. When religious believers assert that the meaning of their holy text is exactly what it appears to say, they're saying that it is not a metaphor or analogy and it shouldn't be conveniently reinterpreted as something more fitting with modern beliefs. If the Bible says the world is flat and that bats are birds (and it does) then it means it. We call these people fundamentalists, and Justice Barrett appears to be Constitution fundamentalist. Apparently if the Constitution had said that all men must own a musket, all women must wear a veil and doctors must first treat all illnesses with leaches before trying anything else, then that is what Barrett would expect the Supreme Court and the US justice system to be enforcing today. The American belief in the Bible as a sacred and inerrant document obviously carries over onto their Constitution, even though it is quite clearly a foolish notion to believe that ancient statements concerning science, ethics and politics will always be true and applicable, when history has shown just the opposite. The disturbing reality is that many Americans are nostalgic for a past when white Christian men were in charge, when blacks slaved in the fields, Indians remained on their reservations, women toiled in the kitchen and Muslims were unheard of, and that was the sort of society the US Constitution was written for. As a very religious country (and it still is) the very thought of including the right to abortion in the original US Constitution would have been utterly unthinkable, and many modern Americans are still of that primitive mindset.

Let us give you another example of where the blind desire of Americans to obey both their god and their Constitution has led to seriously harmful consequences. While some would argue that they were unintended consequences, even a fool could see that suffering and death would ensue. Just as most Americans support the right to abortion (but after consulting their Constitution they revoked it anyway), most Americans oppose the criminal abuse and neglect of children, but went ahead and changed state laws to allow it. Why? Because the vague wording of their Constitution permitted child abuse. They elected to blindly and obediently do the legal thing rather than bravely do the right thing. What we're referring to is that in America:

'Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have religious exemptions in their civil codes on child abuse or neglect; fifteen states have religious defences to felony crimes against children; and twelve states have religious defences to misdemeanours against children'. [16]

In NZ and the likes of Canada and the UK those parents would all face prosecution based on the criminal neglect of their children. Why can't Americans see that a very broad interpretation of a vague statement in an amendment to the Constitution is creating real harm to innocent young lives? Well, many can, so the question now becomes why aren't they prepared to change a centuries old piece of text to protect children from their parent's stupidity? Because they fear that making changes to the Constitution, or more correctly, adding an amendment, would open the floodgates for untold other changes (especially that beloved amendment concerning guns), and of course it would create the very frightening realisation that the Constitution was not a perfect document. Americans must stop treating their Bible and Constitution as sacred documents and need to find the courage to move beyond them. We have matured massively as a society and ancient proclamations that are clearly unjust must not be allowed to run roughshod over the justice system and our lives. Today's laws must be informed by today's understanding, and the Constitution amended to account for modern sensibilities, as was intended from the beginning. Amendments like granting the right to abortion and prohibiting the abuse of children in God's name.

We also view Justice Alito's argument by omission, ie the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, as being rather childish, like saying that since the Constitution omitted any mention of driverless cars controlled by computers we therefore can't make any laws concerning them. Hellooo ... 27 amendments and counting! But OK, maybe amendments aren't needed, clearly the Constitution isn't the only place to look for the current laws that make the US function, since the US has untold federal laws covering the entire country that have no reference in the Constitution, so why couldn't the right to abortion simply be one of those, why make abortion an all or nothing argument, it's either in the Constitution or it's not?

As for tradition, if simply being a tradition and not being mentioned in the Constitution is important, as Justice Alito maintains, some critics have suggested that the justices' argument to overthrow Roe v. Wade could equally be used to throw out modern laws that make homosexuality, gay marriage, divorce, contraception and even sex toys legal, since the Constitution makes no mention of them and therefore 'no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision', and there is also clearly no right to any of those things based on them being 'deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions'. Just the opposite in fact, American history and traditions have been deeply opposed, sometimes in law, sometimes in tradition, often in both, to those things that the majority now believe should be legally allowed. (Since I wrote this paragraph, as we noted above it's now been confirmed by Justice Clarence Thomas that the legality of homosexuality, gay marriage and contraception is indeed back on the table.)

However, while the legal conclusions may be based on the Constitution and matters of law, we suspect the motivation to find legal arguments against abortion is based solely on the deluded, traditional and deeply conservative religious beliefs of the majority of the US Supreme Court justices and their supporters. We've just mentioned that having dealt to abortion Justice Thomas now thinks they need to seriously look at, not gun laws or systemic racism or health inequities in the US, but the banning of contraception, sodomy and same-sex marriage. That's where their focus now lies. And besides the US Supreme Court, what other group is bitterly opposed to contraception, sodomy and same-sex marriage? Umm ... those annoying Christians? Correct. So where does it appear that the loyalty of the US Supreme Court lies, who's pulling their strings? Umm ... the stupid bloody Church? Correct again. But because the Constitution demands (or at least a later amendment does) a separation between church and state any blatant mention of God or Christianity by the justices in their arguments would quickly see the case dismissed, just as they always are when Christians argue to have Creationism or Intelligent Design taught in science classes. So the justices have to be careful how they word their arguments so as to not show their hand. Of course their Christian bias is obvious but they can't say it out loud or put it in writing. When Justice Alito writes that the 'right to an abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions', it's obvious what he's referring to. The majority of Americans (wrongly) believe that their nation is a Christian nation that was founded by Christians for Christians, meaning the history and traditions that Alito alludes to are those that reflect a past when all "good" Americans were deeply religious and subservient to God's wishes. They want to return to a time when America was seen as God's country, when all Americans spent Sunday in church and not in the shopping malls, and when a husband and wife each slept in their own single bed.

Think about it. The law granting the right to abortion has been in place for almost half a century, so what has suddenly caused the US Supreme Court justices to not just reconsider it, but to actually overturn it? Has new scientific knowledge shown that our understanding of human reproduction fifty years ago was wrong? Has society again realised that women shouldn't have any control over their own bodies? Has religiosity in America increased and caused a fervent and fearful desire to hand women's bodies over to God's will? No, no and no. The answer is the intense lobbying by devout Christians that play on the Christian faith of the justices; Bible carrying advocates and lobbyists that remind them that an American's loyalty goes 'God, family and country'; they serve God first, their family second and their country third. So when God says abortion is wrong and their country says it's legal, then God's wishes should trump a mere federal law made by sinful humans. Justice Alito saying that they're looking at abortion through the lens of 'the Nation's history and traditions' surely means America's Christian history and traditions, not the history and traditions of Native Americans or African Americans or secular Americans. When Justice Thomas talks of banning contraception, sodomy and same-sex marriage, you just know he's been reading about Bible history and traditions and not the Harry Potter books. We've just been made aware of an article, 'The Religion of the Supreme Court Justices' by Gallup Senior Scientist Frank Newport, in which he writes that, 'All of the justices on the court have a religious identity', comprising 'six Catholics, two Protestants, and one Jew', and notes that, 'This is not reflective of the U.S. population ... about 22% of the adult population identifies as Catholic, as opposed to the 67% Catholic representation on the court'. He also reveals that, 'The rise of the "nones" represents a major change in American religious identity over the past decades' (Americans that have no formal religious identity, currently about 21%), and yet they are 'a completely missing constituency on the court'. So all the justices on the Supreme Court claim to believe in God (no surprise there), and if they're true believers will want to serve God before all others, such as man-made governments, knowing full well what his demands are. Yet it is also a crucial part of a judge's job to remain independent, unbiased and impartial, and if they can't do that, for example if there is a clear conflict of interest, like, I don't know, being a life-long close friend of God, someone intimately involved in the case they're hearing, then they should recuse themselves. None did. So much for integrity. Of course they will argue that God has nothing to do with the abortion debate, just as the Christians argue that God has nothing to do with the Intelligent Design debate, but they're fooling no one. That said, some justices will hopefully be able to put aside their bias and focus solely on the law and the facts, but in no other cases are judges or jurors allowed to participate after such a clear conflict of interest is exposed.

Of course this fervent push to end the right to a legal abortion is nothing new, it's been raging since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, and has nearly been won on several occasions previously. While we in NZ were largely oblivious to the real possibly that Americans might make such a backward move, those on the US abortion front lines were not. American legal historian Mary Ziegler wrote back in 2020 that, 'For the first time in decades, the pro-life movement stood on the cusp of seeing the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade' [14]. So what was changing, what made the court increasingly likely to reverse the decision that the US Constitution protected a woman's right to choose abortion? What's changed is the makeup of the US Supreme Court. To attract the Christian vote, 'Donald Trump, when running for the White House in 2016, promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe "automatically".' As we now know, the unthinkable happened and he won. Then, as an immediate thank you to his Christian support base, 'He not only reinstated but expanded what critics called the "global gag rule," barring any NGO receiving U.S. foreign health aid from providing or advocating for abortion-related services' [13]. They didn't just want to harm the health of American women, they wanted to deny women their reproductive rights worldwide. Then throughout his presidency Trump managed to stack the Supreme Court with three new conservative justices that were sympathetic to the deeply religious beliefs of the Christian majority. After the Supreme Court ruling was announced, a gloating now ex-President Trump acknowledged at a victory rally in Illinois that they deliberately appointed specific people to positions of power in order to overturn Roe v. Wade, stating that, 'we got almost 300 federal judges and three great supreme court justices confirmed to do exactly that'. And surprisingly this was one of the rare times in Trump's life when what dribbled from his mouth wasn't ignorant nonsense, hate speech or fake news, he can indeed take much of the credit for stripping a human right from American women by packing the court with his flunkies. The entire court didn't need to be in agreement, all they needed was enough for a majority vote, which after many decades they finally achieved with a 5-4 victory. Worse still, they hold their position for life, so they must die before the chance will come up to get new justices on the Supreme Court that might actually believe in actual justice. Justices should be free of bias and conflict of interest and look at all cases dispassionately, yet clearly these justices were nominated solely because they had an agenda, overturn Roe v. Wade. Their minds were made up before they even heard the legal arguments. It's quite shocking to think that a president, backed by his Republican supporters, can deliberately stack a court with justices that he has handpicked to give a legal ruling that he has promised to deliver to a religious group. All this in a country where one of their most important laws demands separation of church and state, where the state most definitely can't make laws that benefits (or harms) any specific religion. Yet creating new laws around abortion to appease Christians is doing just that.

Here's another disturbing tidbit about politics and the strength of American character. Before they considered running for president, Donald J. Trump, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were all outspoken in their support of a woman's right to an abortion, but every one of them flipped to being anti-abortion, knowing that as a Republican candidate they must secure the huge block of Christian votes needed to win the election for president. They didn't campaign on what they actually believed (or what the majority of American citizens wanted) but deviously on what they needed to say to get elected into a position of power by God-fearing Christians. They knew that the Religious Right would only support a candidate that was anti-abortion and committed to overturning Roe v. Wade. And the voting public that elected these flip-floppers knew they were reversing course for purely selfish political reasons, but apparently didn't care as long as their lies served God's purpose. It was the same when Trump promised to stack the Supreme Court. Mary Ziegler wrote that, 'Many pro-lifers were well aware of Trump's flaws. But for the right Supreme Court justices, almost no price was too high' [13]. And politicians wonder why they are one of the most despised and least trusted professions on the planet.

In the draft opinion Justice Alito revealed his bias and reliance on Christian arguments when he goes on to write that overturning this ruling is important because 'abortion destroys potential life'. Recall that he has already argued that the Constitution makes no judgement on abortion, and therefore the court must 'return the issue of abortion to the people's representatives', that is, it should leave the issue to the states to decide. The Supreme Court is saying, inexplicably, that state court judges with less qualifications and less legal experience than them should decide such a fractious and contentious issue that has been raging for a lot longer than fifty years. With this ruling Alito is stating that the Supreme Court is not dictating a stance on abortion, they are not saying it's wrong and is now illegal, they are merely saying the answer is not in the Constitution, it is silent on abortion. But while they don't dictate what the states' verdict on abortion must be, Alito definitely hints at what that verdict should be when he quite unprofessionally influences their decision by adding that Roe v. Wade differs from other Supreme Court cases in that, 'abortion destroys potential life'. What essentially does that phrase mean to many people? The message many take is that, 'abortion destroys' — meaning illegally ends or murders — 'potential life' — meaning potential human life or simply human life, or to put it more concisely, 'abortion is murder'. The statement 'abortion destroys potential life' is simply a less emotive form of 'abortion is murder', without doubt they are saying the same thing. Alito is asserting that the Supreme Court is not going to tell the states how to rule on abortion, but speaking off the record folks, it is murder, so use that as your guide.

Whether it's by destroying or murdering, this is an argument that the Christian Church has been using for centuries, and most obviously year after year since abortion was made legal in the USA. Other arguments they'll put forward are that, 'All life is sacred' or 'God created life and only he can take it away' or 'Every soul has a divine purpose' or simply, 'Abortion is wrong ... umm ... the Bible says so'. Every one of those claims — murder, sacred, a Creator, souls, the Bible — links to God and how abortion is interfering with his property, thwarting his plan, destroying a purposeful life before it even begins. Initially those opposed to abortion would have simply been called devout Christians, then the most vocal and active Christian groups emphasised the anti-abortion label, with Catholics in the early 1950s arguing that a fetus had a 'right to life' (and we're sure, a right to carry a gun, something designed to take life). But since the late 1960s they have labelled themselves the 'pro-life' group. This led in the early 1970s to those that support the legalisation of abortion calling themselves the 'pro-choice' group, their argument being that how the reproductive life of a woman plays out should be her choice, not that of the government or a religion. They view any opposition to abortion as opposition to women's rights. The pro-choice group are not arguing that pregnant women should seek abortions, they're arguing that women should have the choice to take the pregnancy to term or get an abortion. Either way it's their body, their choice. The pro-life group in contrast insist women have no say in what happens in their own body if they are faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Other people, usually men, will decide for them, have in fact already decided for them, and they must go through with the pregnancy. And now for many American women, to fight against this pro-life group will very difficult, very expensive, very risky and very illegal.

Even if you explain that most aborted fetuses are just a small collection of mindless cells, ask anyone against abortion and the response that a potential life is being destroyed (or a real life murdered) is almost always one of the top reasons offered as to why abortion should be illegal, in any and all cases. So the Supreme Court justices clearly lifted their motivation from the pro-lifers, who openly acknowledge their view of abortion comes from their belief in God, and what they believe God has decreed regarding abortion. As we all know, Christians (and all religious people actually) are very superstitious, gullible, and when it comes to how the universe works, deeply ignorant people that happily embrace silly beliefs that were handed to them as children alongside stories of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Somehow just bright enough to eventually dismiss belief in Santa and fairies with a tooth fetish, they aren't so astute when it comes to winged angels on clouds and talking snakes.

So that essentially is why in our view all pro-lifers (which now seemingly includes the majority of the US Supreme Court justices) are against abortion, not because they've studied and debated the theological, philosophical and scientific arguments surrounding it, but simply because God, their invisible sky fairy, is against it. But actually, he isn't. For the record, the Bible (and therefore God) actually makes no mention of abortion whatsoever. Nada. Zilch. Zip. In that respect it's just like the the US Constitution. But it matters not to these ignorant Christians that God never thought it important to raise the topic of abortion, they have fooled themselves into thinking that he's deeply opposed, and they have now finally got enough devout justices on the US Supreme Court that agree with them.

For the Bible tells me so

There have been untold books written that have discussed abortion, but no one we've ever debated abortion with has ever read any of them, or can be bothered to, but without fail they've all read one book (well, that's not quite true, they've all heard of one book) that for them states the only acceptable stance on abortion. The Bible. And that stance is that's it wrong. Oh, so very wrong.

Four ongoing debates I've had over the last few years have concerned the opposition to suicide, euthanasia, genetic engineering and nudity, and without exception every argument offered against was, sometimes after considerable probing, found to come from the Bible, or more often, people's misunderstanding of the Bible. It's the same with abortion. There are solely philosophical arguments surrounding abortion which I've read that are completely divorced from gods and religion, but my experience is that the people I encounter are ignorant of them, and would believe them to be overridden by arguments from the Bible anyway. It's also surprising that many people that aren't very religious often unknowingly use arguments that have their origin in Bible stories; the myths of Christianity are just so ubiquitous. It's like when you ask someone why we shouldn't kill people. Everyone knows it's quite wrong but have difficulty explaining why exactly, and one of the first reasons they'll grasp at is, Doesn't it say in some ancient book that we shouldn't kill?

Look at the above image of both pro-life and pro-choice protesters in the US and the messages their signs are displaying. The pro-choice signs are small and rational:

'Abortion is Essential'
'Abortion is a Human Right'
'I Had an Abortion'
'Proudly, Loudly, Jewishly, Pro-Abortion Access'

'Abortion is Murder — Exodus 20:13'
'Turn to Jesus or Burn in Hell'
'Repent or Perish — John 3:19-26'
'Cry to God — Jesus Saves'
'Jesus Saves from Hell — John 3:19-26'
'God Hates Hands that Shed Innocent Blood — Proverbs 6:16-17'

'Secret Sins: Lying, Swearing, Cursing, Fraud, Lust, Extortion, Gluttony, Vanity, Laziness, Cheating, Stealing, Exaggeration, Self-Pity, Self-Love, Stubbornness, Unbelief, Fornication, Pornography, Pride, Gossip, Covetousness, Boasting, Jealousy, Envy, Insincerity, Malice, Revenge, Deceit & Finally Rejected Jesus Christ'

'The anti-abortionists are strongly fundamentalists, almost universally, whether you're talking about Catholics, Mormons or Protestants, they're one kind of fundamentalist or the other. Those who favour choice tend to be non-religious ... so we have a religious war in a sense going on here'. [17]

Abortion is murder

Yes, in the Bible's Ten Commandments God states that 'Thou shalt not kill', but that's referring to other living, breathing people, not to an unseen human embryo or fetus. And to be completely factual, that commandment only referred to Jews (Hebrews) killing other Jews. God, as the Bible clearly shows, had no problem with his chosen people slaughtering people of other cultures and religions, in fact he often demanded they do so. They only gained the land now called Israel by slaughtering its occupants, something we now call, not mass murder, but genocide. Take this child-friendly Bible story for example:

'The Lord said to Moses, "Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites" ... So Moses said to the people, "Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord's vengeance on them ... They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man ... They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals ... Moses was angry with the officers of the army ... "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. ... Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man".' (Numbers 31:1-18)

And it wasn't just foreigners either, God even demanded they kill their fellow Jews when they displeased him, for example:

'Moses told them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Each of you, take your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other. Kill everyone — even your brothers, friends, and neighbors". The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people fell dead'.
(Exodus 32:27-28)

So clearly this Biblical commandment not to kill is just a rule of convenience, you can demand it of others to stop them killing you, but Christians can personally disregard it whenever the situation calls for it. Like it's OK to kill when someone has some nice real estate you want, when someone offends you by being gay, when an atheist disrespects your sky fairy, or even when a black man jogs past your house in a nice white neighbourhood. So if you're looking to the Bible for guidance, depending on who's doing it and to whom, murder may or may not be wrong. But as we've said, unlike wanton murder which plays a big part in God's stories for the whole family, the Bible makes no mention of abortion. It apparently didn't concern God at all. Christians need to ask why.

The one Bible passage that we've seen Christians (mistakenly) use to claim abortion is murder is in Exodus which states:

'If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot'.
(Exodus 21:22-24)

It's also clear in that Exodus story that they're referring to a pregnant woman being struck accidentally, there is no suggestion that someone is deliberately trying to make the woman miscarry. This is an example of a woman losing a child that she (presumably) wanted to keep. But what rules apply if her husband wants to abort his own child, or the woman wants to end her pregnancy? Since the fetus is the property of the husband then Exodus would imply that the husband could cause an abortion with no ramifications, since he's not going to fine himself for doing something he wanted to do. If the woman aborted the fetus against her husband's wishes then he has been deprived of some of his property, but since she is also his property and would be unable to pay a fine, we're guessing her punishment would be somewhere between a severe beating and being sold into slavery, perhaps both.

Thus the Exodus story is not about abortion, it's about financial compensation, in that the Biblical penalty for accidentally causing a woman to miscarry is merely a fine, not death, since the loss of the fetus is not considered murder. What should happen if a woman deliberately seeks an abortion is apparently not something the ancient Hebrews (or God) bothered thinking about. They only made laws about matters they thought important, like prohibiting men from having sex with goats, while omitting one prohibiting sex with children, an omission many of God's priests and ministers have taken full advantage of. And it's not in the Constitution either, so doubly lucky.

So there is no Biblical commandment against abortion, no discussion on whether it is right or wrong for a woman (or a man) to terminate a pregnancy. Let's remember that God was not a fan of women, and like the Hebrew men, often found their bodies and sexuality offensive. Let's recall that God was forced to create Eve as a sexual plaything for Adam only after Adam had found the thought of sex with numerous animals not to his liking. Women were an afterthought, something created to keep men warm on cold nights and a vessel in which their sperm could gestate. Like his goats and camels they were seen as mere property, even traded as such in marriage, and God even permitted Hebrew men to sell their own daughters as slaves. God had little reason to concern himself about the welfare of women and their wombs. Men were his favourite. Today one might suspect that God was gay.

So why do Christians believe that the Bible clearly condemns abortion? Well, it's not difficult to read 'Thou shalt not kill' in isolation (remembering that most Christians have read little of the Bible and understood even less) and jump to the erroneous conclusion that babies are little humans that are created nine months before they are born and therefore God's commandment must apply to them right from the moment of conception. It's all guess work by ignorant, superstitious people. Everything the Church says about abortion is a matter of interpretation by deluded Christians reading obscure and mysterious Bible passages and putting their own spin on them. For example, in Genesis 1:28 God told Adam that he should 'know' Eve (if you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and that they should 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it', which means have lots of wild sex and populate the world. (Note, in case you're wondering if God had already wiped out humanity due to some mistake, like he was later to do with Noah, and Adam and Eve were another attempt to get things right, back when the Bible was translated into English the word 'replenish' apparently meant 'fill' and not 'fill again' as it does now.) So God was keen for families to grow and for there to be lots more people to worship him. Even though everyone now agrees that the world is definitely over-populated in places, Christians still argue that anything that slows down God's planned population explosion is defying God's wishes, and they see abortion as such a thing. As we've noted, Christians also argue that life is sacred, again simply because they believe God personally and deliberately creates every life with a purpose in mind, and humans have no right to end a life God created, only God has that right. It's called property rights. That's why suicide and euthanasia are also serious sins in Christian eyes. But as regards abortion, in the early years of Christianity you could still abort an embryo up to 80 days after conception with no punishment, since 'life' didn't start until God popped a soul in some two and a half months after the man 'lay' with his wife. This period also roughly relates to something that comes next which is called the quickening, the time when a woman first feels the fetus move, which in the past implied that a soul had now taken up residence. But then Christian theologians did some more interpretation (meaning they probably discussed sex after a few too many wines), and suddenly came to believe (long before we had powerful microscopes and such), that life begins at conception. Not they understood conception as we now do, involving sperm, eggs and fertilisation, their notion of conception was essentially two people having sex, and that that action somehow sets a pregnancy in motion. And since God says we must not destroy life (although remember he actually only said Jews must not kill other Jews, and then only some of the time, and he actually didn't even say that because God isn't real) this means that modern Christians now argue that as soon as a male sperm fertilises a female egg then life has begun, and so even destroying this minute, single cell is murder most foul. And right there we encounter a huge and embarrassing fact that demonstrates the sheer ignorance of Christians and the unspeakable brutality of their loving God.

God the abortionist

What do we mean by calling God an abortionist, someone who performs abortions? An abortion, by my dictionary definition, is an induced termination of pregnancy and expulsion of an embryo or fetus. However, a termination of a pregnancy sometimes happens naturally and is called a miscarriage. Pro-lifers would argue that abortion is deliberate and a miscarriage is natural; the abortion is caused by an intelligence acting with a purpose while the miscarriage has no such cause, it's just a sad and unfortunate event brought about by nature. We would argue, if God is real as they claim, it is nothing of the sort. If the Christian god exists, it's easy to show that he is continuously performing direct, intentional abortions.

Let us explain. It's well known medically that, 'as many as 1 in 4 known pregnancies end in miscarriage', but what that statistic is referring to is that a quarter of 'known or confirmed pregnancies' will fail due to a miscarriage, it does not include the pregnancies lost before a woman is even aware she's pregnant. In this article, 'New Research Shows Most Human Pregnancies End in Miscarriage', it's revealed that:

'It's treated as a taboo subject, but miscarriages of pregnancy happen a lot. Well according to a new paper, they happen a lot more than any of us may realise — even the women having them. The research has found that more than half of successful fertilisations will end in miscarriage.'

But it's more than half when we look at the big picture. If we assume 100 women get pregnant in a specific period, then using a rough calculation this means around half, 50 pregnancies, will fail before the fertilised egg even makes it to the uterus. Of the 50 remaining some percentage in the uterus will also fail without the women realising they were even pregnant, for argument's sake let's say 10%, meaning 45 now remain, and a quarter of those (1 in 4), say 11, will fail due to miscarriage, leaving 34 pregnancies that result in a live birth. That means 66 pregnancies failed, which is of course 66%, and that is considerably more than half, roughly two thirds in fact. So the reality is that more pregnancies fail than succeed due to what is medically called a spontaneous abortion. If a pregnancy lasts long enough so that the woman does realise she is pregnant then these spontaneous abortions are called miscarriages, but this label is misleading. When you ask the question of whether conception happened and a fertilised egg or zygote started growing and then some time later suddenly stopped or aborted, it's irrelevant whether the woman or her doctor knew this happened. A pregnancy still began and was then aborted.

And in the Christian worldview who or what would cause or induce these spontaneous abortions? No, not Satan. It's God of course! Remember God is the all-powerful being, he's in charge and running the show, Satan is just one of God's minions, a patsy God uses to pin many of his more evil acts on. God may push Satan in front of the cameras, or under the bus, but it's all still God's work. The woman may not have known she was pregnant for a few hours, days or weeks, but God certainly knew. In a material world we atheists can ascribe natural causes to miscarriages or spontaneous abortions, in that they are often induced by genetic errors, but Christians can't. Christians can't claim that their god is responsible for all life, that he allows a pregnancy to go to full term and yet claim that he has nothing whatsoever to do with the majority of lives that don't make it. That he deliberately breathed life into the embryo (or 'ensouled' the embryo in religious technical terms) then, for some unknown reason, chose to abort it later down the track, ripping the screaming soul back out. So throughout history God has been aborting zygotes, embryos and fetuses left, right and centre. The babies that God has allowed to be born throughout human history are a much smaller proportion than those that God has aborted, that God has, as Christians' describe the act of abortion, murdered. I read in Jennifer D. Sciubba's fascinating book: '8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World' (2022) that, 'The almost 8 billion of us alive today represent around 7 percent of the 108 billion who have ever taken a breath'. [2] So considering some 108 billion people have been born since modern humans first arose, and if (using our above calculation) around 66% of pregnancies have failed, that means God has performed some 210 billion abortions. The most prolific abortionist of all time is God himself. If abortion is murder as pro-life groups maintain, then clearly God is a mass murderer, although just as clearly this is a gross understatement. If a human killing 100, 1,000 or six million innocent people is described as a mass murderer, what is the label for a god that kills nearly a quarter of a trillion? Of course Christians may protest that the 'All abortionists are murderers' argument only applies to humans, not God himself. Do as I say, not as I do. But we would ask, if abortion is immoral, why should we be more moral than God? God has obviously found good reasons for frequently performing untold abortions in specific circumstances, and so have we, although on a much, much smaller scale. God apparently sleeps well at night, and so should we.

When does life begin?

The pro-life mob and Justice Alito both argue that abortion destroys a potential life that begins at conception, and this forces us to ask what 'potential' life actually means, how it relates to actual life, and when this real life begins. Not potential life or pretend life or fantasy life but real life. I know we've said that for most people the statement 'abortion destroys potential life' is simply just a less abrasive version of 'abortion is murder', but some take it further, arguing that abortionists commit murder before an actual life even exists. It's like saying I could steal your completed novel before you've even written it. So as regards this potential life, what is potential, is it something we can touch, or destroy? My dictionary defines potential as: 'Capable of being but not yet in existence; latent'. Potential speaks of something that we can imagine happening if certain (perhaps very unlikely) circumstances are met, of something that is physically possible, but also something for which there is no necessity that it must happen or guarantee that it will happen. I have the potential to win a Nobel Prize, to win Olympic Gold, to become Prime Minister, to play the arch-villain in the next James Bond movie, but that said, I don't have the right to demand that everyone clears a path to ensure my potential becomes my reality. Whether I achieve any of these possible futures is solely up to me, just as whether a potential life becomes a real life is solely up to the woman who is pregnant. By calling it potential life rather than simply life, pro-lifers are admitting (reluctantly) that no actual life yet exists, but they want people to keep thinking that there is a real life there (or more specifically a living baby) right from conception, so they keep saying 'life' and just preface it with the word 'potential'. But it's the word 'life' that resonates with people. It's like if a doctor were to say to a patient that they have advanced cancer in the form of an aggressive, grade IV glioblastoma tumour, all the patient hears is the word 'cancer'. Pro-lifers fudge the issue by talking of potential life, which by definition means life that doesn't yet exist, and may never exist, meaning that destroying the tissue that does exist in the early stages of a pregnancy is not destroying a real life, since you can't destroy something that isn't there. By deliberately adding the word potential they subtly acknowledge this, but most listeners never grasp the crucial distinction and fixate solely on the word 'life' — Oh my God, they're killing a live baby!!

So, potential life and real life, we need to go back a step and ask when actual life begins, since surely real life is what matters, not someone's imagined dream of what might be. As we've said, the Christian Church has changed it's view on when life begins (which just proves that their take on what the Bible verses actually mean is more than a little shaky), moving from 80 days after conception to conception itself (which may be anywhere from a few minutes up to five days after sexual intercourse), but seriously, what the fuck does the Christian Church know about human biology (or science in general)? That's like asking a medieval witch to explain quantum mechanics. So when does life begin, actual life? Does it begin at conception as the Church has long claimed, or does conception merely create potential life which later morphs into actual life? Actually this is the wrong question, the right one being, When did life begin? Not at conception, obviously, unless you believe that sperm and eggs (also called gametes) are dead, inanimate things until they suddenly bump into each other (like flotsam and jetsam) and God zaps the resulting fusion with the spark of life. Most cells in our bodies are alive, except the likes of dead skin cells, hair and finger nails. A healthy zygote that results from the union of a sperm and egg can only happen if both the sperm and egg are already alive. You could say that a new, unique genetic code is created when sperm and egg fuse, and this code will (if God gives the thumbs up) go on to form a new human life, but there most definitely was no stage at which non-life suddenly (and miraculously) turned into life. The 'essence' of life that you possess was passed onto you by your parents, like a relay baton, and your parents received life from their parents, and right back through the chain of continuous life to the actual point when life began, over 3 billion years ago. And no, there was no Creator moulding clay or throwing lightning bolts around back then. Cell biologist and Nobel laureate Gunter Blobel describes the 'splendor in life's unbroken tenure' this way:

'When it comes right down to it, you are not twenty or thirty or forty years old, you are 3.5 billion years old. Some people may say how terrible it is, this idea that we come from monkeys. Well, it's worse than that — or better, depending on your perspective. We come from cells from 3.5 billion years ago. There is this tremendous thread of life that goes back to when the first cells arose, and that will continue on after any of us die as individuals. It's continuous life, and continuous cell division, and we are all an extension of that continuity'.

Confronted with this reality, that life doesn't miraculously appear after two people have sex, some pro-life proponents might now argue that we have misunderstood their claim that abortion destroys potential life. What they mean is that when an egg is fertilised this begins the process of making a new human life, and that abortion halts that process. Regardless of when life begins, regardless of what science has shown, it's now obvious that a process that normally leads to a baby has begun, so we shouldn't interrupt it. The potential now exists that, God willing, a baby may be born some 9 months later.

So does that resolve the confusion, does it make sense to call an egg with a sperm freshly ensconced inside it a potential life while insisting that an egg with several sperm surrounding it cannot be called potential life? We don't believe it does. Surely the battle of those sperm, all trying to be the first to enter, is simply screaming potential life? That's what potential means, that if a sperm breaks through then it has the potential to execute the next crucial step in human reproduction. Potential is there at every step, from when a couple fall in love and then have sex right up to the moment a baby is born, only then does that potential become realised, because that potential could have been squashed at untold steps along the way, like with the couple not falling in love. Potential life clearly does not just begin at conception, as if the couple having sex had no idea that the woman might get pregnant, had no idea that the potential for that existed. This means that if 'potential life' must be protected then the pro-life groups should have extended their purview far beyond just abortion, certainly back to the sperm and eggs, but they haven't, meaning untold potential lives are being lost on their watch. And yet they don't care.

As for moving from potential life to actual life, we've argued there is no point where something suddenly becomes alive, there is no transition from non-life to life, which is what the statement "potential life to actual life" seems to suggest. Following the meeting and fusing of two living gametes the transition that does occur is a slow move from a single living cell, to two cells, to four and eventually up to trillions of cells that form a unique human life that can survive independently of its host. We say host in the sense that the growing embryo can be likened to a parasite and the woman it is attached to the host. Throughout the pregnancy there is an ongoing battle with the parasite demanding ever more resources from its host, and the host desperately trying to limit those demands and ensure its own survival. A pregnancy is not peaceful co-habitation with the conditions of who gets what and when amicably negotiated and agreed upon when the sperm first bumped into the egg. This was an invasion by a foreign body and the woman's body is fighting to stay alive, and in the past the parasite did often end up killing its host, as parasites are wont to do. As far as the pregnancy goes, the relationship between the parasite and host is not one where both benefit equally from the relationship. The embryo benefits by siphoning the body's resources to fuel its growth, the woman more often than not merely suffers to varying degrees. The benefit to the woman comes after the birth, assuming she survives her body's eventual rejection of the parasite, and assuming she actually wanted a child to raise in the first place.

With no convenient dividing line between non-life/potential life and actual life, one way of making a division is to look at when the multiplying cells move from being a life-sucking parasite to an entity that can survive on its own, independent from its host. While some mothers say this doesn't happen until the child is in their late teens to early twenties, scientifically speaking this normally happens at birth when the ties are cut and the baby has to stand on it's own two feet, or more accurately, breathe using its own lungs. However experience has shown that some babies that are born prematurely can survive outside the womb, and with the aid of modern technology, some very premature babies that would most certainly have died even ten years ago can now be kept alive. For a little while anyway. This stage in a pregnancy is know as 'fetal viability' and even with the best medical advancements doesn't currently become possible until at least 22 weeks, recalling that a full-term pregnancy lasts 39 or 40 weeks, so over half way through the pregnancy. The minimum point of viability is more typically considered to be around 24 to 28 weeks, since despite some fetuses surviving at 22 weeks, most born at that stage will soon die, and of the handful that survive, most will have severe disabilities. And that goes for all these extremely premature births, even at 28 weeks. While medically speaking a few percent of these extremely premature births can go on to lead normal lives and would be considered a worthwhile intervention, from the woman's perspective she must take a huge risk to her health to give birth to a premature fetus that is highly unlikely to survive, and if it does, is highly likely to be severely disabled.

What this means is that we (well, certainly not the pro-lifers) now usually consider the transition to a human life as occurring sometime after this point of fetal viability, when a fetus could theoretically survive outside the womb (but usually only thanks to an army of highly skilled doctors utilising very expensive equipment (the machines that go 'ping'), something many expectant mothers never have access to, especially in the USA where hospitals demand that you have medical insurance before they'll even admit you). In our opinion talking of fetal viability at say 6 months of a 9 month pregnancy is a little like saying we can land a man on the moon, meaning we know it's possible and it has been done, but for most of us it's quite unrealistic. I'll never go into space, and neither will anyone I know, and most premature fetuses will not survive, and the few that do will fail to flourish. That said, at fetal viability the parasite soon to be named Chad or Brianna might technically survive in the wild, so that is the stage of a pregnancy that doctors and pregnant women can realistically focus on if an abortion is being considered, and a line needs to be drawn.

In NZ what this means is that women can legally request and obtain an abortion (for free) up to and including 20 weeks into a pregnancy. After this period abortion is still possible but only permitted if a doctor considers it 'clinically appropriate', for example, if continuing the pregnancy puts the woman's life at risk. As we understand it an abortion is technically permissible right up to the end of the pregnancy if this meant saving the woman's life. The overturning of Roe v. Wade in the USA will no doubt see many changes in abortion laws, 13 states immediately banned abortion and it will soon be illegal in 26 US states, and even liberal states that promise to continue abortions may see new restrictions forced on them. Prior to this we believe they banned abortion after the start of the 37th week (of a 39 to 40 week pregnancy), and they used fetal viability as a focus point and generally allowed abortion on request up to 20 weeks, sometimes 24 weeks. However individual states could always add their own regulations to abortion law meaning access to services could be easy or difficult. New York and California were very liberal (and intend to remain so) whereas in Texas even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, 'abortion access is really among the most restrictive in the world'. Also it's not free in any US state and is only available in a limited number of abortion clinics in each state (and now of course there are only clinics in less than half of US states). In NZ abortions are performed in public hospitals, not standalone clinics. This means that US law makes it very easy for rabid anti-abortionists to identify, harass and intimidate women visiting an abortion clinic, whereas women visiting a hospital in NZ could be there for any health reason, or just visiting a patient.

So in relation to this technical point of fetal viability at around 24 to 28 weeks, when are abortions generally performed? According to the American CDC 91.1% of US abortions in 2015 'were performed at or before 13 weeks and 7.6 percent at 14 to 20 weeks', meaning a minute number, only 1.3%, were carried out at 21 weeks or greater. This shows that almost all abortions are performed well before the fetus gets anywhere near being viable. That low figure for these so-called 'late-term' abortions, just 1.3%, has remained stable over the past two decades.

We've argued that neither life nor potential life begins at conception, both existed before and both can be traced back not just to your parents, and their sperm and eggs, but back more than 3 billion years, whereas the pro-lifers argue that a magical or supernatural transition from non-life to life happens at conception. But arguing over this or whether what God does at conception creates a real life straight away or merely a potential life is irrelevant to the pro-life group, since at the very minimum it is a potential life, and destroying even a single potential life is still considered murder in their eyes. This means that for pro-lifers to be logical and consistent to their larger argument — that all life is sacred — they must battle to protect all potential life. They need a starting point for this potential life, and like God they can snoop and spy and determine when people have sex, so that's where they've decided to draw their arbitrary line in the sand. We agree that it's helpful if a line can be drawn, but because they're basing their guesswork on primitive, superstitious ignorance, they're drawing it in the wrong place. So let's look at this claim that sex, or more accurately, conception, something unseen that happens a little time after sex, is what creates potential life.

Abortion destroys potential life

OK, we've now moved from asking when actual life began and back to this fuzzy notion of when a potential life begins. We've argued that potential life already exists in each sperm and in each egg, whereas the pro-life view is that potential life only surfaces at conception. They can imagine that a zygote can lead to a real life — even in a woman who is a stranger to them — and thus they insist on taking control and demand that the woman allow the natural processes of human reproduction play out without interference. Even though interfering is exactly what they're doing. Strangely they can't imagine a sperm or an egg ever leading to a real life, they can't see any potential there until they see the two gametes fused into a single cell, and then they exclaim, Oh wow, new life, who would have guessed that was possible by joining those two little things?

To deny this obvious connection, pro-lifers might then argue that there is a crucial difference between gametes and a zygote, that isolated sperm and eggs that remain in their own bodies will never mature into a new life, whereas a zygote, a fertilised egg, will naturally and without help mature into a small human. This is true (if we ignore those pesky spontaneous abortions). They'll argue that aborting a zygote is destroying a potential life but the loss of sperm and eggs is not, since gametes are still one step away from forming potential life. But even if that were true, let's remember that there are still untold steps that must happen correctly and in the right sequence before that zygote can turn into an actual life, a healthy, living, breathing new born. And more often than not, one of those steps will fail and the potential for a new life vanishes. Why do Christians and the pro-life crowd get to decide on which step a potential life begins, and that before that arbitrary step there is no potential? And why can the hypocrites then change where that specific step is based on what's currently happening in their life? Think of how Christian parents condemning abortion insist that potential life only begins at conception, but then they back up several steps when they refuse to let their teenage daughter take her amorous boyfriend up to her bedroom to study. Why? Because they're afraid it will lead to kissing, then petting, then sex, then an unwanted pregnancy. Sitting in the lounge they are several steps away from conception happening and yet already the threat of potential life is dictating the parent's behaviour. Not that we'd disagree, putting two horny teenagers together creates huge potential for new life happening, as history clearly attests to. But this means the necessary conditions for potential life to arise exist before conception, they're sitting on the sofa holding hands, and by their actions in trying to suppress that potential, Christian parents agree.

We'd argue that the very fact that males have sperm and females have eggs and both have the innate desire to have sex means that the process of making a new human life began long, long before that sperm, out for an evening swim, bumped into that egg. Think about this fact, you don't have to tell sperm what their purpose is, or even tell men how to send sperm out on missions. Even without sex ed classes or the Internet we are somehow wired to figure it out by ourselves, with a little experimentation that our body actively encourages once we reach puberty. Males and females naturally seek out others to have sex with, driven by innate, unconscious urges to combine their unseen gametes. It has been suggested that the sole purpose of men and women's existence is to produce new life, to reproduce the species, that human bodies are merely machines and factories that toil in order to multiply human genes. The means to produce new life and the potential for creation is ingrained in the behaviour of every man and woman. That fertilised egg is only one link in a long, unbroken chain of not just life, but of potentiality. To fulfil its potential a zygote first requires a uterus (womb), that uterus requires a body and that body requires a nurturing environment. Equally in the male world sperm need to be stored in testicles which require a body which requires an environment in which to flourish. Plus the male body needs a sperm delivery system and the female body needs a corresponding receptor, which the prudish morons believe is called a vajayjay, hoo-ha or cha-cha. And of course there must be the burning desire to put these bits to the use they were created for. From the physiological to the psychological, all this must be in place and purposefully working towards an end goal which is reproduction. We can say that with the appearance of this male and woman and their messy inner workings there is now the potential to create a new life. There hasn't been any sex but already there is potential. Just putting the man and woman in the same room (preferably bedroom) creates the potential for a new life. However forcing them into single beds or making the man wear a condom destroys that potential for new life.

So clearly it's not just abortion that destroys potential life, any act that prevents men and women from having unprotected sex is putting a huge hurdle in the way of potential life. In other words, Christians condemning premarital sex destroys potential life. The stupid and unnatural celibacy of priests and nuns destroys potential life. Untold potential lives are destroyed long before an abortion is performed, and Christians care not a jot. Well, that's not quite true. Because it inhibits the creation of potential lives many Christians and pro-lifers also oppose contraception, homosexuality and masturbation. But this raises a problem for them. None of those acts ever destroys a zygote, which is where pro-lifers insist a potential life starts, but now the hypocrites want to go back a step and insist that anything that stops sperm and eggs commingling is also destroying potential life. One minute they're claiming that it's just interference with the zygote that destroys potential life, that before fertilisation occurs we're free to act as we choose since potential life doesn't yet exist, but then they contradict themselves when they claim that even interference with gametes through contraception, homosexuality and masturbation destroys potential life, so no, we're no longer free to act as we choose regarding sex. Their insistence that interfering with gametes 'destroys potential life', in addition to abortion, only makes sense if they're now arguing that potential life arises before conception. And this is the argument we're making, that their claim that potential life starts with conception is false, and their inclusion of gametes has shown it to be false. Their need to keep sperm and eggs apart, to keep their teenage daughter away from her boyfriend, has shown it to be false, as does their contradictory desire to ban contraception, to prevent anything that stops sperm and eggs getting together (except perhaps where their daughter is concerned). But our argument goes much further back than just the gametes, that potential life exists just one step prior to the zygote, it actually extends back millions and billions of years. When two small, shrew-like mammals considered mating under the feet of the dinosaurs there was the potential that their actions would create a life that would in turn have the potential to create another life which would eventually lead to me being born millions of years later. That potential was always there, and a dinosaur eating one of those little mammals before they got to have unprotected sex would have destroyed untold potential lives, but since I'm here clearly that didn't happen. What that means is that with every meal a dinosaur had it destroyed potential lives, the same with saber-toothed cats and cave bears. The same with soldiers in the Roman legions or the armies of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. Every life lost in battle destroyed not just an actual life but untold potential lives that would now never be born. The number of lives that have been born are nothing compared to the potential lives that have been lost throughout the history of the world.

Clearly this is getting ridiculous if we're going to start fixating on all the potential lives that have been lost and will be lost, at the expense of actual lives, lives that aren't merely potential but that really do exist here and now. And yet this is exactly what anti-abortionists do, they intimidate women entering abortion clinics in the hope that one or more will forgo their abortion, while at the same time their country sends thousands of young men and women off to fight and potentially die in foreign wars. They care infinitely more about a single potential life, a single pretend life that may never eventuate, a single fantasy life that is often not wanted, than they do about thousands of real lives. Surely it is more important to stop real lives from actually ending or suffering than forcing unwanted babies into the world, onto women that are often emotionally or financially ill-equipped to raise them? We saw a US case recently where a 13 year-old girl was prevented from having an abortion by the legal wrangling of pro-life lawyers and is now forced to try and raise the baby alone. Where is the father you may ask, well she got pregnant when she was gang raped by three men, and while DNA testing can no doubt identify which of the three is the actual father, what young mother would want one of her rapists to help raise her child? Even the fact that her child's father was her rapist is something that will be very troubling to her. But that's anti-abortionists for you, they're more enamoured with the unborn than the living. In fact, beyond telling them what to do, the anti-abortionists have little time for the living and the new lives they create. You almost never see anti-abortionists offering to adopt the newborns, or even helping with the cost of their upbringing. Once an abortion has been averted and a baby is on the way to being born they quickly lose interest, immediately focusing back on how many more lives they can force on unwilling mothers and an overcrowded world. They don't care about their own soldiers dying or the deaths of foreign citizens caught up in the fighting or the homeless or the poor unable to afford basic healthcare, live people can fend for themselves in their view, it's the potential lives, the unborn, that need their help. As author Helen Lewis asks, 'If life begins at conception, why does their interest in protecting it end at birth?' [12] I heard a woman ask of the pro-life protesters at abortion clinics, 'Why aren't they adopting all the kids out of the orphanages?', and the apparent answer was later given when Jocelyn Elders M.D., US Surgeon General, said that it seems they only love children 'as long as they're in somebody else's uterus'.

Pro-lifers fixate on potential life, but the messy reality is that they can't point to any one specific process in human reproduction and realistically identify that as the point where a potential life really begins. They do point at conception, but that is quite arbitrary, there is no good reasoning behind it apart from convenience and blind obedience to ancient Church dogma. As if to expose their error around conception, they then point at contraception, homosexuality and masturbation as interfering with the creation of potential lives. The reality is that all the many untold varied steps (stretching back into the mists of time) that lead up to an actual life create the potential that a baby might be born sometime in the future. But until (and if) that birth actually happens, they only ever hint at potential life, they never guarantee it. Pro-lifers are merely looking at one single step or link in the process of human reproduction — the maturing zygote — and insisting that it's 'hands off' on this step, that this step can't be interfered with because it is now imbued with 'potential life' whereas other earlier steps aren't. Clearly that is nonsense. That's like saying when my parents first met there was no potential that they might create me, when clearly that potential life was always there, and if you're curious, it actually came to pass.

OK, so here's a strange little tidbit that the pro-life group uses to their advantage, even though (if you think about it) it screws up their main claim. They argue that a potential life begins right at conception, not 80 days later or even a few hours earlier when an amorous couple booked into a seedy motel under the name of Smith. However, rather confusingly, they also agree, no doubt unwittingly, that potential life actually begins before conception when they refer to how many weeks along a woman's pregnancy is. As you may be aware, the medical and legal professionals consider the average length of pregnancy to be 40 weeks. What you may not be aware of is that, even though a pregnancy is counted at 40 weeks, the unborn baby only spends around 38 weeks in the uterus, because 'pregnancy is counted from the first day of the woman's last period, not the date of conception which generally occurs two weeks later'. We both only learnt this a couple of weeks ago on watching a documentary on the abortion war in America. What this means is that the medical and legal 'experts' are insisting that women become pregnant, that they created 'potential' life, two weeks before conception happened. Think about that, this means they somehow created a potential life two weeks before they even had sex!! That's right, pregnancy happens before sex. Hmm ... so maybe we've got it wrong, maybe sex doesn't cause babies, maybe it's those toilet seats after all ... or storks really are involved? OK, as stupid as this sounds this is how they've decided to count the length of a pregnancy (for reasons that may or may not make sense), but since the pro-lifers go along with this timing then they must also be agreeing that the potential life they've got their knickers in a twist over did indeed exist medically and legally before conception occurred. They can't logically argue that life began at conception and at the same time agree that the woman became pregnant two weeks earlier. Yet they do. This simply shows that they don't really think about what they're claiming, they'd say black was white if they thought it would help their cause. What this means for a pregnant woman seeking an abortion is that if a law says she can legally seek an abortion 'no questions asked' in the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy, the reality is that she will never seek an abortion in the first 2 weeks since she isn't actually pregnant during that period, meaning she really now only has 18 weeks available to her. And of course it's more like four or five 'pregnant' weeks or two or three real weeks before a woman might even suspect she is pregnant. So now the 20 week window is likely down to 15 weeks before the alarm bells might even ring, before she can even start to think about arranging an abortion, and the pro-lifers (especially in the USA) actively put roadblock after roadblock in her way to make her waste the weeks she has remaining. Now many Americans will have to add travelling to another state to find a clinic, and all the time and expense that will entail, further reducing the few weeks they might have available, and for many that ability to travel will simply be out of the question.

But technicalities aside, let's repeat our argument that potential life begins before conception, that sperm and eggs possess potential life just as much as Romeo and Juliet did, even though that potential wasn't realised, meaning that for pro-lifers to be consistent they must battle to protect all potential life. But they don't, not even close.

Let's give another example as we want to impress on you why this talk of potential life, that potential can't be interfered with, is a nonsense that could never be realised, and one that they don't even take seriously.

Imagine a woman's pregnancy test has just revealed she is pregnant, does the potential now exist that she may (assuming an abortion or miscarriage doesn't happen) give birth later that year? Pro-life groups reply with an emphatic Yes! So let's go back a day in this woman's life to when she realises her period is late and wonders why, at this point does the potential exist that she may give birth later that year? Obviously it does because a pregnancy is what a missed period often means, and we're also aware of the positive pregnancy test she will later take. So let's go back further still in this woman's life to where she is having frequent sex with her husband, does the same potential exist? If she is not using contraception she knows that her actions are most certainly creating the (quite high) potential that she may give birth later that year, and if she is using contraception she still knows that no method is absolutely 100% effective so her behaviour has still created the potential (albeit low) that she may give birth later that year. Let's go back further still in this woman's life to where she is saying her wedding vows, does the potential exist even back then that she may later give birth? Clearly it does since this coupling set in motion the behaviour — frequent sex — that later resulted in the positive pregnancy test. Let's go back one final step in this woman's life to where she's at college, single, on the pill and occasionally having casual sex. Again, it's obvious that the potential for the creation of a baby exists at this point in her life. It's the very recognition of this potential and the fear of it that prompts people to use contraception, and for parents to counsel their teenage children not to have casual sex at all. All these episodes from the woman's life describe different sets of circumstances that nevertheless are all imbued with real potential, the potential that a birth might happen. That potential exists long before a pregnancy happens, and yet the pro-life mob focus, at the exclusion of all else, only on the potential that exists after conception.

Logically it doesn't make sense to focus on just one example of potential life and ignore all the rest. If it's vitally important to protect potential life, then surely all potential life needs protecting, otherwise you're being selective and irrational, like a racist who argues that human life is sacred but carries a sign that says: 'White Lives Matter'. But the pro-life group won't extend their protection to all potential life, so clearly their cry of wanting to protect potential life is a sham, it's just an emotive phrase they fling about to mislead people. They must either fight to protect all potential life, meaning a ban on contraception (something many would support) but also a ban on preventing teenage casual sex along with a ban on the celibacy of priests and nuns, or admit that they're just being picky and going after the easy target, pregnant women who can't easily run away.

And of course they're being picky because protecting all potential life is clearly impossible, and unwanted, even by Christians. If it was even attempted the intrusion into our lives would be extreme and contentious, just imagine the actions of the Muslim Taliban in Afghanistan on steroids. The pro-life claim that abortion destroys potential life is one of their key arguments, but their refusal to actually protect all potential life shows it is just a smokescreen, and we can dismiss it.

Just as modern Western society doesn't make demands on people that are having sex, married or single, insisting that they do nothing that might prevent or hinder a live birth, we likewise shouldn't make demands when an unwanted pregnancy happens. If someone wants to protect some narrow version of potential life, that should be an individual choice, a choice that applies only to their personal potential, not that of others. Are people free to criticise and condemn behaviour they disapprove of, like abortion, contraception, masturbation, homosexuality and casual sex? Certainly they are free to criticise others, but they are not free to control others through repressive laws. Free speech is allowed, blanket prohibition to enforce their backward attitudes is not.

Abortion and masturbation

Which causes more harm, masturbation or abortion? I mean seriously, if you think masturbation causes any harm at all then you're clearly doing it wrong, but good Christians believe both acts cause serious harm and anger their god.

Let's repeat Justice Alito's claim that 'abortion destroys potential life'. As we've already argued, obviously human gametes, male sperm and female eggs, are perfect examples of 'potential life', in that they both have the potential to become a human life, in fact that's their sole purpose in life, and that's the main reason why Christians and the Church condemn masturbation, although to be honest only male masturbation. The writers of the Bible didn't give a fuck about females, or whether they might masturbate, because (1) they didn't know that the females contributed an egg which is by far the major part of the embryo, in fact the egg is about 10,000 times larger than sperm cells. (I guess Adam and Eve knew this as they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, but that clearly pissed God off and he subsequently hid a mountain of valuable scientific information from their descendants, and actually filled the Bible with disinformation.) In ancient times most people thought sperm alone grew into babies (or more accurately, semen, as they couldn't see the microscopic sperm) and the woman was merely the vessel in which the fetus grew. But even if they had known, clearly female masturbation doesn't result in the loss of eggs like the male loss of sperm. That said, obviously menstruation does result in unfertilised eggs being flushed away every month of a fertile woman's life (which again they didn't know about — they obviously knew about a woman's period, a time during which she was terribly 'unclean' and had to be isolated and shunned, but they had no idea about the lost eggs), which if God is running the show, has God wantonly destroying untold potential lives worldwide every day for the last 200,000 or so years. And for the record, a female fetus has about 6 to 7 million oocytes (immature eggs), but most are destroyed during gestation and women are born with some one million oocytes and by puberty only about 300,000 remain, the rest are lost. Yet of these remaining 300,000 eggs women never have more than a dozen or so fertilised, often only two or three, maybe none, so for every woman several million potential lives are lost throughout her lifetime, and yet not a single Christian is worried about this loss. They aren't concerned that women aren't living up to their potential by continually trying to get pregnant to give meaning to more of these potential lives they carry within them. And (2), the writers of the Bible didn't care about female masturbation because they didn't care much about women in general, women weren't seen as equals to men and deserving of their own commandments, women were the property of men, like goats, land and a favourite knife, and it was the man's job to worry about what they got up to, not God's.

But Christians and the Church certainly condemn male masturbation, although again for the record, the Bible makes no mention of masturbation whatsoever. There is just so much that ignorant Christians believe is in the Bible, probably 'somewhere in the back' as Homer Simpson once said, that isn't there at all. Attempting to illustrate God's condemnation of solo sex, many will mention the story of Onan in Genesis 38:7-10. Prudish Christians have even given masturbation the name of Onanism. The idiots came to believe that not only was it a serious sin, it can actually cause the likes of paralysis, insanity, epilepsy, uterine cancer, organ failure, vision loss and suicide, and those are just some of our favourites from a much longer list of afflictions [1]. At times it really astounds us that modern medicine and science has made the advances it has considering that so many "experts" in the past were so easily led astray by religious bullshit. One of the untold pamphlets published over the years (this one by a London doctor in 1712) was called, 'Onania: or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences (in Both Sexes) Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have already Injured Themselves by this Abominable Practice'. As for the Bible story that started it all, it comes with a warning: Graphic sex may offend some people. (It also contains violence but Christians are never fazed by that.) But being a story about God's exploits it's still quite suitable for children. Onan's brother Er was killed by God before he could get his wife pregnant, so by Jewish law Onan was compelled to have sex with her, or in Biblical terms, he was told to 'Go in unto thy brother's wife', in order to get her pregnant and so carry on his brother's family name. Onan didn't want the child he might create to inherit the property that he wanted so, not being a complete idiot, he happily screwed his sister-in-law but just as he felt himself about to come he withdrew from her vagina and ejaculated on the ground, knowing that this way no pregnancy would result. (Even though historically this has probably been the most popular form of contraception, it is by no means foolproof so we wouldn't recommend using it.) Of course, being the voyeuristic pervert that he is, God was watching all this and was horribly pissed that Onan would get his rocks off but avoid getting his sister-in-law pregnant as per the law. So God, being the typical angry asshole that he is, killed Onan on the spot without even thinking of giving him a warning and a second chance. Christians widely misinterpret Onan's crime as one of masturbation whereas clearly Onan was having actual sex, not wanking alone behind a sand dune to an ancient scroll showing Hebrew women in lingerie. And remember that Hebrew men were having sex with goats and sheep, hence the necessity of a law prohibiting such behaviour, do you really think they weren't masturbating as well? So God killing Onan had nothing to do with masturbation or even sex, he was killed because of his refusal to fulfil his obligation to his sister-in-law. If Onan had forgone the sex completely and refused to even go near his sister-in-law God would have still killed him for his disobedience.

But Christian ignorance of their Bible aside, they insist that since male sperm can create life then any waste of that sperm is limiting potential lives, hindering God's plan for humans to multiply. To Christians male masturbation and the waste of sperm is one of the more serious and really nasty sins. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 'Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action'. To show how disgusting their thinking was, in the distant past they considered masturbation a worse sin than having sex with one's own mother. Why? Well at least sex with your mother could result in a baby, masturbation can't. For the same reason rape is not as serious as masturbation since you might, if you're lucky, get your victim pregnant. These are seriously sick, disturbed people. And to think they're allowed to vote!

But let's play the Christian 'What if ... ' game and agree that sperm wastage is a huge and serious problem, especially among teenagers. We know that every male ejaculation contains on average some 500 million sperm [3], and yet only one is required to fertilise an egg. The rest of those millions of potential lives are all wasted. And most times fertilisation doesn't result after sex even when couples are seeking to get pregnant, so not even one of those millions of potential lives are utilised. Multiple acts of sexual intercourse are often required to get pregnant. Unless you're a teenager who definitely doesn't want to get pregnant, then one quick screw behind the bike sheds will be enough for one of those millions of sperm to cross the finish line. One fertile male can easily produce enough sperm in a single week to repopulate our world of nearly 8 billion, and yet most males only use a half dozen sperm at most in their lifetime to produce new life. Every man "murders" hundreds of millions of potential lives every time he masturbates and every time he has sexual intercourse, since there really is no difference between masturbation and sex as far as sperm numbers go. Having just one or two sperm occasionally make it into an egg is hardly worth mentioning when compared to all those millions, billions and even trillions over a lifetime that do nothing, that are wasted, that don't fulfil their Godly potential. And that's just from one man. As noted, some 108 billion people have walked this planet, meaning some 55 billion will have been male (since in nature slightly more human males are born than females. Actually it will be higher still since historically some societies preferred males and committed infanticide, killing the female newborns. Some cultures still interfere in the sex ratio today. [2]) For most of history life expectancy was not as long as it now is so let's guess and say only 30 billion males made it to puberty and into sperm production and distribution. If each one of those 30 billion adult males each wasted a trillion or so sperm in their lifetime, that's ... well ... a lot of sperm ... a 3 followed by 22 zeros. It's a number that we can't really relate to, but it's clearly a ginormous number of potential lives destroyed. And before we put all the blame on men for this wanton destruction of life, remember that when men destroy hundreds of millions of sperm in one outing, women are often along for the ride as very willing accomplices.

This is monumentally bad design on God's part, even worse than women and their million wasted eggs. What the fuck was he thinking?

Let's say that over the last year alone each adult male has destroyed many tens of billions of potential lives, and intend to destroy many more, why are pro-lifers so fixated on only banning abortions when targeting a single adult male's ejaculations could save roughly 100,000 times that number of potential lives each year than an abortion ban would? Then multiply that one male by the millions of American males and surely the huge waste of male sperm is where the attention of pro-lifers should be focused. But it's not, so why not, do they not understand human biology? (Silly question.) Why do they care so much about the loss of potential lives from abortion when they or their husband or boyfriend is bringing about the loss of half a billion potential lives most days, with every single ejaculation? They personally, both men and women, are destroying more potential lives in just one sexual act than abortion could over hundreds of years.

Of course even if you could save all those discarded sperm and eggs, obviously you couldn't turn those potential lives into real lives since we don't have the resources to create much more life than we are currently doing, which just brings us back to what a huge fuck up it is by God to miss such a design flaw that creates such colossal waste. But clearly God is OK with the fact that almost all potential life never goes anywhere, since he hasn't sent out a bug fix. If God isn't worried in the slightest about the trillions of potential lives lost each day in the US through gross over-production of sperm, why should pro-lifers worry about the comparatively few potential lives lost each day in the US from abortion? That's trillions verses a relative handful. Get a grip on reality people! Banning abortion isn't going to make even a minute dent in God's potential lives that will forever fail to reach their potential.

And what about those gays?

Like contraception and male masturbation, homosexuality also limits the number of potential lives joining God's fan base. Homosexual encounters, male or female, obviously aren't going to result in a pregnancy. Males will be wasting untold sperm and women just wasting good child-bearing years. While many Christians do condemn homosexuality, most (thankfully) are very lazy and don't drag those abominations into the town square for a good stoning as their good book insists they do. But why don't they, or why don't they at least demand that homosexuals have heterosexual sex at least some of the time for the good of the world, putting their genitals to the use God designed them for? Why aren't they fixated on the potential lives lost when homosexuals ignore God's commandments, the same way they fixate on women with an unwanted pregnancy who ignore God's demands? Surely all potential lives are worth saving, and again, the potential loss due to homosexual sex must be magnitudes greater than that lost through abortion. Why aren't they looking at every loss of potential and focusing first on those that would return the greatest gains, since apparently God deplores any loss of opportunity? Unlike abortion which isn't mentioned, the Bible really does spell out (numerous times) God's abhorrence of homosexuality and how his followers should be removing it from the world, one stoning at a time, and yet they pretty much ignore it and instead focus on abortion, something that didn't seem to concern God in the slightest. What concerned him was sexual activity that didn't serve the purpose of getting women pregnant. Remember also his ban on men having sex with goats and sheep, an activity that also kept their sperm out of women's wombs?

The Church and society came to believe that a woman's role was to be 'barefoot and pregnant', meaning she should stay home and have as many children as possible. Any barrier to this goal needed to be removed. In fact in the Middle Ages and continuing right up to recent times one of the few ways (often the only way) that a wife could legally seek a divorce and enter into a new marriage was if the marriage was not consummated, meaning if the couple hadn't had sex. This may have been due to various reasons, like male impotence or male homosexuality (since many male homosexuals were compelled to marry to hide their illegal homosexuality). There's even the well-known story of John Ruskin, a British art critic in the Victorian era who married the beautiful 19 year-old Effie Gray, but on seeing her naked for the first time, refused to have sex with her. Apparently this was due to his shocking discovery that his wife had pubic hair. Effie later wrote to her father saying, 'the reason he did not make me his Wife [consummate our marriage] was because he was disgusted with my person [seeing me naked] the first evening'. Ruskin later confirmed this to his lawyer, saying that:

'He had imagined women to be different from what he saw she was. He believed there was something wrong with her body: it was not as lovely as her face; it was "not formed to excite passion;" it checked passion completely. Effie's body disgusted him'.

'According to Mary Lutyens, who has spent years studying the Ruskins' marriage, what disgusted John about Effie's body was probably her pubic hair. She reasons that John had never seen a naked woman in his life and that even the representations of the female nude he had seen in art were either censored or highly idealized, like classical statues. He expected therefore a smooth, hairless, small-breasted body, essentially a pre-adolescent body, and the signs of sexual maturity on Effie's body ... disconcerted and dismayed him. The fact that Ruskin in later life was attracted to very young girls, falling in love at the age of forty with a ten-year-old, supports the conjecture that his image of the ideal female body was immature'. [4]

'Men had sexual feelings about children — of course they did. Some, like Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin, mooned over little girls, and were prostrate with grief when their darlings entered puberty'. [5]

You've killed the next Mozart

Continuing with the 'abortion destroys potential life' argument, pro-lifers love to argue that every abortion means the loss of a life that could potentially have become the next Einstein, Mozart, Rembrandt or Gandhi, meaning that we are depriving the world of their genius and all the good they could have provided, and in doing so limiting our potential for improvement. But we've argued that every sperm, and every egg, that goes down the drain also had that same potential, and as the numbers show, the potential lost down the drain is bajillions (yes, it's a word), a number far, far greater than that lost to abortions. How many Mozarts have we lost through masturbation and menstruation? So again, why don't Christians and pro-lifers care? The answer is that word that describes their entire worldview — ignorance. They simply don't know how the world works, preferring instead to get a quick summary from a few Church sermons on Sunday, not realising that those sermons are based on a work of fiction. They should have realised because the stories are so silly and the lessons taught so immoral, but like gullible toddlers listening to 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', they just lapped it up.

Of course even if they did come to realise what a monumental loss of potential lives was occurring all around them on a daily basis, all those Mozarts lost, they would be powerless to stop it. Even if they made sex illegal (and trust me, they have considered it, just read the New Testament), thanks to God's design of the human body, human will power alone won't stop the body from automatically destroying potential lives. Every night during sleep adult males will experience several erections, and sometimes they, especially teenagers, will ejaculate while sound asleep, an unconscious act called nocturnal emissions or wet dreams (And yes, women can have wet dreams too). There is no conscious intention on the part of the male, but still potential lives are destroyed, so how can you stop something that's uncontrollable? Trust me, Christians have tried to control wet dreams with some quite frightening devices that they forced teenage males to wear, which today would be outlawed as torture, although maybe not by the pro-lifers. 'The US Patent and Trademark Office has records of dozens of anti-masturbation devices from the mid-1800s to early 1900s' [1]. It's likely that not many were built or sold, but even if they had been widely used, the body that God designed has a way around it. The male body is continually producing new sperm, like an average of 1,000 sperm per second [3], and they have a relatively short shelf life it seems, something like 74 days [3]. Of course with new sperm always flowing in, if you don't want the male testicles to expand and explode then existing sperm must be sent out into the world. If for some reason, say diabolical Christian anti-masturbation devices or medical injury, erections and ejaculations aren't possible, then after their use-by-date passes the sperm will simply die and they'll be reabsorbed back into body tissue [3]. So no messy explosion. But the fact remains that those millions and billions of sperm that are reabsorbed never get to fulfil their potential, they are destroyed just as effectively as an ejaculation into a condom. And if God is real, then God deliberately designed the male body to reabsorb excess sperm and to stain the bed sheets with frequent wet dreams, so clearly God himself has no problem whatsoever with the destruction of potential lives. Likewise with women, if they're not shunning contraception and forcing themselves on their male partners or, if they're single, continually roaming the streets trying to get pregnant, then each month their body will automatically discard another unused egg, and whether they have a few children or remain childless, their body then goes through menopause and a million plus eggs are lost, a million plus lives have been destroyed over every woman's lifetime, and that again is by design if God is real. So again, far, far, far more potential lives are destroyed naturally via his mechanisms in every single person's life than are destroyed by all the abortions carried out worldwide, so if God is not concerned in the slightest, why the hell should we be? Again this is just ignorant, superstitious fools trying to control a complex universe using childish knowledge thought up by ancient goat headers.

Of course they ignore it, but there is another important angle to the claim that every aborted fetus could potentially have become the next Einstein, Mozart, Rembrandt or Gandhi, that we are denying the world the great advances they could potentially have brought about. That's the fact that it's equally valid to argue that every aborted fetus could potentially have become the next Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Mother Teresa, Kim Jong-un or Donald Trump, and thus we are potentially saving the world from unspeakable horrors. An abortion may snuff out a potential Mozart, but since it is just as likely to prevent a potential Hitler means that we're willing to play those odds, since we believe that preventing the monumental harm that another Hitler could cause far, far out weighs the good the world would receive by getting another piano concerto. The reality is that we have no way of knowing whether a new life might do good or evil, or just waste their life away fixated on social media, so there is no reason to choose one option over the other, one cancels out the other, so as an argument against abortion it fails utterly.

Abortion, free will and your God-given purpose

Let's now consider free will as it applies to abortion. Free will is the ability to make choices, like turning either left or right, choosing either chocolate or vanilla ice cream or doing good or evil, and Christians insist that God gave us this gift. They love to remind us that God has the right to torture us in Hell for all eternity because we chose to sin when we could have done otherwise. Don't blame God, it was your choice to ... well, you know what you did. They insist that God isn't going to force his creations to behave in a particular way by removing choice, by removing our free will, because then we would be nothing but mindless puppets merely acting out our designated part in God's play. But then, confusingly, they tell us that we all have a God-given purpose in life, that we were all deliberately created to play crucial roles in the divine drama that is unfolding to a specific (but secret) plan. Christians worry constantly over what the exact meaning of life is, specifically their life, since they are convinced that God has created us all for a purpose and fulfilling that purpose is what will give their life meaning.

This Christian view of everyone having been given a purpose in life has always bothered me. Like how can we condemn Hitler for his actions if we are to believe that God created him specifically to be the villain, that was his purpose in life. God's plan apparently called for a world war in 1939 so he needed an actor to play the part of evil, and so some decades earlier God created Hitler specifically for that role. And think about it, if God wants a villain, he will of course create someone comfortable with committing evil, he wouldn't create a meek, kind person and expect him to be able to willingly commit atrocities. Look around the world, clearly there are people fulfilling certain roles in society that most of us wish didn't exist, like murderers, rapists, child abusers, psychopaths, drug dealers, Christian evangelists, evil dictators and social media influencers. Likewise some other people live their life in a manner which deeply offends those of an intolerant, bigoted nature, like homosexuals, sex workers, people of colour and atheists. If, as Christians insist, we have all been created with a God-given purpose in life, then the rapist, the homosexual, the artist and the bigot have no choice in how they behave in their life, God made them the way they are to fulfil his will. We don't condemn a tree for being a tree since it had no choice in the matter, and for the same reason Christians shouldn't condemn rapists or abuse someone for having black skin since they also had no choice. And it works both ways, meaning Christians also shouldn't praise anyone for being good rather than evil, since again they had no choice in the matter. Whether good, bad or indifferent, they are all merely playing the role God gave them in his epic drama that we naively call life.

If you're skeptical that a loving god could create evil to do his bidding, like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, in the Bible the mother of twins Jacob and Esau was told:

'Even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad — in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not by works [acts done by either child] but by his call [his plan] — she was told, "The elder shall serve the younger". As it is written, "I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau".'
(Romans 9:11–13)

More than a drama, our lives are a mystery drama since Christians tell that us God works in mysterious ways and they honestly have no idea why certain story lines unfold as they do, but they're sure God has good and just reasons for introducing all the surprising twists and turns into our lives. But think about that. What part does free will and individual choice play if each of us was created at a certain place and time with a specific purpose in mind, all to fulfil a specific role in God's drama (or is it actually a horror, remember we have been told that Hell turns up at the end for pretty much all of us?). This is like insisting that the actor that has been deliberately brought in to play James Bond or Darth Vader has complete freedom on what he says and does in the planned movie, that he can just make stuff up as he goes along. Clearly the actor is compelled to stick exactly to the script or the story the movie planned to tell will fail, and equally, if humans are allowed to just pop up randomly into God's drama and do as they please with no thought to the blockbuster scenes that God was hoping for, then God's planned drama would quickly go off the rails, plunge over a cliff and explode in a huge fireball at the bottom. It may still be fun to watch, but it certainly wouldn't bear any resemblance to the movie God was planning to make. So if humans have free will then from day one God's plan goes out the window, he has lost control, every day trillions and trillions of choices that humans freely make cause life on Earth to deviate ever further from God's naïve draft plan.

No doubt you're confused. How can free will and God's unerring plan with its fiery conclusion in Hell both exist in the same world? For life to play out to match God's plan he can't allow our unexpected free choices to derail it, so there can be no free will, and yet if free will is real then God's plan was derailed long ago. This embarrassing paradox is just another of the untold contradictions that arise when one takes Christianity claims seriously. Read the Bible and then expose it to a little logic and science and it all breaks down rather quickly, revealing itself to be a confused mess of superstitious nonsense. But for the sake of argument, let's look at the Bible and free will as Christians do. In the Bible God makes known what we should and shouldn't do to stay on his good side. For example, he says we shouldn't steal or kill people (unless he tells us to), we shouldn't get tattoos, eat shellfish or wear clothes made of two different fabrics, and we should stone psychics, homosexuals and atheists to death (that's where the commandment to not kill seriously breaks down). But unlike the real world police, God will never come knocking on our door if we choose not follow his commandments. In his younger days he sometimes did, but he hasn't bothered to make house calls for thousands of years. God has told us how he would like us to behave, and what the rewards and punishment will be depending on our behaviour, but at the same time he has given us free will so the choice is ultimately ours, and ours alone. We are told that we will have to later answer for those choices, but not now, for now we get to live with our choices. Our lives are free to do with as we choose, God has ensured that by giving us free will. That's how Christians explain it, and for Christians it's a very convenient way to explain why people can do evils things and God does nothing, since part of allowing us to make our own choices is allowing us to make the wrong choices. Eventually God will judge people on the choices they make, but later ... much, much later.

But then we come to abortion and Christians suddenly want to have it both ways, insisting that we're all perfectly free to make our own life decisions, for good or bad, except when it comes to abortion (oh ... and contraception, euthanasia, masturbation, stem cell research, homosexuality, atheism and a raft of other topics. Fuck, we can't even read the 'Harry Potter' books). Now they want to tell us what our decision regarding abortion must be. Not should be, MUST BE! And they'll actively hound, stalk, harass and intimidate those seeking abortions to ensure they get the message. If they are deciding for us, as a proxy for God, where has our autonomy as a free agent gone? As God's creation, do we have free will and the ability to make our own decisions in life (for good or bad) or has God already made our choices for us and has simply asked these annoying Christians to inform us of the result and how we must now behave? Are we nothing but actors, doing exactly as God the director demands? Our response must be to tell them to shut the fuck up. Don't try and tell us what we must do, let us make our own choices and let your God judge our choices down the track. You say that free will allows us to choose how we act, then give us that freedom, don't treat us like children and take that freedom from us. As women say, it's 'My Body, Not Yours', meaning 'My Body, My Rights' and it's 'My Body, My Choice'. As long as women are not harming others then what they do with their body is their choice, and no one else's. An abortion is simply a woman exercising her free will as God intended her to do, so who are you to take God's gift from her? If God has a problem with the choices being made, let him speak up. Otherwise, shut the fuck up, piss off and let women express their free will.

What all this means is that there is no argument that Christians can raise that can deny a woman an abortion. If we have free will, and Christians say we do, something deliberately given to us by God, then they must allow women the freedom to have an abortion if they so choose. End of story. Any argument or opposition on their part is denying women their God-given right to choose for themselves. Christians would in effect be arguing that their god made a huge mistake in giving women free will. However, if we were all created with a God-given purpose in life, with a specific part to play to ensure God's plan unfolds as envisaged, and Christians (without realising the fatal contradiction it causes) say this also is the case, then we have little choice but to play that role and fulfil that purpose. Meaning that if a woman seeks an abortion then clearly that is her purpose at that time in her life and in God's drama, it's a necessary part of God's script. Obviously God created her to have an abortion and it somehow fits in with God's larger story. It makes no sense for Christians to argue that women seeking abortions are rogue agents and their behaviour comes as a complete surprise to God. Again Christians would in effect be arguing that their god fucked up by not giving all women a purpose in life that didn't involve an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion.

Either way, whether we're exercising free will or are mere actors obeying God's screenplay, if a woman seeks an abortion then Christians, if they are sincere in their belief, must let her proceed confident in the knowledge that it is God's will. The reasoning behind God's will may be deeply mysterious, but it is still God's will, and surely they are not going to start questioning God's will, as if they know better than God and can see flaws in his plan, of which they admit they know nothing?

A final thought on this mysterious plan for life on Earth. The Christian view is that God controls life, creating each new life and deciding where it will go. He also, for an unknown reason, apparently needs a certain undisclosed number of babies to be born each year and also a number to fail, by this we mean God takes babies from women desperately seeking them (through miscarriages and infertility) and at the same time this bastard forces babies onto women that are equally desperate not to be pregnant. If God were a loving and just god (spoiler: he's not) then he could and would easily shuffle the babies around to ensure they went where they were wanted (without the women even being aware, since apparently he wants to hide his existence from us). God's baby quota would still be reached, the only difference being that ALL the women involved would be overjoyed, whereas as it currently works ALL the women in the group (those subject to miscarriages, infertility and unwanted pregnancy) are the opposite of overjoyed — sad, depressed, angry, stressed, maybe even suicidal. Since God isn't bringing about the best outcome for the women, then clearly this is God actually wanting to cause misfortune in the lives of the women involved, stopping one woman's desired pregnancy and forcing it onto another, and he's merely using the pregnancies as a blunt tool that will cause grief, being quite indifferent to the well-being of any child that might be born. It's the women God is going after, otherwise he would put babies where they were wanted, not where they are not. Remember miscarriages don't happen by chance and unwanted pregnancies don't happen by accident, it is all meticulously planned and willed by God. What an asshole. These ignorant Christians can't grasp that if their god was real then he'd be a monster, able to do good but choosing evil instead. Let's consider that a loving god should have prevented the situation ever arising of where a scared teenager seeks an abortion (Wouldn't you if you were God?), and being an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving god, the Christian god could certainly have arranged things this way had he so desired. But he's hasn't, that's all too obvious, however the reason has nothing to do with his mysterious plan for us all. The answer is uncomplicated and satisfying (to all but Christians) — there is no god and who gets pregnant and who doesn't is simply down to the unthinking quirks of nature. And it's rewarding to know that how we choose to react to what nature throws at us is up to us individually, that we choose our destiny, that our behaviour is not due to invisible strings being pulled by some invisible puppeteer. And of course one doesn't need to believe that for life to have any meaning a god must have stamped it with some purpose. As atheists our lives have plenty of meaning and purpose, made all the more valuable because we get to choose who we like and what we want to do, it's not forced onto us. What Christians call their divine purpose in life is akin to a barbaric and unjust dictator giving them orders, or like a harried slave saying he can't stop to talk or help as his master has given him numerous tasks to perform, and he dare not dawdle as his life is not his own. Give me the freedom of an atheist rather than the servitude of a Christian.

Life — God giveth and God taketh away

Without question the clear message we are to take from the oft-repeated claim that God created life and only he can take it away is that he is in charge of our lives, he owns us, we're his property, he and he alone decides when life will begin and when it will end. It is not up for debate or negotiation. If we thought we had some control, you know, like free will, and that our future is what we make it, well ... no. As we've said, this is why Christians vehemently oppose not just abortion but also euthanasia and suicide. As "evidence" for God's obsessive control over life, Christians often quote Deuteronomy 32:39 where God says, 'I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand', and also 1 Samuel 2:6, 'The Lord brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up'. (Although let's remind ourselves that quoting a character from a fictional book like the Bible, or 'Harry Potter' or 'Lord of the Rings', is not evidence in any real sense). But let's play their game and agree that 'in the Bible' God controls who lives, who dies and when. Christians are mere pawns, to be moved around and sacrificed as God sees fit.

But what happens time after time after time throughout history when it looks like God is about to take a loved one's life away? Everyone rushes to someone, usually a doctor, sometimes a priest (often both), to plead that they do everything they can, money is no obstacle, to ensue that this person doesn't die. They are effectively waging a battle with God. Doctors and surgeons and praying family members are desperately trying to see that a life continues while God is fighting to bring it to an end. Ignoring the confusing notion that simple human endeavours are somehow a match for God's divine power, why do these religious believers now believe that they have some power over when life might end, that the decision is now theirs and not God's? And the same exact thing happens at the other end of life, when people want to get pregnant and have a family or want a premature baby to survive, they again seek every assistance from modern medical science, from fertility treatments and genetic testing to C-sections and incubators, all to help bring about a healthy baby. Yet again they are unwilling to leave the matter of life in God's hand, they will take steps when they think the time is right to have a family, meaning that when God is trying to avoid creating a life through infertility or a miscarriage, they're battling him every step of the way, and as our medical knowledge improves, amazingly we are winning more of these battles against an all-powerful god than we used to. But these battles, hundreds of thousands of which occur every day around the world, are only happening because hypocrites quickly set aside their religious beliefs when the matter of who decides when life begins and ends actually involves them personally.

Likewise it's easy to be against abortion if it's not personal, if you're not pregnant, or are but actually want a child. So might belief in God's supposed opposition to abortion vanish if one suddenly finds themselves with an unwanted pregnancy? And just how rare is an unwanted pregnancy? We read that:

'Globally, the unintended pregnancy rate is trending downward but is still high overall — 44 percent of all pregnancies were unintended between 2010 and 2014. More than half of those pregnancies (56 percent) ended in abortion between 2010 and 2014, slightly more in developed regions (59 percent) than in developing regions (55 percent)'. [2]

'Contraception use among women of reproductive ages has increased greatly during the past decades, from only 10 percent using any method in 1960, to 55 percent using modern methods — sterilization, the pill, injectables, condoms, and so on — by 2000. More recent gains have been slower, however. In 2019 there were 1.9 billion women of reproductive age worldwide, among whom 1.1 billion had a need for family planning. More than 76 percent of them were using contraceptive methods, while the remainder had an unmet need for contraception'. [2]

'70 percent of U.S. states have requirements to stress abstinence as the only or preferred option for safer sex, and yet the United States has one of the highest teen birth rates and the highest STI rate of all industrialized countries'.

'abstinence is only safe sex until you start to have sex, and then it's not safe at all'. [41]

The excellent documentary 'Let's Talk About Sex' (2009) looks at how flawed American attitudes toward adolescent sexuality harms teenagers (and can be viewed on YouTube.) It also noted that 'A new study says abstinence-only education programs don't work', but regardless, 'Since 1996 the US government has spent over one and half billion on abstinence-only programs', and yet, it goes on to say, 'Today America has the highest teen birthrate in the industrialised world'. It contends that, 'The failure of the American attitude is that it pretends teens aren't having sex. In fact America teens and European teens become sexually active at about the same age, but the results are very different. To graphically demonstrate how a different attitude towards sex and sex education impacts teens in Europe and the USA, it provided the following three graphs:

Also in 'Sex(Ed): The Movie', author Debra Haffner revealed that:

'What we know in evaluation of abstinence-only education is young people who take them, [while] they wait to have penile-vaginal intercourse longer, they [also] have four times the rate of oral sex, and six times the rate of anal sex than kids who don't have that program'. [41]

Can Christian morality be trusted?

We watched a documentary recently called 'In God We Trust?' (2012) concerning the separation of church and state and small-town religious bigotry in the USA. It had nothing to do with abortion, but it did (quite worryingly) highlight how typical Americans see their unspoken duty to God. Discussing the incident of God ordering Abraham to kill his son, ten Americans were asked if they would kill ALL their friends and family if God told them to, and eight out of the ten said Yes! How fucked up is that? Let me clarify, they weren't asked if they would kill a dangerous terrorist or a rapist threatening their daughter or some enemy soldier in some far off land, they were asked to kill the very people they love, lots of them, and they said they would. This disturbing example shows that Christians have no idea what being moral or immoral actually means, they would commit the most heinous acts if God asks, and while some may feel terrible doing it, they would still do it. In the past that's how slaves or those under the boot of vicious dictators behaved, and clearly Christians also feel it's safer to kill for God than argue with him. To decent people that have thought about ethics, morality is about good conduct, about doing the right thing, whereas to Christians morality is blindly doing whatever your boss demands. That is how blinded people become when sucked in by religion, that they would commit atrocities if God demanded it, knowing them to be atrocities, and still believe themselves to be moral, where moral doesn't mean good conduct, it simply means being subservient to God, like a good dog that obediently and silently follows behind his master, and is willing to savage a child if his master commands it.

I should also note that not one of the would-be killers in that documentary said they would ask God why their family and friends needed to die, all that concerned each of them was that God first produce some form of ID, and once that was shown, then let the murder of the innocents commence. We've already argued in a previous post that God can never prove he is actually God, but this is just one more example of Christians not thinking all that deeply about their religion. And this is not just a What if ... ? question that could only ever be theoretical. Even in modern times we've had numerous examples worldwide of people committing murders because they believed God or Satan personally told them to. Clearly these potential killers don't need much convincing, they will believe the most ridiculous of tales. Remember when the "Virgin" Mary insisted that she hadn't been with a man, that the most likely explanation was that God had got her pregnant while she slept!? And the fucking gullible morons believed her! Who would believe such a wild claim today? Well, several billion people in fact still believe that claim, still believe such bullshit. It's one of the reasons Christianity is still holding the world, and especially the US, back.

Now let me ask this, while the question wasn't raised with those murderous Christians, how many do you suppose would have asserted that abortion was murder and wrong? We suspect most if not all would have. The same people that would kill their friends and family, for no reason other than that God asked them to, would likely condemn women having abortions and the doctors performing them. They would do what they could to prevent them, all the while screaming that no decent, moral person should be willing to take a life, even an unborn one, that there was no argument that could justify such an act. And yet, they have already admitted that if God said to kill someone, anyone, then they would, meaning they would surely perform abortions themselves if God asked. They cannot deny this, but how can an abortion go from being immoral to moral, from wrong to right, simply if God were suddenly asking that an abortion be performed? If an abortion is wrong simply because a life is being lost, then it must always be wrong, even if God is the one asking. But Christians would disagree, arguing that whatever God wants or does is right and moral, and whatever he hates or forbids is wrong and immoral. If God asked the above submissive and cowering Christians to start performing abortions, they would obediently do so, and abortion would flip to being a moral act in Christian eyes. That's why we can't trust Christians to teach us about what is right and wrong since they have no idea, they are just parroting whatever their boss says, or more accurately what some long dead goat herders claimed he said. Anyone that bases their morality solely on what an invisible, barbaric, unjust, hateful dictator says is not someone we should take any notice of. A moral code should be arrived at through reason, not dictation, and be amenable to change if and when required, not set in stone. Christians cannot argue that abortion is wrong, they can merely argue that their God is opposed to it (which is not the same thing), and that they're too fucking scared to argue with him. Behaviour that is enforced by fear cannot be called moral behaviour, it is simply blind submission to the whims of a powerful authority that one is deadly afraid of. Worse still, Christians are submitting to an authority that doesn't even exist, their badly flawed moral code was dreamt up by ignorant men imagining they were conversing with clouds, snakes and burning bushes.

We mentioned above that President Donald "Grab 'em by the Pussy" Trump lied when he stated that a law had been passed 'that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother's womb moments before birth'. He wanted Christians to be horrified by this image of a baby being brutally killed. And frankly, who wouldn't be? But even if it were true, which it isn't, how can Christians be so shocked and judgemental when in their Bible we read that, 'Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks' (Psalm 137:9). Granted this may have been a rare incident, and God may have been angry about something (isn't he always?), but is that ever an excuse to murder the innocent? How can they worship a god that says he'll bless them if innocent living infants are killed, and then they get horribly upset when a potential life is taken humanely in an abortion? Note we said humanely, no dashing against rocks or bookcases. While we're at it, it needs to be stressed that the legal abortions being performed are never anything like the graphic images and horror stories that are put out by the anti-abortion crowd. These deluded wankers have an agenda, to blindly serve their god, and God apparently wants, regardless of the human cost, more children to be born to unwilling women. And this group will say and do almost anything to bring that about. They've lied about the world being created by a sky fairy 6,000 years ago, about Eve conversing with a snake, about God drowning the dinosaurs and unicorns and all humanity except Noah and his family, about Jesus being born to a virgin, walking on water and rising from the dead, so of course they have no problem lying about abortion and how screaming souls are ripped out moments before birth and ... umm ... I guess locked in a type of Ecto-Containment System like you see in the 'Ghostbusters' movies. The other day I read in a book a comment from a guy in the Philippines, a devout Catholic who had got a job as a nurse, and one night he was asked to assist at the medical clinic's minisurgery. Quite unaware that this was an abortion, he stated that, 'at first I wasn't exactly sure what I was seeing', saying that, 'It's nothing like what pro-life groups or the Church claim. They say you see a small fetus. It's nothing scary, just blood and some tissue. It's a medical procedure'. But to get back to our initial point, Christians condemn doctors who perform humane abortions on embryos and fetuses — not babies — and at the same time joyously follow the commandments of a god who blesses those who dash live infants against rocks, which we're guessing is not all that humane. Or fair and just since they were clearly innocent of, well ... anything. Supporting the god that they do, do Christians really sound like they understand right from wrong?

Nowadays, challenged by atheists to justify their Bible, many Christians do continually lament over many disturbing aspects of their God's morality, like his xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and numerous genocides, his punishing of children for mistakes their parents made, his support of slavery and his torturing of the innocent in Hell, and yet they still come away insisting that these apparent atrocities are (somehow) moral and good, they must be, simply because God does them. Anyone that can defend God for committing these immoral acts is in no position to judge whether abortion is wrong, their moral compass is so fucked up it's worthless. If anything, based on what they praise God for doing (which is clearly documented in their Bible), they are far more likely to defend that which is immoral and condemn that which is good, and not only does history clearly support that view of Christians repeatedly picking the wrong side, many are still doing so. The Christian track record concerning morality is appalling, the missteps they have made is embarrassingly obvious and the harm they have caused is monumental, and yet they utterly refuse to alter or even condemn a single word in their holy book that spells out the "moral" code they're expected to follow. Today many accept that much of it seems — especially to us critical atheists — unjust, obscene and anything but moral, but they won't change a word of it. Instead their effort goes into defending it, trying to find excuses that might explain why their god expects such horrible behaviour from them, and why such horrible behaviour can paradoxically be good if God's name is attached.

Christians have not earned the right to lecture the rest of us on morality, on whether abortion is right or wrong, since it is clearly a topic they are woefully ignorant of. Worse still, their only source of advice comes from a book of fiction written in the Bronze Age by misogynists who saw angels and demons behind every act of nature and every bush. No sane, intelligent person should put any trust in people that think an invisible sky fairy and his zombie son are guiding their actions. Listening to a Christian's condemnation of abortion is like listening to a child's condemnation of Santa's treatment of his elves. Their indignation is based on a fantasy, whereas what society does should surely be based on reality.

Be fruitful and multiply ... but don't have sex

Do you recall that God's opening line to humans was 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth'? That's right, the very first conversation God had with the first man and woman was about sex, and while the Bible is coy on exactly how that talk went (like did he use those anatomically correct dolls?) obviously it was explicit enough that Adam and Eve had soon mastered the basics. And being naked and unashamed probably helped. Anyway, Eve soon found herself pregnant with Cain. And then Abel. And then Seth, and slowly God's plan of sexually active humans creating babies that turned into yet more sexually active humans creating babies was off and running (even though obviously Adam and Eve's children were having incestuous sex with each other, and maybe their parents as well, as they were the only people around to have sex with). It was a simple plan that was self perpetuating with an exponential output. As long as humans kept having sex God's plan was foolproof, soon the world would be his to command, and to ensure the human urge was always there God created one of his masterpieces of human engineering, the orgasm. In addition he designed humans to desire sex all year round, whereas most animals are limited to specific mating seasons each year. God's plan was that humans would continually want sex, have sex, get pregnant, carry pregnancy to term, birth babies, nurture and wean babies, and then back to wanting sex again. Those are the basic steps in human reproduction, each is crucial and must happen for humans to be fruitful and multiply. If even one step fails or is somehow suppressed, then there is no multiplying and no new humans to fill the earth.

Pro-lifers are fixated on the 'carry pregnancy to term' step. They argue that potential life begins at conception, and do so in order to place the entire pregnancy medically, ethically and legally off limits as far as abortion goes. A pregnancy means a new life, and that's the all-important end point for them, to bring real life into the world. That's unabashedly their goal, to convince or force those considering abortion to forgo it and bring another child into the world. And make God's day by doing so. Yay!

But if that's their goal, to ensure that all lives that might potentially be born are actually born, then why are they only focused on the continuation of a pregnancy, on just one step of many in the process of human reproduction? Why are they not also fixated on making conception happen as often as possible? Well, that's not quite true. As we've noted, many Christians also oppose contraception, homosexuality, masturbation and even oral sex (specifically fellatio) because they each inhibit the creation of new lives. Oral sex is not just opposed, it is actually still illegal in 18 US states. And for a masturbation example, in a 2018 TEDx Talk Keeley Olivia noted that, 'In the UK to buy a sex toy from a shop on the high street you have to be 18 years-old, but at 16 you can have consensual sex with other adults'. Think about what this means in the context of pregnancies. British lawmakers, largely old white Christian males, have decreed that if 16 and 17 year-old British women feel the need to satisfy their growing sexual urges, they should do so with a real penis, even though it carries real risks, such as unwanted pregnancies and STIs, and to direct this behaviour they have deliberately made it illegal for them to purchase a vibrator or dildo to masturbate with, a practice that carries no risks whatsoever. They are essentially saying that if young women are going to experiment with sex, then they should do it in such a way that the possibility exists that they might get pregnant, and give some man a thrill in the process. How fucking ridiculous is that, that young women can legally access a real penis but buying a plastic dildo is illegal, apparently because she will use it to masturbate with and it will never get her pregnant? How is this law anything but an example of men controlling how women have sex? Is it that a 16 year-old woman can't buy a sex toy because men already see her as a sex toy, one that men should have exclusive use of? Do men hate the thought that women might get more pleasure from a vibrator, and in doing so are excluding them from the sex act, and without sex these women are not doing their bit towards being fruitful and replenishing the earth? Surely the most obvious outcome from this sexist law will be unexpected pregnancies, which only creates the potential for more abortions, all caused by a religiously driven desire to prevent women (and men) from masturbating. It's said that masturbation is the ultimate form of safe sex, and as such should be widely encouraged, but to the religious, because it doesn't create babies, it is a great evil.

So in addition to abortion, Christians do target (usually with a limited degree of enthusiasm) other acts (like masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality etc) that limit live births and in doing so do their bit to increase pregnancies and the world's population. But at the same time they do something contradictory and stupid, they target other steps in the process of human reproduction in such a way as to try and prevent pregnancies from ever occurring in the first place. Look at the very crucial steps of (1) humans wanting sex, and (2) humans having sex. They actively discourage people from even wanting, let alone actually having sex, and so they limit the chance of people creating new life. They describe sex as dirty, disgusting and offensive, they teach people to be ashamed of the sexual aspect of their bodies, of sexual desire, of nudity. In the state of Virginia they made a law that said it is illegal to have sex with the lights on. Because, you know, sex is just so horrible and naked bodies just so goddamn ugly. In Florida, Massachusetts, Montana and Virginia the 'missionary position' is the only legal sex position. Clearly sex is not something to be enjoyed and experimented with, it should be a business-like routine where everyone knows their role and you get the deed over with as quickly as possible and get back to watching TV. In some states the ridiculous nature of these laws concerning sex and nudity beggars belief. In Texas it's illegal to buy or sell a vibrator, although a woman can own a vibrator that was purchased out-of-state, which seems to rather defeat the purpose of the law, but wait, it gets more ridiculous. She can own not one but several vibrators, but if she owns more than six she can be arrested on obscenity charges. WTF? Why is having six vibrators perfectly legal and acceptable (in a state that won't let women buy even one) and yet having seven sees the woman getting arrested? Is there a point where vibrators reach some sort of critical mass, up to six is safe but seven will cause a huge explosion, or is it a biological thing, a woman using seven or more at once will experience a fatal orgasm? Apparently Texas lawmakers were fearful that having too many vibrators, and somehow they decided seven is too many, will see these women trying to sell their surplus vibrators, which will introduce even more women to the obscene act of female masturbation and pleasure, which clearly cannot be encouraged or allowed. Texas legislators have ruled that vibrators, or dildos or anything that stimulates the genitals, are classed as obscene devices, and they believe that not only do women clearly have no 'need' for a vibrator, having one will surely cause women to commit obscene acts with that device. But then strangely they also decided that if she obtains one of these obscene devices from out-of-state then she should not only be able to keep it, but be allowed to keep a total of six such obscene devices. How does that make any sense? If women in Texas don't need even one vibrator, then why would they suddenly need six? If you've decreed that something is obscene and made the purchase of that something illegal in your state, why do you let women keep that obscene and illegal thing if they've sneaked it in over the border? This is as stupid as saying it's illegal to let young children buy alcohol, but if someone gives it to them for free then they can keep it and drink it. Surely if lawmakers have decided a vibrator is an obscene device then it's still obscene no matter how women obtained one? Clearly the mere financial act of purchasing a vibrator is not obscene, it's what's done with it later that Texas prudes consider obscene. But once women have somehow obtained one (or six), lawmakers allow them to keep it! Do lawmakers seriously think these vibrators are never going to be used to do the 'obscene acts' they are so afraid of, that they're just going to gather dust in a drawer, never coming out of their box? Joanne Webb, a woman in Texas who faced these obscenity charges, argued that, 'What I did was not obscene. What's obscene is that the government is taking action about what we do in our bedrooms'. The charges were eventually dropped in 2004, but not before Joanne Webb and her husband were forced to declare bankruptcy due to the cost of fighting the charges. Since the case never went to trial the unjust law still stands, and as of 2006, it was still a felony to sell sexual devices in Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Kansas [39]. Of course these illegal sexual devices are all devices that impact the sexual well-being of women, it's perfectly legal in all these states to buy and sell Viagra, a product that enhances the sexual pleasure of men. And while these state legislators are debating whether women can own vibrators without becoming a risk to society, they never think to ask about guns, remembering that it's perfectly legal to buy, sell and trade in as many guns as you like. Many, especially in Texas, openly carry and display their guns, but no one, even in states where they are legal, does the same with their vibrators. The majority believe that vibrators that provide sexual pleasure to women are far more dangerous than guns that deal only in death for everyone, that you should be proud to own a gun and ashamed if you own a vibrator. Tools of death should be celebrated and tools of pleasure should be hidden.

Seriously, this is how negatively many Americans view sex, that it's a truly unpleasant act that should be hidden in the shadows and needs to be firmly controlled (unlike gun ownership). And this is nothing new, I was reading a book awhile back on the history of slang, and when a guy called Francis Grose (1730-1791) wrote his dictionary of slang words, for one of the many words describing the female genitals — Cunt — he wrote this less than informative entry: 'C**t: a nasty name for a nasty thing'. Note that his disgust had nothing to do with the word itself, one he couldn't even bring himself to spell fully, but what it described, and obviously his implied advice would surely be to stay far away from the furry little critters, to avoid or at least severely limit one's exposure to sex and that nasty thing. I thought perhaps he was gay, that might explain his aversion, but clearly he thought his readers would immediately know what the partial word C**t meant simply by its vague definition as a nasty thing, meaning he expected everyone to be as equally repulsed by the female sex as he was. Apparently good Christians view sex the way I view going to the dentist, something I know must occasionally be done for the greater good, but something I absolutely dread doing.

In the Bible Paul recommended that everyone that could should choose celibacy over sex, making one think that he must have had really bad sexual experiences with both men and women (and goats), but no, he mainly said this because Jesus had said the world was going to end soon anyway. We would have thought that would have been a good reason to have a lot more sex, to go out with a bang, but strangely Paul didn't. The likes of Augustine (one of the early Church Fathers) connected the transmission of original sin with sexual intercourse, or more precisely, sexual pleasure. But for some undisclosed reason Jesus was wrong and the world didn't end as he had predicted, so the idiots realised that some brave souls would have to take one for the team and have sex with those nasty things and create babies or else humans would all be dead before Jesus finally turned up to save them (and ... still waiting). Sex was seen as a necessary evil, but only within wedlock, and only for procreation. So marriage was allowed, although not encouraged, since it was still better to live life as a virgin than worry about the continuation of the human race. In fact Christian theologians even calculated how much one would benefit on reaching heaven. Virgins would receive 100% heavenly reward, widows and widowers (because they had stopped having sex) would get 60%, and married people only 30%. So sex was begrudgingly permitted for married couples, and in medieval times they even put numerous restrictions on when and how couples could have sex, and it was not under any circumstances to be enjoyed. Thomas Aquinas said that, 'Marriage is aimed at procreation, and therefore the man who loves his wife too passionately contravenes the good of marriage and can be labelled an adulterer'. Jerome stated that, 'The begetting of children is allowed in marriage, but the feelings of sensual pleasure such as those had in the embraces of a harlot are damnable in a wife'. The likes of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great considered sexual pleasure as 'evil, a punishment, filthy, defiling, ugly, shameful, sick, a degradation of the mind, a humiliation of reason by the flesh, common, debasing, humiliating, shared with the beasts, brutal, corrupted, depraved, infected and infecting'. And even worse, these descriptions were also transferred to women since they are the filthy beings with those nasty things that men are coerced into having sex with. Clearly those negative Christian attitudes towards sex and women still influence Christianity today. Church sermons create people, especially women, that often find sex shameful and unrewarding, something that must be done quickly with the lights off. As they used to say to new brides, Just lie back and think of England. And sex outside marriage is still a sin. Christians intimidate and police the behaviour of teenagers and young adults to prevent sexual activity, with parents completely ignoring the cries of their teenage daughters who insist that their eggs have a right to life, life that they're just flushing away each month. Instead Christians try and force them to practice abstinence, they try and prevent sex education from being taught in schools hoping that ignorance about sex will mean they won't be interested in having sex (that one really demonstrates their stupidity), and they censor sex and nudity from movies and TV so that impressionable people won't get frisky ideas. Also many Christian parents condemn contraception at church, but the hypocrites use it at home. In her book 'Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion' (2022), Gabrielle Blair notes that, 'In the United States ... 99 percent of women who identify as religious — mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Catholics — have used birth control' [37]. In short Christians try to severely limit both the amount of sexual activity that is occurring in society and any unplanned pregnancies (by using contraception), and thus they greatly limit the potential of human reproduction. The lives that could be being created simply aren't eventuating, the Christian buzzkills are actively discouraging people from being fruitful and multiplying. Any gains they might make with an abortion ban that sees potential lives become real lives are quickly overwhelmed by all the potential lives that never have a chance due to a society that discourages free love. They've created a society that actively works towards preventing the unwanted pregnancies that would be the very potential lives that God so desires. If God were real, and thank God he's not, he would not be happy.

And it's not just untold unwanted pregnancies that Christians thwart through their actions, many also oppose wanted pregnancies that some married couples desperately seek, by which we mean pregnancies brought about by assisted reproductive technologies, such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and surrogate motherhood. Several Christian cults vehemently oppose women getting pregnant by methods that don't involve a penis thrusting into them. Emphasising the Catholic Church's opposition to IVF Pope Benedict XVI claimed that, 'it separates the unitive procreative actions that characterize the sexual embrace', or as a Catholic website explains in slightly less cryptic language, 'the Church teaches that human dignity is best respected when the beautiful sexual union of two people conceives a child. This does not happen when a human being is created in a laboratory'. Although what they mean by the phrase 'human dignity is best respected' is beyond me. If they are so proud of the 'beautiful sexual union of two people' then why don't they video the act and show us all how their child was conceived? We'd watch it. Apparently the Church now believes that creating a baby involves far more than just conception, more than just sperm meeting and fertilising an egg, they now believe that something crucial must proceed it, and that something is 'the beautiful sexual union of two people', or to put it in terms that ordinary people would understand, it requires writhing, sweaty bodies and a penis in a vagina with lots of thrusting and moaning and orgasmic fireworks. In other words the Church now implies that the creation of potential life happens before conception, before the fusing of two gametes, that it happens in the strength of 'the sexual embrace' which apparently alludes to the old Catholic belief that in order to get pregnant women have to enjoy the sex, ie they need to have an orgasm. The embrace of a sperm and egg in a Petri dish, no matter how intimate, is not sufficient. But clearly it is. Unlike most of history where actual intercourse was indeed necessary, today conception can be achieved outside the female body with no need for any sexual embrace, no female orgasm, and no struggling to find those missing panties in the morning that somehow found their way behind the sofa cushions. By using assisted reproductive technologies real life, not just potential life, can be brought into the world, and isn't this what God wants? And on a very positive note, unlike the women at abortion clinics, these are pregnancies that the women desperately want. And yet many Christians oppose IVF as much as they oppose abortion, another example of irrational behaviour that prevents the pregnancies we're told that God so desires.

In fact most Christians put considerable effort into preventing their own unwanted pregnancies (like most people), and encourage their own families and society at large to do likewise (hence the small family sizes these days), but if (when) an unwanted pregnancy does occur, they then also put huge effort into ensuring the very thing they're always trying to prevent actually goes ahead. In their own lives, as far as potential lives go, they are only interested (and then very reluctantly) in the rare pregnancies that get through the cracks, meaning they are doing very little in the 'Be fruitful, and multiply' sense. In fact in 2020 87 developed countries (including the US and NZ) were below what is called the replacement-level TFR of about 2.1 (Total Fertility Rate — the average number of children a woman is likely to have in her lifetime), which basically means deaths outnumber births and their populations are declining [2]. However, while not at all keen to start one, if a pregnancy unexpectedly happens they will fight to continue it, which is obeying God's will, but they will equally fight to prevent it in the first place, which is opposing God's will. Why don't Christians have a huge problem with this blatant hypocrisy? If they sincerely believe new lives are what God wants, then why aren't they encouraging everyone to have as many kids as possible? Why are they preventing their teenage daughters from 'knowing' their boyfriends? Recall that we mentioned earlier that in the UK it is perfectly legal for a 16 year-old woman to have sex but quite illegal for her to buy a dildo, and in some US states sex toys are illegal no matter a woman's age. Even though this is what the law dictates, can you imagine parents lecturing their teenage daughter that she not to even think about trying to obtain an illegal dildo or vibrator, and that if the urge is really overpowering, surely there are some boys at her school that can willingly and legally give her the real thing? Of course parents are not going to recommend what is legal, most would insist that she shun both fake penis and real penis, and at worst, would likely see the best option as buying her a vibrator, even though it would be breaking the law. If forced, parents would rather their teenage daughters (and sons) masturbated than went out and had legal sex, specifically because they know a sex toy (even an illegal one) won't get them pregnant, even though this isn't helping in the 'Be fruitful, and multiply' sense. But isn't this behaviour opposing God's will? Why aren't they (mothers and daughters) personally going from pregnancy to birth and back to pregnancy, ensuring that they bring as many lives into the world as they possibly can? Of course it's all about self interest. These hypocrites will have (quite rightly) decided that they don't want (or can't afford or manage) any more children and achieve that aim with contraception or even abstinence, but when a stranger finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy they will with no compassion forcefully insist she go through with something they are quite opposed to for themselves. They see no problem with forcing child rearing onto women that like them also don't want it. They want the freedom to control their own lives and bodies by not having children (or at least no more children), and at the same time they want to control the lives of others by forcing children on them. They're like evil dictators, caring only about their own selfish views and being quite dismissive of the desires of others, arrogantly believing that they have the right to dictate how women should respond to an unwanted pregnancy. They conspire behind God's back to avoid a pregnancy themselves, and place obstacles in the way of those wanting to have sex, but if they spy a stranger with an unwanted pregnancy, rather than be empathetic and think, Wow, poor woman, that could have been me, they instead go on the attack and badger, intimidate and pressure the woman to go though with the pregnancy, even resorting to legal roadblocks to prevent her obtaining an abortion. Desperate to avoid their own pregnancy, and that of their daughters, and wilfully disregarding God's commandment to populate the world, they do what they can to make amends by forcing babies onto strangers.

When responding to this hypocrisy of actively trying to prevent unwanted pregnancies, pregnancies that God wants, and then fighting to keep those that do occur (in other women), pro-lifers typically ignore the embarrassing contradiction in behaviour and put the focus solely on the abortion. They'll agree that society tries to prevent unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, but that's not what's important here, what's important is if they do happen, then they must be allowed to continue naturally. They deflect the argument by talking of society not wanting unplanned pregnancies, rather than Christians, when Christians are often the largest part of society driving this behaviour, especially in the US, so rather than jumping straight to why the pregnancy must proceed, we need to jump back a step and ask why they, as good Christians, don't want them for themselves, meaning the pregnancies and the resulting children? Doesn't your god encourage them? If they say they can't afford to raise a child, or they already have enough children, or they're too young and immature to have a child, while we'd agree that these are all very good reasons not to get pregnant, aren't these often the same reasons that women seeking an abortion give, and that they quickly dismiss? Other reasons for an abortion might be that a pregnancy would destroy a woman's career or life goals, that the woman doesn't want or even like children, that a pregnancy would be life threatening for the woman, that the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, or that the fetus is severely disabled. Why do these valid reasons suddenly become invalid when it's a stranger seeking the abortion? Shouldn't it be her body, her choice?

When it comes to getting pregnant in the first place most Christians and pro-lifers (and people in general) behave selfishly, by which we mean they think of themselves and what they want. Seeing themselves as free agents and independent individuals, they will decide when and if they want to have a child, not their parents or their friends or their god. These women want utter control over their body, and even though their fertile young body may be screaming 'I'm horny, there's the chance for potential life here, just find me a male', these women only want a pregnancy on their terms. And we completely support that. What annoys us is when others that feel the same (for themselves at least) decide that women that suddenly find themselves pregnant don't get to have that same control over their bodies, that others will decide for them, and the decision is always the same, you're having the baby, abortion is not an option. Their personal view is that they are in control of their own body, screw what some absent god thinks or wants, but when some woman, a stranger to them, gets an unwanted pregnancy, then of course she must keep the child because that's what God wants. Again, what fucking hypocrites they are, God's views are paramount when they encounter a stranger with an unwanted pregnancy, 'You should be overjoyed you're pregnant, it's a gift from God', while God's views can be easily dismissed when their own interests are considered, saying to their teenage daughters, 'Don't you dare do anything to get pregnant!!' These pro-lifers are just so arrogant, ignorant and selfish, harassing women entering abortion clinics, arguing that they have the freedom to act on their beliefs and the right to protest, while through their actions they are attempting to deny the very same rights and freedoms to the pregnant women trying to enter the clinics.

So clearly Christian prudishness and self-interest is severely impacting God's plan that new lives 'replenish the earth', their fear of sex and their desire to see their own plans succeed push God and his desires into the background. They're forcing strangers to take the baby route and thinking that God will just have to be happy with those small gains for the moment. True Christians, true believers, would view sex quite differently and be doing far, far more to help if they genuinely believed every possible pregnancy was something God desired, rather than just forcing the burden onto women for whom being pregnant is the last thing they want.

Babies, and souls, are there from day one

As it is at the end, so it was at the beginning. That's the premise of the pro-lifers argument to oppose any interference at any stage of a pregnancy, that the baby doesn't just appear at the end of a pregnancy but is there from the very beginning.

Let me try to explain with an analogy. Let's say I want to make a birthday cake; chocolate icing, festive candles, the works. I can discern several steps, moving from looking up the recipe in a cook book to gathering the ingredients, then measuring and mixing them, baking the mixture in the oven, letting it cool, icing and decorating it to finally adding and lighting the candles. Having watched my mother do this, I know that the text of the recipe, the gathered ingredients and the mixture in the bowl bear no resemblance to a cake. Even when the batter has been baked and has cooled it still isn't something the birthday recipient would identify as their birthday cake, there is still important work to be done for it to reach its full potential. Only at the completion of the final stage does it become something that truly looks and tastes like a birthday cake, only now can it fulfil its cake-y purpose. I'm arguing that making a birthday cake involves several very different steps — desire, a text recipe, ingredients, construction and moulding, baking, icing and decorating — and the actual birthday cake doesn't make an appearance until the very end.

Let me now suggest that a pregnancy proceeds in a similar way, from desire to sex to conception, from the fertilised cell's DNA code (the recipe) being read and the assembling of the necessary ingredients to build a body, from the cellular construction building the basic template to then constructing the individual organs, to slowly growing those organs, integrating them and finally bringing them online, and only at these final stages does the fetus start to resemble what it is going to become. Both the cake and the pregnancy go from a recipe or DNA code (that looks nothing like the final product), to basic construction material to foundations (that still looks nothing like the final product), to gradually creating something that slowly begins to look like the end goal, and only when that final step is successfully completed does a cake become a cake and a baby a baby. Until then it is just potential.

I think that if Christians were to apply their baby making logic to making a cake then they'd likely argue that a real cake with candles is there at every step of the process. That if after reading the recipe for a fancy chocolate birthday cake I decide it is too difficult and close the book, then I have destroyed a potential cake, and that is something to be mourned, and preferably made illegal, arguing that once a cake recipe is read, once the conception of a birthday cake forms, then it must be allowed to become real. This is essentially how pro-lifers tend to view a pregnancy, that a real baby is there from conception through to birth as a fully formed small human growing in size over 40 weeks. They want us to believe that at the 1 week, 6 week or 20 week stage an embryo or fetus is essentially the same human as a 40 week baby, just smaller. Clearly we can all identify and empathise with a crying baby that has just been born, and none of us would wish it harm, let alone kill it in cold blood. Pro-lifers want to take this image and protective feeling and place it on every stage of a pregnancy, even on the moment of conception. And if this transference made sense then even we would oppose abortion, but clearly the single fertilised cell that exists at conception or the conglomeration of cells that exist a few weeks later bear no resemblance to a new born baby. From a single cell dividing, multiplying and then differentiating, trillions of cells must gradually come into existence and slowly mature and form the body and organs of a human. However the false belief that babies come from a miniature, fully formed individual that merely increases in size is not new, it was quite popular back in the 15th to 17th centuries and was called preformationism, the belief that babies had been created preformed — just add water and stand back. The details varied, but one was that a small human called a homunculus — a very, very, very small human — was present in every sperm, just waiting to be planted in a woman's uterus where it would undergo explosive growth. Another variation was that the homunculus resided in the female egg, not the sperm, and the sperm bumping into the egg merely triggered the explosive growth of the little human (or again more accurately, they originally imagined a small seed resided in semen or the womb as they couldn't see the microscopic sperm or egg). What this means is that when God created Eve, within Eve was contained all the humans that would ever live, including you and me, already fully formed, just, obviously, very small. And we mean very small. Within each of Eve's eggs was a homunculus, and if it was a female homunculus then it contained many eggs that also each contained a homunculus, and each of those that were female also contained many eggs that each contained a homunculus, and down and down it went, getting forever smaller each time, with little fully formed humans nesting inside other fully formed humans like those Russian dolls. Since the world has seen some 108 billion babies born throughout human history, and many more aborted by God, that means that Eve must have had 300 billion plus fully formed humans in her ovaries just to get humanity to the 21st century, plus the billions and trillions that will be required for all the future generations until Jesus finally returns as promised and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are unleashed (and kills most of them). That's a lot of little humans in one body, so we suspect Eve had a much more Rubenesque figure than is usually shown in paintings of her and Adam (and talking of paintings, why didn't God include some in the Bible to add a bit of colour, or better still, photographs? What ... you believe God could make the human eye and vampire bats but couldn't make a simple camera, and wouldn't have taken a few selfies for the family album?) And if you reverse this problem, if all the homunculus were in sperm, then each sperm doesn't just contain one small human, each of those small humans contains other small humans who each has trillions and trillions of sperm that each contain yet more small humans, and ... well, it's the Russian dolls again. But just as the belief that babies start out as fully formed humans was obviously false, the current claims that babies are thinking, feeling, fully formed little humans with hopes and desires from day one is also blatantly false, but unfortunately the traditional belief that little humans exist throughout the pregnancy has persisted. Again, this is a primitive myth, babies are slowly constructed from scratch using basic materials and for much of a woman's pregnancy it is a work in progress, and often all an abortion is destroying is essentially the bricks and scaffolding. And maybe a very small sign that says: Hard Hats Required Beyond This Point. By Order of God and Son Construction Ltd.

The other Christian and pro-life claim that promotes this false belief that a thinking, feeling and fully aware human life is present throughout the entire pregnancy is the nonsense that God pops in a soul at conception, that from day one the invisible, immaterial, divine essence that makes you a human is present and functioning. According to the Christian fantasy the soul is our entire being; the body, whatever its material state may be, is nothing but an empty husk that degrades us by performing dirty, sinful actions, and many Christians joyfully look forward to the day they get to shed it, meaning their soul is set free and takes up residence in an apartment that Jesus has prepared for them in Heaven. Why a soul would need an apartment, or streets paved with gold, is beyond me. But regardless, it is the Christian belief that the very thing that makes them unique, that makes them who they are, that informs their morals, that creates their personality, that let's them form a picture of the world and create memories, all that resides in their soul. And it's there at conception, staking out its claim. Nothing that resembles a body is there yet, it's still a work in progress, but they'll insist that the soul is literally there in spirit, fully aware, watching and waiting.

We can identify with those core feelings of who we are as a person, the only difference being that we believe those things are all generated in the brain. We can also accept that if something ripped all those abilities away from us then me as a thinking, feeling person with goals and hopes would be destroyed. The person that I was would have effectively been killed even if my body still lived on. And I would be very pissed about that ... you know, if I wasn't already brain dead and my days of getting angry are over. But I'm describing the mind and body of a living human. The things that make me a person, like being sentient and self-aware and having plans for the future, didn't exist in that single fertilised cell that slowly grew into me over some nine months. Even for much of that period there was no person in my mother's womb. I wasn't thinking about what the outside world would be like or making plans for world domination, I wasn't thinking, period. I didn't even have a functioning brain for much of my incarceration. Rumour has it that I couldn't even speak or understand language when I was born. I couldn't write my name until I was four. Of course my parents were horribly embarrassed.

But we can understand the real harm that someone losing their mind as a living human would cause, and consequently we should strive to prevent that sort of harm. However pro-lifers argue that the same level of harm to a person can occur right from conception, because they insist that what makes living humans sentient and self-aware is present from the very start, in the form of the soul. The soul doesn't slowly grow and mature like the embryo does, it doesn't go from an unthinking invisible blob of ectoplasm to a thinking blob, it's fully aware and understands what its divine mission is from day one, which is to take control of the developing human it finds itself in. In biological terms it would be called a parasite. Again, we'd obviously agree that destroying a living human brain causes harm and must be avoided, so pro-lifers hijack that sentiment by arguing that the very thing that gives the living human brain it's power to control the body later in life — the soul — comes into existence at conception, and exists fully formed and aware throughout the pregnancy, so destroying even a one week old embryo must also cause harm. Since the soul turns up at conception (well, not really), they argue that there is no safe window early in the pregnancy when an abortion might still be permissible. This argument can be dismissed simply because the very notion of souls is superstitious nonsense. It's as nutty as saying, 'Use the Force, Luke', and 'Remember, the Force will be with you always'.

And the religious believers in souls got a real poke in the eye when Louise Brown was born in 1978, the first 'test tube baby'. We've already mentioned that many Christians oppose assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, especially the Catholic Church, which of course was the only church for around one and half thousand years and still thinks it should be calling all the shots. With people calling it 'unnatural and immoral', the problems this birth raised greatly flustered and angered the Church, with the Catholic Donum Vitae Instruction of 1987 complaining that IVF is 'violating the child's integrity as a human being with an immortal soul from the moment of conception'. If the soul is truly who we are, if every material body needs a soul to animate it, and it's something that God only places in the zygote after he has watched a married couple lovingly perform 'the marital act' as these prudes call it, then any fusion of sperm with an egg that occurs in a lab will obviously not be graced with a soul. God spies on people having sex; anytime an erect penis gets near a vulva sensors trigger alarms in Heaven and God drops whatever he is doing and reaches for some coconut baby oil and a box of tissues. Sex is what turns him on, he does not hang around in labs where people keep their clothes on (although maybe he'd learn something if he did!). And even then God only bangs in a soul if the sex pleases him, which is why some couples never get pregnant. They need to up their game. Maybe bring in a chicken. So logically, people born through IVF and such with no sex acts for God to watch won't have a soul, won't have any connection to God, won't have a Heavenly Father that loves them, and so will be soulless. But how do they function without a soul if a soul is needed to run the brain and the body? Why don't they just collapse, or at least shuffle around aimlessly and incoherently like a zombie? Clearly those born through IVF are just as moral and just as intelligent and just as capable (perhaps even more so) as all those born the traditional way with souls, right? Likewise, in addition to us atheists, there are billions of Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others of non-Christian religions running around, we have to assume, without souls, since surely God is not putting souls into Hindus and atheists is he? After all, what's the point of being an annoying Christian, of praying every night and giving up masturbation, if everyone gets God's gifts, even those that don't have to follow God's repressive rules?

Clearly there is no discernible difference between a person born through IVF or a person born through two Christians fucking, meaning either both have a soul from God or (most likely) neither have a soul, with the brain and mind doing all the work. As atheists, we've both had Christians tell us we don't have a soul, and of course we agree with them 100%. But by simply observing people going about their daily lives no one can tell the IVF babies from the atheists from the Christians, we largely all perform various tasks equally well, meaning there is obviously no advantage in having a soul compared to not having one. Christians insisting that only they have the gift of an immortal soul from God means that, if true, their souls are mere freeloaders, just along for the ride, giving nothing of value and simply there to spy on their behaviour, a sneaky little tattletale that reports back to God. Confronted with this problem and needing to believe that the soul is absolutely essential to animate any and all bodies (even animals and coloured people now have souls whereas previously Christians insisted they didn't), Christians now argue that God obviously puts souls in IVF babies, that's why they are able to function normally in the world (and by extension he must put souls in Hindus and atheists too). But if this were true, that IVF babies get a soul from God, that would mean that God does not condemn IVF as a way of producing a new life, or at the very least can't be bother preventing it, when he could easily do so. Whatever the reason, God is aiding and abetting healthy pregnancies through IVF, so why are Christians again putting a spanner in the works by actively opposing him, by actively nipping potential lives in the bud, potential lives they claim they want to save when they talk of abortion?

Not only is there no evidence of their existence, how souls supposedly work makes no sense. Think about it, if you need a soul to run a body, then why does the mind, a creation of the brain, exist? Why when the brain is injured does the soul hide in the background and let the combined brain and mind run the body in a very limited form? Why when a person's eyes or ears are damaged does the soul let the person go blind or deaf when it could easily see and hear for them? We know it can because we are told the soul has all the senses a human has, and happily uses them on 'Out of Body' experiences and of course will rely on them when it heads back to Heaven on the eventual death of the body. Why when something like Alzheimer's strikes the brain does the soul, which has all their memories safely stored, refuse to help them function socially? Why does the soul in untold cases of failing mental and bodily health step back and let the brain takeover the running of the body? And if the brain can run the body in a limited capacity when it's damaged, with no help from the soul, then surely it's reasonable to assume that the brain is more than capable of running the body when it's brand new and everything is functioning perfectly, still with no assistance required, and any later reduction in performance is simply down to something like nerve, muscle or tissue damage. It makes no sense to think that a soul is required to run our bodies when they are in perfect health, that our brain alone isn't capable of such a feat, and yet when some physical damage occurs the soul simply walks (floats) away and somehow the useless brain can now somehow, with no help from the soul, step up and start running our bodies and still do a pretty good job. Another huge problem is that Christians argue, in order to explain why we have a brain at all when we already have a soul, is that the immaterial soul simply directs the brain to run the body. The soul sits back with its feet on the desk and orders the brain to get to work. But how can an immaterial soul have any affect on a material brain? It would be like those silly ghosts in movies that easily walk through walls or their spectral hands pass right through objects they try to grab. If the soul tried to push on my brain to make me go left it would fall right through it and have no effect. The notion of souls is just a primitive, superstitious fantasy from our ignorant past, alongside fairies, leprechauns and gremlins. An abortion can no more harm a soul than mowing your lawn might kill a fairy.

Another related pro-choice argument we should mention is around a nonsense called fetal personhood, the ignorant idea that from the moment of conception an actual "person" exists in the uterus. Pro-life lawyers then insist that this "person" is a separate legal entity under the law, with the full human rights that a living person would have, and because it is deemed utterly defenceless and in need of the protection of others, it tends to be given more rights than the living, and as author Helen Lewis notes, 'the more the foetus is treated as a person, the less its mother is' [12]. The pro-life groups fixate so much on the fetus that they effectively strip rights away from the mother, almost forgetting that she is even in the room. As Bonnie Steinbock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Albany, SUNY, said:

'Pro-lifers think that abortion is wrong because it's intrinsically wrong to destroy a human life. And ... people who are pro-choice also think that it's intrinsically wrong to destroy human life. But they think that it's important to allow women to make this choice for themselves because her human life also has intrinsic value. And to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term when she doesn't want to or isn't yet ready to become a mother is also a way of not respecting the intrinsic value of human life'. [17]

But global corporations aside, there is a little more to a person these days than what the dictionary suggests, by which we mean if pushed most people would also agree that God is a person, as is the furry alien Chewbacca from 'Star Wars', probably also the droid C-3PO (a humanoid robot), even though none of them are human. So how do we define what a person is, and who qualifies? I found a better explanation was given by philosopher Richard Hanley when he considered whether aliens and artificial life forms in the 'Star Trek' universe should be considered persons. He started by comparing humans with chickens:

'A fully developed human being is more morally significant than a typical chicken, even though both are intelligent and both are morally considerable. Why? Briefly, because a fully developed human being has future-oriented mental states: beliefs about how her future life might go, and preferences for how her future life will go — preferences that can be frustrated in various ways. She has such preferences because she has a concept of herself as an entity persisting through time. Just as it is wrong, other things being equal, to cause severe pain to a chicken, it is wrong, other things being equal, to severely frustrate the preferences of a human being. But while a chicken has an interest in avoiding pain and suffering, it has no future-oriented preferences to frustrate'.

'philosophers hold that a person is an individual with a concept of self — a concept of himself or herself as a continuing entity. Persons are more morally significant than intelligent nonpersons like chickens precisely because they have a greater range and depth of preferences'. [15]

'An intelligent individual who has a concept of self and others, who has beliefs and preferences about how his or her life will go, and who has the concomitant moral concepts has achieved the threshold of personhood'. [15]

All life is sacred and in God's image

When people say 'All life is sacred', their mouth full of fried chicken or a fresh killed salad, clearly they only mean human life. After all, God said we could eat most of the animal life, except for the likes of oysters, lobsters and pigs. As Homer Simpson said, luckily pork and bacon isn't on that list, and I personally don't like seafood anyway so I'm good. But human life is different, the religious view is that a human is not an animal for a start, we are a special creation. Jews, Christians and Muslims believe human life is a gift from God, and as a gift from God it needs to be valued, protected and respected, like a rare first edition 'Superman' comic. This religious notion is called the sanctity of life. The religious believe the human body is a scared object, a masterpiece of design, a true wonder, lovingly crafted by God and gifted to us for a lifetime, however long God might decide that to be. As a scared object — 'the body is a temple' is a popular saying — it's strongly felt that it shouldn't be interfered with in any way, hence the vocal opposition to the likes of genetic engineering and stem cell research. In some historical periods it was forbidden to dissect dead bodies to aid in medical research, and even today many cultures forbid organ donations and cremation, bodies must remain intact and as God made them.

And yet ... look at these same devout believers that willingly undergo numerous cosmetic and quite unnecessary surgical alterations to their bodies, such as mammoplasty, rhinoplasty, buttock augmentation and labiaplasty (modifying the shape of the breasts, nose, buttocks and labia respectively). Clearly they are not happy with the body God gave them and even though it's a sacred object, have no problem with modifying it, even though you'd think that this would void their warranty. How can that dissatisfaction and subsequent tinkering not be an insult to God and a clear disregard of his wishes? Even though the Bible forbids them, look at the current popularity of body tattoos, of permanently marking and scarring the skin, with people declaring that it's their body and they'll get a tattoo if they want one! God should butt out of their business. Also consider genital mutilation, where the foreskin of the male penis is chopped off for no good reason (and the US leads the Western world in this by leaps and bounds), and where the female clitoris is sliced off and in many cases the labia sewed shut (leaving just a small opening for urine), a truly horrific procedure (the sexist reason being so men can control women's sexuality). Lest you think female genital mutilation (FGM) is something confined largely to primitive parts of Africa and the Muslim world, it isn't. 'In America, surgical removal of the clitoris (clitoridectomy) was an accepted treatment for masturbation well into the twentieth century' [6]. Some American doctors were still recommending it in the 1960s. Unfortunately FGM has tagged along with those migrating to Western countries. Arguing sexual equality, some supporters cunningly label it female circumcision rather than female genital mutilation in order to (falsely) suggest that it's just the female version of male circumcision, which is perfectly legal and viewed as safe, harmless and normal in the US. Normal practice yes, but we'd disagree with the safe and harmless claim, since all surgeries carry risk (there are many cases of severe infections, lifelong pain and even where the entire penis has been accidentally sliced off, not just the foreskin), made all the worse since this surgery is completely unwarranted. But the argument is that Americans are happy with circumcision, so why shouldn't parents be allowed to circumcise their girls as well as their boys? It's a little like the American argument, Why shouldn't I be allowed to buy my kid a gun? Americans are big on allowing harm if they see it as a right backed by tradition, their Constitution and/or religion. I saw in the documentary 'American Circumcision' (2017) that it wasn't until 1996, following 9 years of legal lobbying, that America finally passed federal laws 'banning female genital cutting in the US'. But then in 2010 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement that essentially suggested that doctors should either ignore those federal laws or advocate to have them overturned. Their opposition to the law was seemingly based on the real fear that they might lose the legal right to mutilate male genitals if it remained illegal to mutilate female genitals, since opponents were becoming more vocal and asking why males don't deserve the same protection? This push by the AAP to allow FGM revealed a shameful and continuing disregard for women's health, with doctors and parents perfectly willing to permit serious (lifelong) harm to young girls if this is what it took for American society to remain supportive of male circumcision, slicing off the foreskins of young boys. And the selfish reason that many cut men give for circumcision is simply that they want their sons to look like them, equally mutilated. The health, safety and well-being of women was to be sacrificed in order to aid the continuation of a primitive male ritual. Just as with abortion, this was another example of women being denied a human right, one of bodily autonomy, and a clear statement that they were still seen as second-class citizens. Thankfully after an outcry the AAP was forced to issue a retraction, saying they now fully support the law, as should their members, and adding that it had 'retired its 2010 policy statement on female genital cutting'. Why would you remove flesh from a sacred object given to you by God, surely the disfiguring can only make it imperfect in both appearance and function, especially considering that the glans alone of the the female clitoris contains about 8,000 nerve endings, more nerve endings than any other part of the vulva, and it is the only part of the human body, male or female, that has a single purpose: sexual pleasure (By contrast the glans of the penis only has some 3,000 nerves.) Other than give sexual pleasure, the clitoris does nothing else, so one can easily understand why men think that by removing it they are limiting and controlling female sexuality. And as regards the male foreskin, this article notes that a new study was, 'consistent with a previous finding by other researchers from 2007, who concluded that "Circumcision ablates [removes] the most sensitive parts of the penis".' Why would you remove tissue that God deliberately added to provide pleasure, and by doing so annoy God with your arrogance of thinking that you know what's best for the body he designed?

Since the religious believe the human body is made by a perfect god, this means it must be perfect by definition since a perfect god can't make imperfect things, and as a sacred object each of our bodies must be the way God wants them to be. So how can people that sincerely proclaim that our life and our bodies are sacred, that women seeking an abortion don't own their body, God does, meaning that they can't make changes to it, then turn around and happily make changes to their own bodies to correct aspects of it that they're not happy with, even to something as trivial as continually removing all their body hair which God spent time making sure all women had? It's the same with nudity, if the body is God's temple, a true work of art, beautiful beyond compare, then why are the religious so ashamed of it and demand (often by threat of law) that the ugly, disgusting bits remain covered? Many Americans (and certainly most US lawmakers) are absolutely terrified of the female nipple, not to mention the genitals of both sexes, and we're quite mystified how they can reconcile this revulsion with the fact that their God made these "ugly, obscene, disgusting" bits in the first place? How can they praise God's handiwork and at the same time be utterly ashamed of it, so much so that they're too embarrassed to let others see it? With religious pro-life groups there is this blinding contradiction, insisting that women have no choice concerning their pregnancies because their bodies are sacred and beyond their control, and yet in their personal lives they demand complete control of their own bodies and will make all the changes they want. Boob jobs are the most common cosmetic surgical procedure in the US, by one estimate 1 in every 26 American women have breast implants, and that's just one of many cosmetic surgical procedures undertaken, so it's clearly their bodies, their choice, except when it comes to the bodies of other women and abortion and then choice ... disappears.

The religious also believe that we humans are created in God's image, since in the Bible Genesis 1:26 reads, 'Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness".' Of course all this only makes any sense and carries any weight if said god actually exists and did indeed make us in his image.

Frankly I find it hard to believe that God looks like me. I mean one would assume that Jesus, being God's son, would carry some family resemblance to his father, and yet I look nothing like Jesus, so surely I also look nothing like God, right? Of course Christians will say I'm just being silly, that being made in his image simply means we all have a generic human appearance. Umm ... OK, that might, in a very broad sense, explain human males since God is clearly identified as male, but how can females be made in his image? Aren't women clearly different to men? In many periods and cultures of the past many men believed that women were not just obviously different, but were less than human, a sub-human situated somewhere between animal and human. And as such, in not being equal, men had God-given dominion over women, just as he had over the animals. Christians are told in their Bible of God's demands:

'Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church ... wives should submit to their husbands in everything'. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

'Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet'. (1 Timothy 2:11-15)

'Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church'. (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)

Again, women 'must be in submission, as the law says'. To explain male domination women are also reminded in Genesis that God created Adam first and then Eve was created as his 'helper' (i.e. 'servant'). In fact Eve was actually created some considerable time later as a bug fix, a workaround to correct a problem God hadn't foreseen (which is rather strange for an all-knowing god). As we've already briefly mentioned, the Bible tells us, in Genesis 2:18-22, that after making Adam, the perfect human, God had no plan to also make a cheap knockoff female version. Instead, sensing Adam might be lonely, he made all the birds and animals and brought each of them to Adam to see which one he might form an intimate bond with, intending that one to be his helper. But God was totally taken aback when Adam wasn't turned on by any of the many sexy animals he paraded before him. Not even the goats apparently. Only after he spurned all the cute animals did God then decide to come up with a Plan B, create a sexy female version of Adam from one of his own ribs. And it worked. But let's pause for a moment and think about what this Plan B means. Adam was created with the perfect body, which must include the perfect penis and testicles, even though women (with their complementary nasty vagina and ovaries) did not exist, and were never meant to exist. So why did God create Adam with working genitals? With no Eve planned for, just animals, where was Adam expected to put his erect penis? Evidenced by the speed dating between Adam and the entire animal kingdom, clearly God had planned for Adam to have sex with the animals, or at least the larger mammals, since we're not sure how sex with birds, fish or even gerbils would work. And just as clearly, God had no idea that human sperm and animal eggs wouldn't create human/animal hybrids, that interbreeding is impossible. Although I guess with God anything is possible, so we're assuming he was going to simply bypass mammalian biology and make each sexual encounter a fertile one by simply saying the magic words — 'Let there be a centaur, and lo, there was a centaur'. Of course being involved with every pregnancy like that would mean a lot of extra work for God, but Christians insist God is still involved with every human pregnancy, you know, the breath of life, putting in the soul, and then deciding whether to abort it or let it go to term, so I guess God is just a hands-on type of guy.

That God made Adam with working genitals and no Eve is not something most Christians are aware of, but even less well known is that the creation of Eve was actually Plan C, not Plan B, because before Eve there was Lilith. Lilith was the world's first feminist, the first woman actually created by God who, to Adam's great annoyance, believed she was created as Adam's equal, not his servant. According to the Jews, and they should know as they actually wrote the Bible stories, Lilith's refusal to submit to Adam, especially in matters of sex, saw Adam running to God to complain. He apparently took Adam's side, believing that Lilith should be submissive to Adam, negotiations broke down and Lilith was banished by God (something that God later forced on Eve as well). And so God tried again, this time making another woman, Eve, but not from dirt as he had made Adam and Lilith, but out of one of Adam's ribs, the logic being that being made from Adam she was now indebted to Adam, like a servant. This (quite fictitious) incident surrounding the nature of Eve's creation generated the belief that women owe their very existence to a man, to his sacrifice, but is that true? Did Adam come up with this plan and freely offer his rib? No, just as God would later do with Mary, teenage mother of Jesus (and who knows how many other victims), Adam was surreptitiously drugged and woke up dazed some hours later in an ice-filled bathtub with a bloody incision and missing a rib. There was no grand altruistic gesture from Adam, no informed consent, not even a comforting lie from God — Don't worry, it'll grow back. Women owe nothing to men and certainly not submission, and this story of Eve is important because it reveals the sexist attitude that weaves its way through history to today's abortion debate, arguing that the choice is not a woman's because her body belongs to men and the ruling authority, ie either the government or God. You can't strip away thousands of years of brainwashing overnight. Of course this story of Lilith and then Eve reveals yet another example of God's planning going down the tubes and him having to rehash everything, so it's no surprise that it got left out as the Jewish authors gathered stories to send to the publisher. So in the Bible as it finally came to be, Lilith effectively never existed, meaning we're back with Adam and his genitals and nowhere to put them except in animals.

So clearly women weren't meant to be here, and they are here now only to fulfil the role that God had initially hoped lowly animals would preform, to serve man. No wonder that throughout history the Church has seen women as little more than animals. I read that in the Middle Ages 'women of all social classes could be beaten by their husbands quite legally. The Church approved, regarding women as such morally weak creatures that physical punishment was required to help them see the error of their ways' [11]. And not only could men beat women like an animal, they could sell them, rape them, silence them, train them to know their place, force them to cook and clean for them, lock them away when on their period, decorate them for display, use them for entertainment, marry them to strangers to form alliances, control their reproduction, and know that any pregnancy that might occur is the property of men, a gift from God. And you don't have to go back to Biblical or medieval times to see man's continuing dominance over women. Nan Sloane's book 'Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers & Revolutionaries' (2022) focuses on Britain 200 years ago, between 1789 and 1832, which in historical terms is relatively recent, and she notes that the public political space:

'... was entirely a male affair. Women could not hold any kind of public office, had almost no legal or political rights and were thought to be immoral if they ventured out of the private realm ... Although the Victorian ideal of the "angel in the house" had not yet taken up its stranglehold on women's lives, members of "the fair sex" were still expected to adhere to the rules laid down for them by religion, society and the law. Married women were the property of their husbands, who had complete control over every aspect of their lives. Wifely obedience was a religious as well as a social duty. Women had no independent existence in law, and no legal power over their own finances, children or bodies. Nor was divorce possible ... Since the power was all on one side, domestic and sexual violence was rife, and many women suffered abuse as a matter of routine ... for the vast majority there was no escape and no refuge, and it is therefore hardly surprising if most wives simply found it easier to accept things as they were ... Most women uncritically accepted moral and sexual codes that are now repellent'. [11]

Women were considered property that could be bought and sold, just like the goats, even a marriage was a legal transfer of property, the woman being transferred from her father to her husband, her new owner. Recall that at weddings a father walks (in the past it would be 'escorts' or 'forces') his daughter down the aisle and the priest or minister often still asks, 'Who gives this woman to this man?' He's confirming that the current owner has agreed to the woman becoming the legal property of another man, and the father (or male guardian) replies, 'I do', and the transaction can then continue with the property changing hands. And for much of history in many cultures, and still existing today, the value of the woman alone, what she had to offer as a person, was still insufficient for a simple exchange to take place, and additional money and/or assets had to be included to sweeten the deal. Pure love between two people seldom had anything to do with marriage. While I had often heard mention of dowries, I read last night that, 'Brideprice — money transfer from the groom's family to the bride's family — is customary law in many societies. Dowry, in contrast, is an exchange of funds from the bride to the groom, an important distinction' [2]. This essentially means that either the groom had to purchase the woman from the seller (her father), like one might buy a cell phone today, or the woman's owner (her father) had to effectively bribe the groom to take her off his hands, usually believing that he would profit from the deal through his relationship with the groom in the future.

After taking his new purchase home, unwrapping her and trying her out, if all went well she would soon be with child. As mentioned, for much of Western history people (men) believed that the sexual default (and goal) of a pregnancy was a male baby, and only if something went horribly wrong in the process would the result be a female baby. As this article notes:

'Before that time [18th century], Laqueur argues, most anatomists accepted the ancient idea expressed by the Greek doctor Galen that there was really only one gender ... This appealed to classical notions of cosmic harmony, and allowed doctors to argue that women were simply inferior versions of men'. [7]

Clearly women cannot be made in God's image if men were, because women obviously posses some physical and mental attributes that men lack. And remember we're talking about God here, in his world there are only two distinct sexes matched to two distinct genders. So women, half the population, have no reason to see themselves as created in God's image, meaning they didn't receive a gift of value equal to what men got. Instead they were created as man's servant, sex toy and baby factory. For most of history women often saw no reason to thank God for creating them. Sure they might do their utmost to protect their own lives, but this was due to selfish concern, it wasn't a desire to protect God's property that he had gifted to men for their use. So, made in his image, what are the other options, maybe God was an hermaphrodite, possessing both male and female characteristics? Christians don't like that suggestion, and regardless, it would mean that now neither men nor woman are made in God's image. Another suggestion Christians oppose, one which actually gains some support from the Bible, is that women were created in the image of a female goddess and men in the image of a male god, that humans were made to look like male and female gods, and not just a lonely male god called GOD. If you look more closely at that Bible verse it has God saying, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness', not 'Let me make humankind in my image'. Obviously God was not alone, and making humans was a team effort, with some of the team likely being female. Yet Christians insist that there is and only ever has been one god, that talk of other gods and goddesses existing is quite false, even though there are several verses in the Bible where God clearly reveals that he is just one god among many, and not even the one in charge. This is where Christians vehemently insist that the Bible is wrong, that God never spoke of other gods existing alongside him. It's amazing how they can declare that Bible verses they don't like are errors and most definitely false, and that Bible verses they do like are most definitely true, while continuously assuring us that the entire Bible is the Word of God, true from start to finish, since a perfect god could never produce an error ridden book. Even the lies are true. Wait ... what?

To try and resolve this obvious problem around God's image, in recent years, in contrast to your typical Christian who never got the memo, Christian theologians have now started to say that God doesn't possess a material body at all, they think he's more like invisible energy, at most he might have some tentacles, and he certainly doesn't look human, even though the Bible clearly describes God many times as having a physical body that resembles a human male. This re-imagining of God's form is to get around complaints that God is biased towards men to the exclusion of women (umm ... duh!), and that his male human form means he must have male genitals and therefore have a sexual nature, which leads to the question, Who's he having sex with? Or is it just masturbation? Not quite, remember there was his rape of Mary, the sweet young virginal mother of Jesus, but this is the only documented case of God having sex, and creating an unwanted pregnancy. No Constitutional right to an abortion back then (or now thanks to the Supreme Court), even in cases of rape. But going by the Bible stories involving sex, nudity and God's unhealthy obsession with genitals, and coupled with God's perverse urge to spy on us even during our most intimate moments, this suggests that, rather than having sex with very young peasant girls, God the voyeur prefers to get his sexual thrills by hiding behind a curtain and wanking to the sight of humans having sex; straight sex, gay sex, solo sex and illegal sex, especially his priests sodomising little boys. God is a Peeping Tom who apparently gets off watching real-life underage torture porn. But for some reason Christians now don't like to imagine their god having a male body and deviant sexual desires. So in complete denial of where the Bible describes God's form and nature and real world events where God watches women being raped and priests abusing children and does nothing (well, he is doing something ... nudge, nudge, wink, wink), Christians have not just castrated God, they have made his entire body disappear. For God to have the powers he does, like being everywhere at once, it's now argued that he can't exist in the form of a human male, so now God is imagined to be in the form of something that we, well, can't imagine. That's all well and good, but this new vision means humans, contrary to what the Bible claims, were clearly not created in God's image, since we are not invisible clouds of nothingness. A Christian saying we are made in God's image obviously can't be true, it's as ridiculous as saying a black circle is made in the image of an orange starfish. And since this 'Made in God's image' claim is just a lie, it can have no bearing on the abortion debate and how women should behave. The argument that any changes women choose to make to their bodies, like having an abortion, will make them look less like God, that it desecrates their body and offends God is bogus, since clearly they never looked like God in the first place. They have no responsibility to maintain a Godly image that was never real. But perhaps one could still argue that although God looks nothing like us, nor acts and thinks anything like us, our life is still a gift from him, which surely carries obligations. Not so.

A discussion I've had with people over the years is one that concerns gifts, just ordinary gifts, not God-given ones. Although I've had many birthdays, my "loving" Father in Heaven has never once sent a gift. Not even a card with a generic greeting. My therapist and I are slowly working through these issues. But moving on, I contend that once someone gives you a gift then it is yours to do with as you wish. The gift-giver loses control of the gift completely. If you want to throw Aunt Maude's gift of a truly ugly vase into the basement, then so be it. A gift is something that is given voluntarily, for free and without conditions. As such the gift-giver can't then demand what you do with the gift or dictate how you treat it, meaning that God as the gift-giver of life can't demand that we protect and respect that life. So even if we were to accept that life is a gift from God (and we certainly don't) we still wouldn't be compelled to treat it as if God still owned it and had control over it. As the story goes he gifted life to us, and with it complete control of how we deal with that life, and that includes a potential life in a woman's uterus. That's how gifts work. If we want to sell a crappy Xmas gift or do something with our life that God might not agree with, or a woman wants to abort a fetus that God gifted to her (like those unthinking morons who gift people pets), then that is our choice. A gift does not tie our future actions to the desires of the gift-giver. Even if we were gifted our bodies, they're now our bodies, and so it's our choice what we do with them.

All life is clearly not sacred, something that must be protected and respected because it's a treasured gift from God. After all we happily eat much of it (at God's request), and clearly even all human life is not sacred since we as a society have deliberately killed, injured and harmed untold human lives and still do so everyday (often at God's request or urging) in everything from wars, gang battles and violent crime to wilful neglect of those suffering poverty, hunger, discrimination, abuse and ostracism. Most importantly life is not sacred, as in being tied to God, because God doesn't exist. Duh! There can be no compulsion to feel a duty of care to an imaginary being. Life is not sacred, it is simply life, and while many of us do try to protect and respect our own life and the lives of others, it is a choice we freely make, we are not doing it because we feel indebted to some invisible god, and are afraid he'll punish us if we don't, which is your typical Christian rationale.

Pray to End Abortion

When I watched TV news reporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade there was various video footage from all over the US of elated pro-life groups screaming for joy and pro-choice groups just screaming, they were pissed, and rightly so, their justice system had let them down. But I also noticed that several pro-life groups were huddled in prayer, carrying signs that said, 'Pray to End Abortion'. No doubt they were thanking God for kicking Roe to the curb. After so many battles and some small victories, finally with God's help they had triumphed and won the war. Praise the Lord. It was difficult and bloody but finally God's might had won out.

This again showed me that these morons have no realistic comprehension of who or what their god supposedly is. They tell fairy tales to children about their god being all-powerful and all-knowing, but they can't connect that vision of their god to real world events, they have this disconnect between what should be happening in the world if God were real and what has actually happened. If God were real and decided to respond to their tearful praise for overturning Roe, we suspect he would say something like this:

'What the fuck? Why the hell are you thanking me? Do you really think I had anything to do with this, that I'm answering your annoying prayers, that I've been fighting your petty battles alongside you? Have you not read my book? I created the universe in under a week, I made stars and black holes and those cute little Koalas, I created the viruses that cause COVID-19 and AIDS. Do you really think I'd have to toil for 50 fucking years to just overturn a man-made law? And have you not noticed that I kill people that cross me, I don't take them to fucking court!'

Anti-abortion lies

Obviously ignorant Christian dogma provides their core motivation to oppose abortion, but the anti-abortion crowd have no scruples, they'll embrace a lie no matter where it comes from if it might further their cause and lead to some women forgoing an abortion. Listed below are five claims that pro-life activists regularly make to pregnant women, women that might not give a fuck about what God wants but are still naturally worried about the risks of an abortion, and let us quickly state that every single one is false. For more details, please read this excellent article, 'A scientist weighs up the five main anti-abortion arguments'.

• Abortion leads to depression and suicide  (Not true)
• Abortion causes cancer  (Not true)
• Abortion reduces fertility  (Not true)
• The foetus can feel pain  (Not true)
• Reducing access to abortion decreases demand for abortion  (Not true)

'I'm required by law to tell you that by having an abortion it can increase your risk for breast cancer. There is no scientific evidence to support that. Now, the state requires me to tell you that if you were having this procedure there's the risk of complications. I think that that's a good thing to know the risks. The state requires me to tell you that you could have heavy bleeding that can be life threatening and can require you to be transferred to the hospital and need a blood transfusion. If you have bleeding that can only be controlled with removing your uterus, you have to have a hysterectomy and you lose your ability to have babies in the future'.

'Those are all the risks associated but guess what ... those are the exact same risks that are associated with having a baby. It is to say that you are not taking any extra health risks ... so abortion is extremely safe'.

'actively worship Satan and they take the baby out of the womb by the hind leg and they'll hang the baby up in front of us pro-lifers who are there, and then they'll barbecue this baby right in front of us on a barbecue pit. It's macabre, it's satanic'. [17]

Another myth we recently read about concerns the so-called 'heartbeat' bills that many US states introduced to prohibit abortion after six weeks, falsely arguing that, 'this is when a fetal heartbeat can be detected on an ultrasound'. This can be before some women might even have realised they were pregnant. However we read that:

'what a doctor might pick up at six weeks is not a heartbeat. ... At six weeks the four-millimeter-long embryo consists only of clusters of cells that may one day form organs like a heart or a brain. Modern ultrasound technology is now sensitive enough to catch the electrical activity of these cells, which is a sort of rhythmic pulsing. That's the signal of sanctified life that heartbeat bills refer to'. [1]

The rules around legal abortion can be very restrictive in some countries, for example some only allow it in cases of rape. Many Americans believe that even victims of rape or incest should be denied an abortion (and in most of the states that now ban abortion they now are), and even before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the following argument was often heard:

'In 2012, former US representative Todd Akin infamously claimed that abortion shouldn't even be allowed in instances of rape. The female body, he said, had ways of trying to "shut that whole thing down", if the assault was "legitimate". In other words: you can only get pregnant if you enjoy it.' [1]

Just like the ignorant US representative Todd Akin, Islamic law also holds (even today) this belief that women must enjoy the sex to get pregnant, and if a Muslim woman accuses someone of rape and then gets pregnant, this is seen as clear evidence that she must have consented to illicit sex, so it wasn't rape. But worse still, she then gets charged with adultery or fornication, meaning the rape victim is the one who goes to prison. But even if she doesn't get pregnant it is nigh impossible in Islamic law for a woman to win a rape case because the victim must produce four witnesses to the rape [8]. Four. Plus they all have to be Muslim adult males of good repute, meaning women, children and men who the authorities didn't like wouldn't count as witnesses (like an atheist, or even a Christian). Worse still, they also have to witness actual sexual penetration, that is, the erect penis entering the vagina. Simply seeing a man moaning and writhing on top of a woman, or thrusting away under the sheets, like we see in Hollywood movies, is not sufficient, since as we all know, no one is really having sex in the movies, contrary to appearances. So by Muslim logic if the witness didn't actually see explicit penetration then maybe penetration never happened, and therefore rape never happened. Obviously a rape victim could never produce even one, let alone four Muslim adult males of good repute who were all close enough to witness penetration. After all, how could four men of good repute stand by and allow an innocent woman be raped, all the while getting close enough to see all the action? They may technically be witnesses, but their inaction means they are almost as guilty as the actual rapist, not of good repute, and therefore not eligible as legal witnesses.

Lest you think Islamic law is very backward and unjust compared to Christian law, sadly it is not. The only real difference is that laws impacting Christians have recently changed to reflect science and ethics, whereas Islamic law is still back in the Middle Ages. I've read that until quite recently Christians were just as bad in that they also required witnesses to a rape:

'The earliest legal responses to rape in the US were based on European property laws. These early conceptualizations of rape focused on the harm caused to men's property, which happened to be women. Rape was held to standards not seen in other crimes. Into the nineteenth century, most states required two witnesses to convict a man of rape. Through most of the twentieth century, husbands could lawfully rape their wives because wives had no grounds to object to sexual behavior'. [9]

When Rachel read what I wrote above concerning the old belief that women had to enjoy sex and have an orgasm to get pregnant, while she knew it to be true she wondered whether many might be skeptical, and suggested we should justify it. After all, even in her own life, women of her mother's and grandmother's generations often said they got little joy from sex, it was more of a chore than a pleasure, and even though they had had several children, it was sadly true that many had never experienced an orgasm, ever. Likewise the majority had never masturbated and thought the practice disgusting and obscene. And I must agree, when I was a kid growing up society and movies all suggested that sex was really something only men pursued, women were more into finding a husband, not for sex, but as someone to support them, to provide for their needs, to replace the protection their father had offered growing up. These were still times when women earned much less than men and couldn't even open a bank account, and when the contraceptive pill came out, only married women were allowed it. Men that successfully chased sex were called studs and envied by other men, women that accommodated these men were called sluts and vilified, by both men and women. So which view is correct, did women once enjoy sex and then grow weary of it? Did the female body slowly adapt to getting pregnant without an orgasm? That these contradictory views exist is due to a change in the way society (men) came to view female sexuality in recent centuries. Women went from being seen (by the Church) as 'innately lustful and likely to masturbate', as voracious sexual creatures that should be feared, to passive creatures that had little interest in sex, and any claims to the contrary were denounced 'as an unacceptable slur on female virtue'. Women went from enjoying sex to society later convincing them that they shouldn't, it wasn't feminine or lady-like behaviour, and if they did feel pleasure they should feel shame even more. As this interesting article notes, 'A Romp Through Time: Key moments in our sexual development':

'For most of Western history, doctors believed (despite some fairly obvious evidence to the contrary) that conception could only occur when both men and women experienced sexual pleasure; this immutable law of nature was even written into many handbooks for midwives in the Renaissance'. [7]

'Female orgasm officially demoted. ... around 1730, anatomists proved that the female orgasm was not essential for reproduction. The Dark Age of the bedroom had begun, as male medical experts played down the importance of female satisfaction to the sex act and to women's happiness in general. By the Victorian era, doctors were asserting that women were not, in fact, capable of a true orgasm. "As a general rule," intoned the English urologist William Acton in 1875, "a modest woman seldom desires any gratification for herself. She submits to her husband's embraces, but principally to gratify him; and were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved of his attentions'. [7]

'in Victorian times, many men simply did not take women seriously and did not even consider them as sexual creatures capable of orgasm ... But then most men, including doctors, were fairly ignorant of female sexuality. Men enjoyed sex and women tolerated it — that was the natural order of things'. [10]

'My generation was brought up with the idea that, sexually speaking, "men are from Mars, women are from Venus". Men demand physical sex; women want an emotional connection, or so goes the stereotype. Historically, this stark distinction between men and women is relatively recent. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women were presented in literature and medicine as lustful, bawdy, passionate and sexually active, even though, contradictorily, chastity was a much prized and policed trait in young ladies. Female sexual pleasure could be positive, connected to a woman's fertility. ...

In the nineteenth century, however, women's bodies and minds became seen as fundamentally different from those of men. After the French Revolution of 1789, the ideal woman was increasingly presented as passionless, passive and pure, unsuited to physical or mental employment — her sole purpose pregnancy and motherhood. It was in this context that the so-called 'double standard' emerged, a sexual divide that has haunted women ever since. "The majority of women (happily for them)", as Victorian doctor William Acton put it in 1865, "are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind." ... "What men are habitually," Acton concluded, making a distinction that has threaded through popular opinion even into the present day, "women are only exceptionally."

Women who did not fit with this passionless "standard" were nymphomaniacs; they had an abnormal desire for sex. This expansive condition had many symptoms, including lewd behaviour, masturbation and promiscuity, as well as "adultery, flirting, being divorced, or feeling more passionate than their husbands". In 1850s Boston, when Mrs B.'s husband was unable to keep up with her desire for nightly sex, her gynaecologist recommended temporary separation and a host of privations to limit sensuality. "If she continued in her present habits of indulgence," he warned, "it would probably become necessary to send her to an asylum".' [6]

Women need to take back their lives and their bodies because clearly the myth that orgasms are needed to get pregnant, meaning the rape wasn't real, and the contradictory myth that women are not sexual creatures, are both still circulating in society and continuing to do great harm. The more we learn how religion gave men the power to treat women as nothing but property and in the process abuse them, the more we're disgusted by religion and by the men that kept enforcing these barbaric and unjust customs. And as we know these aren't just horrible tales from the distant past, they are still taking a terrible toll today, especially under Islam, but also to a lesser extent under Christianity and Judaism. The fundamentalists of all these religions still believe men have absolute control over women and their bodies. Which of course reflects their latest move concerning abortion in the US.

As another example of this disregard for women, we recently watched the documentary 'I Am Evidence' (2017), which exposed how US Police departments nationwide are regularly refusing to investigate rape cases (over 200,000 at last count), mainly due to the erroneous belief that it was the woman's fault she was raped, like wearing a short skirt to a place where men might be present. So the police were not going to bother chasing the man who had raped her — sorry, we mean had sex with her — when she was the one that did something wrong; or that she actually wanted sex but then later regretted it and decided to make a rape complaint. After exposing the harm suffered by victims even after the rapes and the thousands of serial rapes the police enabled by failing to take the women seriously, the documentary highlighted the ignorance and arrogance of the police attitude towards women by ending with a senior police officer stating that, 'The majority of our rapes that are called in are actually consensual sex'. Which translates as, Women are just sluts and liars. Another documentary on a similar theme was 'The Invisible War' (2012), which exposed widespread cases of rape and sexual abuse within the US military, of how women accusing superior officers of rape are ignored, disbelieved or believed but silenced and usually forced out of military service. If they remain they are continually threatened, intimidated and harassed for not just keeping their mouths shut like a good woman should. One woman accused a general, we think, and rather than prosecute the general for rape they prosecuted the woman for adultery, even though she wasn't married and the general was, found her guilty and dishonourably discharged her from the military. Think about that, to be found guilty the court must have agreed that the general and the woman had had sex, and yet they only went after the woman who might tarnish the reputation of the US military if the truth got out. The military hierarchy does everything they can, and generally succeed, in hiding the rapes and abuse by either ignoring or discrediting the women. And it's not just the US military, the documentary 'The Hunting Ground' (2015) exposed the sexual assaults occurring on US college campuses where the same methods were employed. The women who were raped were told it was their fault for wearing a revealing outfit or for drinking alcohol or for not fighting back (against a much stronger assailant!) Their complaints of rape were ignored, dismissed as trivial and covered up. The educational institutions put their efforts into protecting their reputation so as not to scare away potential students and any investigations that did happen almost always found in favour of the alleged rapist (who was often a money-making star athlete for the college) and not the victim. At one college, after the school dismissed their claims, some frustrated female students published a list of male students that they had accused of rape. A male student challenged the women's view of what a rapist was: 'And to be saying that just because a woman says no and because you have sex, those are the two facts. The woman said no and you had sex. Then are you a rapist automatically because of that?', he asked. Yes, you fucking moron, you would be a rapist, having sex when the woman has said no is the very definition of rape! Following the action of female victims that refused to be ignored and silenced, eventually legal authorities across the US started to take notice and the documentary ended stating that, 'More than 100 colleges and universities are currently under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault complaints'. Of course that means little if those investigations also conclude that the female students were 'asking for it' and their rapes were their own fault. Already 19 Harvard Law School professors have denounced the documentary, denying the claim that sexual assaults are being covered up, or even happening. Certainly not at Harvard! But this sort of knee-jerk denial just highlights the fear of the financial damage to their reputation any admission of a problem might cause. Clearly they still have a lot of work to do before all women receive justice in the US, from the police, in the military and on their campuses.

Another movie we watched recently was 'Flashback' (2021) starring Caroline Vigneaux, a French comedy that, with the help of some time travel, takes an interesting look at some French women who fought for women's rights. The movie begins with Caroline Vigneaux's character, a contemporary French lawyer, getting an accused rapist set free by arguing that it wasn't rape, that his victim clearly went out seeking sex because she had chosen to wear red thong panties. It was classic victim-blaming and it worked, the court accepted that the woman had effectively consented to sex by her choice of underwear, ie she was obviously asking for it. I almost stopped watching the movie at that point, believing it to be such a ridiculous legal argument and easily challenged, surely they could have devised a more believable plot element for these modern times. But I persevered and the movie improved from its shaky opening premise, and we were shocked to discover during the end credits that the 'ridiculous legal argument' was based on a real court case that happened in Ireland, in November 2018. Twenty fucking eighteen. Not 1818. And in Ireland, not in Taliban controlled Afghanistan. As this article explains:

'a 27-year-old man was acquitted of rape during a trial in which his lawyer cited the lacy underwear worn by his 17-year-old accuser. "You have to look at the way she was dressed," defense attorney Elizabeth O'Connell said, "She was wearing a thong with a lace front." After deliberating for 90 minutes, the jurors — eight men and four women — unanimously found the man not guilty.'

The crucial point we want to impress on you with these historical insights is of the destructive thread running through them all, which is the continuing sorry status of women in society, and how these attitudes help distort the abortion debate. Long held beliefs from centuries past about women being the property of men to be traded at wedding ceremonies, about their inferiority due to them being failed males, about women's indebtedness to men (Adam), about them (Eve) being the reason sin entered the world, about rape and witnesses and underwear descriptions, about rape, female orgasms and pregnancy, about how when women say no to sex that's just another word for yes, about little humans called homunculus, about Victorian women and their disinterest in sex, all these entrenched beliefs don't just vanish overnight, especially where the Church is involved, an organisation that is dogmatic and deeply opposed to change, because change would be an admission of error, and when you claim to be infallible (your knowledge source being an infallible god), error is impossible. Thus these old myths, sometimes contradictory, often corrupted, their origins forgotten, just keep circulating, hinted at in sermons, as gossip in church pews, as macho arrogance in pubs and as old wives' tales, and they continue to do one thing, one very negative thing, they allow men to maintain their superiority over women.

Belief in these bogus old myths continues to oppress women and emboldens the anti-abortion movement which in turn has a wider impact on society than just the fate of an embryo, they work to maintain the status quo, that women should remain under man's thumb. And yes, it has to be acknowledged that some (perhaps many) women do believe they are inferior and that male control over their lives is wholly justified. Women, unfortunately, are standing alongside men in protests outside abortion clinics and beside them in court challenges opposing abortion and are effectively arguing that they should be standing several paces behind the men, because they support God's absolute control over man and (as God's proxy on Earth) man's absolute control over women ... and their bodies. These women, like a dog following meekly behind his master, have succumb to the sexist and misogynistic myths that have informed much of history. Continually reinforced by religious sermons and outbursts from macho men, they have come to believe in their own inferiority. And they teach it to their daughters. It's somewhat like that coping mechanism called Stockholm syndrome where a person develops positive feelings toward their captors or abusers over time. There are women today who, like in centuries past, still believe they shouldn't be allowed to vote, that their place is in the home, that their husband should control their lives, even beat them if they displease him, that women who wear revealing clothing and go out alone only have themselves to blame if they are raped, and obviously, they should be denied an abortion if they get pregnant. These women, like the men that control them, are a lost cause, there is no reaching them. Religion has so corrupted their minds that you'd have a better chance teaching a toaster how to count. The hope for a better future for women, one of equality, rests with the younger generation, where a sizeable proportion of young women are absolutely sick of being treated as second class citizens and are intent on making real changes. In the US, where traditional thinking is hugely influenced by religion, this is not going to be easy or a quick fix, but as religion wanes and feminism advances, we believe (or at least we hope) that the ignorant dinosaurs in power will eventually meet their asteroid, or at least retire with Alzheimer's, and let new voices take over, both women and men that fight for justice for all, equally, with no favouritism towards men, and obviously no denial of abortion on demand for women, or any other equally archaic restrictions.

It's just disturbing that many US states currently deny a woman an abortion even if she was raped. As if their rape and then finding they're pregnant wasn't traumatic enough, the last thing they need is good ol' Christian boys telling them that their pregnancy was their fault — Next time wear your chastity belt instead of sexy panties you tramp! (which by the way is another myth, women never worn them. Chastity belts that is. Well, actually they didn't wear panties back then either, women didn't start wearing underwear until the late 19th century). Today the important buzz word around sex is the idea of consent, clear consent between both parties before anything happens, and rightly so, but in some US states that haven't managed to outlaw abortion in cases of rape, they have tried to use the notion of consent in an obscene way. It was noted in the 2018 documentary 'Hollywood: No Sex Please!' that, 'Today in the Trump era, the governor of Arkansas wants to remove from women who are raped, the right to an abortion without the consent of the man who raped her'. What a patriarchal, misogynistic and totally unjust attitude, to give the final word on an abortion to the rapist, the monster that raped her, the criminal that sexually violated her and got her pregnant. If such a law were passed, and now with the defeat of Roe v. Wade it's not unthinkable, it would almost certainly deny a rape victim the right to an abortion. This is because this law would demand that the rapist must give his consent, but to be in a position to give, or deny, his consent, the man accused of the rape must first confess that he is guilty of rape, that he is indeed the woman's rapist and the one now holding the power of consent. Of course no defence lawyer would advise his client to confess to a crime, and no accused rapist would be foolish enough to do so. The accused rapist would be solely focused on having the rape charge dropped or at least being found not guilty, he would have no interest in his victim's pregnancy or her request for an abortion, thus he would never confess. Since he denies being the rapist he is not legally able to give his consent to an abortion, and without that consent the abortion cannot go ahead. Even if the accused is eventually convicted of rape, and he then has nothing to lose by giving his consent, the delay as the case worked its way through the court system would mean the woman had already been forced to give birth or had at least passed the point where an abortion was legally possible. On the unlikely chance that the accused felt remorse and did immediately confess, he would of course still be tried for rape and his defence lawyer could well advise him that rape is a very serious crime, and that the jury and judge might well look more favourably on him at sentencing if he didn't add murdering an unborn child to his of list crimes. Meaning it might be in his best interest to withhold consent for an abortion. A law framed in such a way that it gives absolute power to a rapist and ignores the welfare of the victim speaks volumes as to the utter contempt those that try and enact them must have, not just for women, but for women that have been violently raped. It truly sickens me that such ignorant and uncaring people hold positions of power over vulnerable women that they have sworn to protect, and rather than allow rape victims the right to make their own choices in life, they instead demand they bring a child into the world, raising him alone, and be reminded of their horrific rape every time they look into the eyes of that child and see the eyes of their rapist staring back.

Where to from here?

Well, in the US the latest ruling is merely a battle that has been won or lost depending on which side you're on, a battle that has no chance of deciding the outcome of the abortion war. The legal actions by both sides will continue apace, the abortions will continue, merely the places one can access them will change. Many will now be legal and safe out-of-state abortions rather than local abortions, but sadly many women will also be compelled to seek local, illegal and potentially expensive and unsafe abortions. As Gloria Gray, owner of the West Alabama Women's Center said, 'Closing the clinics is not going to stop abortions. Women are going to have abortions, it's just that they are not going to be safe and legal'. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned clinics in many states were fighting legal challenges every day to remain open, and it was noted that:

'It doesn't matter if we've won the right to legal abortion, if there is no physician that will provide an abortion, women will be back where we were in the '50s, where the number of deaths from illegally induced abortions was the highest death rate. It was the cause of the most deaths of women in their reproductive ages, from the ages of 15 to 45. That is what women died of more frequently than heart attacks or smoking or car accidents or domestic violence, that was the predominant cause of death'. [17]

'In countries where abortion is legal, only one out of every hundred thousand abortions leads to death. In countries where abortion is illegal, the death rate can be seven hundred times higher. The World Health Organization estimates that worldwide, one out of every eight maternal deaths is due to an unsafe abortion — most of those in areas where abortions are illegal. When a service is made illegal, many of the safety standards regulators insist on go by the wayside. If safety of [women] is a concern, it makes more sense to regulate [abortions] than ban them'. [42]

When I mentioned this regressive change in US abortion law to a casual acquaintance last month, he replied that it's not our problem and wasn't worth worrying about since we don't have any say in US politics … and whatever the outcome, it won't affect us here in NZ. Oh really, US political decisions can't or won't affect countries outside their borders? Ask the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan if US political decisions affected them at all. We dare say that the US legalising abortion in 1973 lent considerable weight to NZ's decision to do the same in 1977. Now that this repeal of Roe has gone ahead, any legal lessons and strategies that were effective and might work in NZ will be quickly embraced by NZ pro-lifers keen to repeal our abortion laws. We dare say many of them jumped for joy on hearing the news and will be brain-storming deep into the night on how they can use it to their advantage. Just as anti-abortionists in the US have been fighting for the last century and longer to first keep abortion illegal and then after that failed in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, to then try and overturn that law, NZ anti-abortionists have been doing likewise. Prior to the pandemic pro-lifers were protesting one day a month outside my local hospital where abortions are performed (thankfully well away from the entrances). Religious groups in the US opposed to the teaching of evolution and trying to get Intelligent Design taught in science classes are in close contact with similar groups in NZ, and are continually advising on strategies to extend their influence and sending free resource material to them and to NZ schools. Even those morons protesting COVID-19 mandates that recently occupied NZ parliament grounds and had to be forcibly evicted were getting protest advice from similar US groups, with many protesters proudly wearing Trump hats and waving Trump banners and placards that were clearly sent over from the US, as if our politicians would be intimidated by their wannabe connection to Donald Trump. News and articles about untold debates in society usually start by listing how many other major countries around the world have already legalised or banned some action or product, meaning if it made sense to them we should probably consider it too. It will be no different with abortion.

When the US ruling was announced in NZ every political party made some sort of statement denouncing the move, saying that it was a backward step as far as human rights go. Every political party except the National Party that is (one of NZ's two major political parties alongside the Labour Party), a party that voted against abortion reform in 2020, and a party now led by Christopher Luxon, an evangelical Christian who has stated he believes abortion is murder. When questioned about their silence, he said that, while he is personally pro-life, the party will not be looking to change NZ abortion laws while he is leader. Note that the clear implication is that the party would like to outlaw abortion, but apparently the time is not yet right, which is why his promise only applies while he is leader, and what is a politician's promise worth anyway? At around the same time National MP Simon O'Connor announced on Facebook that he applauded the US ruling, saying 'Today is a good day', and his post was immediately 'Liked' by another National MP. Luxon made O'Connor delete the post (but probably sent them both a fruit basket afterwards). The NZ National Party is starting to look increasingly like the US Republican Party, focused on God, traditions and history.

This abortion reform in the US should be seen as a heads up for NZ, that the abortion debate here is definitely going to heat up, and rather than not worrying about it, we need to start preparing our defences lest a vocal minority (like in the US) suddenly whips a basic freedom away from NZ women. Well before the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court looked even remotely possible, activists like Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League realised that apathy could be their downfall:

'There is nothing more dangerous to a democracy than when people take their rights, their liberties, their freedom of religion, their freedom of speech, their right to choose, whatever fundamental right it is, they take it for granted, and that they do not participate in the democracy in preserving those liberties. Because there will always be forces at work to try to take those liberties away. And right now there is a strong ultra-conservative, religious, fundamentalist movement in this country led by groups, like the Christian Coalition, that are just determined to return women to their Biblically ordained role, as they see it, which is to, by and large, procreate, and not to be equal partners with men in the society, but be under the control of men. We must spend our time educating the grassroots, inspiring them to involve themselves'. [17]

So we need to stay alert. Like all things religious we've found the abortion debate to be no different in that most religious folk have little understanding of the issue. Not only are they ignorant of the scientific, philosophical and legal aspects, they are equally ignorant of exactly what their holy book says. They take the lazy stance that they don't need to concern themselves with the details, their church told them that God say's it wrong and that's good enough for them. While the right to an abortion may be safe for the moment in NZ, if we let our guard down the mindless zombies, led by the head zombie, Jesus, will quickly overrun our defences and we'll again be burning people at the stake before you know it.

For your viewing pleasure

If you're interested in understanding the contentious atmosphere around abortion in the US, we can recommend three documentaries we've recently watched, obviously all made prior to the latest ruling. 'Reversing Roe' (2018) moves from an historical look at the US abortion debate right up to 2018, and even back then the documentary revealed that both sides believed that the Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade was quite possible if not probable. 'Trapped' (2016) is about so-called 'TRAP' laws, or 'Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers' laws, which refer to legal roadblocks created by pro-life legislators to restrict access to abortion in America. 'The Janes' (2022) looks at America prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and an underground group of young women who helped women who were seeking safe, affordable abortions, even though they were illegal.

Update: Since writing this essay, we've since viewed two more informative documentaries. 'Lake of Fire' (2006), at 2h 32m is a black and white documentary showing both sides of the abortion debate, something that took 16 years to make. It is graphic in places, showing real abortions and also interviewing doctors that were later shot dead, and the deviant pro-lifers that murdered them ... umm ... because murder is wrong and taking a life is never acceptable, unless you're the one taking it apparently. The documentary doesn't explicitly choose a side, but, in our view, any intelligent person with a modicum of empathy can't help but opt for pro-choice. The Christian pro-lifers get an equal chance to convince viewers, but again in our view they only come across as deluded fools with no compassion, with some being downright dangerous. The other documentary, 'Abortion: Stories Women Tell' (2016), has women explaining 'the choices they've had to make regarding their pregnancies'. It's sad that some women wanting an abortion elect not to have one solely because they fear going to Hell, which is as stupid as never disagreeing with anyone so that Santa will keep you on his 'good children' list. It's depressing to think that the irrational fear of a fantasy being can ruin people's lives.

On a lighter note, there are two movies we've watched that explored America's backward and a harmful attempt to control the reproductive rights of women, even though at the time the US Constitution still granted the right to abortion and contraception. 'Plan B' (2021) is a comedy starring Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles. After a condom mishap a teenager desperately seeks the Plan B pill to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, unfortunately she lives in a US state which allows pharmacists to refuse to give customers emergency contraceptives. She has just 24 hours to hunt down a Plan B pill in America's heartland. Overturning Roe v. Wade has just made that movie plot something a lot more women will soon be able to identify with. As this article explains, 'Emergency contraception, such as the Plan B pill, and some IUDs could be the first birth-control methods under restriction, solely based on the language of state laws that outlaw abortion "from the moment of fertilization".' It seems that in the US many people falsely equate emergency contraceptives and IUDs with abortion. 'Unpregnant' (2020) starring Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira is another comedy. A 17-year old teen finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, and with abortion outlawed in her state, must embark on a road trip from Missouri to New Mexico to access an abortion clinic. Again this movie plot is something that will soon become all too common for many women in the US. Unfortunately it is a trip that many will be unable to make, and as we've mentioned, it is also a trip that some anti-abortion state legislators are attempting to make illegal.

Update: Again, since writing this essay, we've since watched two more pro-choice movies where the theme is abortion, both comedy/dramas. 'Obvious Child' (2014) stars Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy and Gaby Hoffmann, in which a stand-up comic in her 20's is suddenly faced with an unwanted pregnancy, and while waiting for an abortion is forced to confront the realities of life. In 'Grandma' (2015), a young teen (Julia Garner) is likewise shocked by an unwanted pregnancy, and needing $630 for an abortion scheduled for later that day, asks her Grandma (Lily Tomlin) for the money. Unable to help financially, they go in search of people that might be able to lend them the money. While the intention of these movies is to entertain (which they definitely did), there's obviously a serious underlying message that the makers want viewers to also think about, made clearer by various events and discussions in the movies, that women should be able to make their own choices regarding abortion and contraception, that their reproductive lives shouldn't be dictated by strangers bent on pleasing their god, or by men (the sperm donors) that don't want anything to do with the future child but at the same time still believe that any decision regarding abortion will be made by them, and yet any cost (either for an abortion or in raising the child) will be borne by the woman alone.

Update: OK, three more movies we've since seen dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, all serious dramas this time. Starring Anamaria Vartolomei, 'Happening' (2021), is a French movie set in France in the 1960s when abortion was still illegal. Based on real events, it follows a young woman's efforts to seek a termination and features scenes of self-administered abortion attempts and backroom abortion procedures, graphically portraying what desperate women will do when safe, legal abortions are not available, risking their lives and a prison sentence if caught. 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' (2020), a drama starring Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder, sees a desperate 17-year-old travelling from restrictive Pennsylvania to New York City with her cousin to seek an abortion. It realistically portrays how women must endure unwanted attention and abuse and suffer the consequences. The third, another foreign language drama, is 'Lingui' (2021), starring Achouackh Abakar Souleymane and Rihane Khalil Alio. In an African Muslim nation where abortion is illegal and morally condemned, a 15-year-old girl seeks an abortion aided by her impoverished mother. Female Genital Mutilation also features, referred to as circumcision. The movie highlights the harm that women are subjected to by men and their oppressive theocracies, reminding us that some places are still living in primitive times. Like parts of darkest Africa and parts of the US. Unlike the comedy movies, one should view these dramas like the nightly TV news, you watch them to be informed, not to get a laugh, to know what we should be angry about and what we need to fight against. As America has demonstrated, even places where human rights seem secure can have them stripped away by ignorant god-fearing forces if we become complacent.

Conclusion

An incredulous stare, that's what we present when people debate abortion with either of us and defend their pro-life stance with clearly religiously motivated statements, all linked by a belief in God and in blindly doing what God wants. To us, and surely to any sane and rational person, someone saying that we should accept that abortion is wrong simply because some misogynistic tribesmen back in the Bronze Age said so is just totally preposterous. Remember that they also said that it was wrong to eat shellfish or work on Saturday and right to own slaves and to kill your own children if they were disobedient, so clearly their take on morals, on right and wrong, was majorly screwed up. Worse still, the men that claimed these things were not basing their view on sound reasoning, but on the demands of a tribal war god called Yahweh, a jealous and barbaric (and invisible) god that supposedly spoke to them from behind clouds and burning bushes, or perhaps a little more convincingly, from within dreams. Likewise any so-called arguments of fact derived from God's pronouncements, like life begins at conception and that souls exist, can be quickly dismissed considering this is the same god that said the world was flat and the entire universe was created in a mere six days. Our response is to state flatly that you cannot win a debate on real world issues by quoting the ignorant and backward views of some fantasy character from some ancient book of magical tales. That's like arguing why we shouldn't colonise space by using Darth Vader as an example of the dangers we would face. Do these fools not realise that to win an abortion argument using God's commandments they would first have to demonstrate that God is actually real, only then might we feel compelled to consider God's claims? And note that we said consider, not blindly accept and obey. So for us any abortion argument that is clearly based on an ancient book of fanciful tales concerning a fictional god is worthless and irrelevant, and can be immediately dismissed as such. Human society has come too far to again start taking dubious advice from an invisible sky fairy, be his name Zeus, Osisris or God. As adults, for us to sit down and seriously discuss abortion with the implication that God is real would be like having a tea party with some three-year-old girls and their dolls, and sincerely agreeing that their make-believe tea and cake was delicious.

Free access to abortion is a vitally important issue that can have serious impacts on women's lives if it is denied, so Christians and pro-lifers shouldn't hijack the debate by always turning it into a silly lecture about their imaginary god. Abortion is about the welfare of real women, not about Christian fantasies. If you can't present an argument that deals in the science and ethics of abortion, if, unable to think for yourself, you must keep referring to what some ancient god demands, then please leave the room and let the women whose bodies you are trying to control make their own choices, since who knows their bodies, their situation, and their capabilities better than them? Let each woman decide for herself to suit her own circumstances rather than forcing them to forgo an abortion simply to please your imaginary friend. Or at the very least you should request that your god comes down and expresses his demands personally. Is that really too much to ask, that God delivers the bad news himself rather than forever delegating the task to a vocal group of ignorant lackeys, who let's be honest are just guessing as to what their god wants, since not only won't God counsel pregnant women considering an abortion, he won't even talk to his obsequious followers and reassure them. Why is that we wonder? Too busy, away at a conference, doesn't speak any of our modern languages, doesn't give a shit about abortion, or ... maybe he's constrained by reality? By that we mean, beings that aren't real can't pop around for a chat.

Any argument about abortion (or anything really) that includes God is dead in the water. The stupidity and gullibility of those that present them astounds us. If they mention God you can walk away confident in the fact that you're not missing anything important. Them shouting after you that God is against abortion is as childish as shouting that Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck are both against abortion. We both genuinely feel embarrassed when Christians start talking and reveal the nonsense they believe in, and they almost seem pleased to admit that they have no good reason or evidence to support their stance, that it all rests on blind faith, as if that fatal shortcoming somehow makes their argument stronger rather than weaker. Seriously folks, God-fearing anti-abortionists need to be reminded that we're not still living in the 10th century, that we've moved on, learnt new things, and that threats of God's wrath, like witches' curses, don't work any more, and are becoming rather tiresome.

But of course pro-life threats are anything but tiresome when they hinder a woman's access to an abortion, they can be intimidating, fear-inducing, stressful, destructive, discriminating, costly and even life threatening. An abortion is a health procedure and women should be able to arrange one with no stress and no judgement from others and undergo the procedure legally, safely, calmly and economically with the full support of the health system.

The arguments of the pro-life, anti-abortion groups fail because they are based on irrational Bible myths and their behaviour in their own lives is hypocritical, their actions simply don't match their rhetoric. If Christians were genuine, sincere and truly committed to serving their god then they would make every effort to ensure every potential life was protected, not just the ones that require the least commitment on their part, that is, telling strangers with unwanted pregnancies what they must do, an effortless demand that doesn't affect their life in the slightest. It's like how after a disaster strikes naive Christians think they're helping the victims when they say, 'I'll pray for you'. Christians do the bare minimum to try and keep on God's good side and ignore the innumerable things that God actually demands they do. Now don't get us wrong, we're thrilled that they generally don't obey their god, we just want to highlight their hypocrisy by them only protesting against abortion, when things like contraception, homosexuality, masturbation, blowjobs, handjobs, anal sex, abstinence pledges, celibacy, menstruation and menopause are each causing the loss of more potential lives every day than an abortion ban could save in a thousand years.

It's easy to say that abortion destroys potential life, but if people truly consider it to be a heinous sin, one that greatly offends God, and that their refusal to physically oppose it would see some of the blame transfer to them personally, then obviously they are duty bound to jump into action. But the crucial and important thing here is not abortion per se, let's not lose our focus, it is the loss of potential lives, that is the crux of the matter and what truly angers God (apparently ... because he won't speak up). If you're not going to put as much effort and commitment into not just outlawing but actually preventing contraception, homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, abstinence pledges and celibacy, and into controlling menstruation and menopause (by harvesting and freezing women's eggs for example), as you do abortion, then you are failing monumentally. Your abortion activism will be woefully insignificant in the scheme of life, a huge waste of your time and effort that only served to harm the lives of an unfortunate few who found themselves burdened with an unwanted pregnancy.

Of course the whining response would rightfully highlight not only the enormity of the task but the utter impossibility of the task, the sheer futility in trying to not just outlaw but physically prevent all the many ways that incalculable potential lives are snuffed out every second of every day. Just as we can't prevent masturbation, homosexuality or contraception, no matter what laws we might pass, it's likewise quite irrational to outlaw abortion, knowing full well that it will still continue illegally and often dangerously, harming many women who are far more important than mere potential lives. It's quite unjust to take away a woman's right to choose, to try and control her reproductive choices, to effectively state that her body belongs to someone else, and in doing so put her at real risk of harm. It's quite sexist to try and prevent women from ejecting a single potential life when men eject hundreds of millions with every orgasm and nobody complains. But then they say it is a man's world. We say that needs to change.

OK, so here's what we suggest. This abortion debate has got dangerous, lives are being put at serious risk (real lives that is), so we think it's time we got something in writing from the big guy, preferably on stone tablets with a verifiable digital signature. Even though there won't be any cell phone or carrier pigeon coverage where God is, we're told God can certainly hear our requests, so until we hear back from him we stop pretending we know what he wants, mysterious plan and all that guff. We assume men and women are equal, that both have bodily autonomy and we let them both make their own choices. No one, men especially, get to decide on the behalf of others. Any adult can do and say anything they want as long as it doesn't cause serious harm to others, where others means other real people, not invisible friends or fantasy beings, or living cells like sperm, eggs or zygotes that merely have the potential of becoming real people. Until the contrary is demonstrated, we should assume that the natural world that we experience is all there is, that we are free agents with free will and are not being pushed around a giant invisible chessboard by some manipulative god. We should assume that our lives are ours to do with as we wish, and that it is quite unjust for any person to dictate how a woman handles a pregnancy. And don't even think of telling us not to masturbate or use contraceptives. Until God, or Zeus, Thor, Apollo, Baal, Ra, Maui, Quetzalcoatl or some other god turns up, with some appropriate ID, and explains the divine law around abortion, which reason suggests is unlikely to happen any day soon, then we should simply conclude that they don't exist and therefore we are not the property of some god and not bound to follow some bogus, vague and poorly translated old holy book. Think about it, which makes more sense, to believe that the world we can see and touch is real and impacts and influences our lives in very physical ways, or that an invisible supernatural world run by an equally invisible god is what is really controlling our destiny, and that all the things we think are real and natural are just stage props that this god has manufactured to fool us (like those dinosaur fossils)? An invisible god watching us in the shower? ... nah, we don't think so. Meaning that we should all agree that everyone is free to lead independent lives and that no one has the right to make unreasonable demands of others, and anyone thinking they have the right to dictate to a woman concerning her pregnancy is most certainly making an unreasonable demand. So, until we hear otherwise, the world is ours, our lives are ours, and access to abortion is a right women deserve.

If you disagree, then grab a hobbit and piss off on a holy quest, find your god and drag him back here to tell us in person what his demands are. If abortion is a divine wrong then we need to hear that from the boss, not from some ignorant underling fearing for his own welfare. And when your god doesn't respond to your pleas, and you can't find him, and you can't understand why he won't help your anti-abortion activism, maybe you'll finally grasp that he isn't real, like Zeus, Ra and Santa Claus before him. But of course we jest, the religious mind is not capable of critical reasoning, only of blind obedience to age-old superstitious nonsense. Rational adults make decisions based on reason and evidence, religious adults meekly bow to ancient tales of invisible gods threatening them harm. 'Abortion is wrong, abortion is murder', they scream, 'God says so', even though he doesn't; not in person, not in his actions, not in the Bible or on Twitter.

Authors:   John L. Ateo,    Rachel C.
Copyright © 2022, by the 'SILLY BELIEFS' website. All rights reserved.

Readers' Comments:    Add a Comment     

References