Bacon & Abortion
by J. Hancock.
I love bacon.I deeply appreciate that there’s a raft of choices surrounding this charming meat product.I also like that we live in a country where if someone doesn’t want to eat bacon, they don’t have to.More bacon for me.I’m pro-choice the choice to eat, or not eat bacon. Your body, your bacon, your choice.We all love choice. It’s comforting that we can make important, or not so important decisions about our lives. If we go to uni, or if we get a job right out of school. If we chose to get married, or live the life of a singleton, or anything in between. If we chose to rent, or buy. To go to a burger joint, or get one of those sad looking salads from the supermarket.Today, we have a bunch of lovely and sincere people marching in Wellington for “choice”, for something labelled “reproductive rights”.Well, who is against choice? Who is anti-choice? Kim Jong Un?What about people who are against reproductive rights? Those zero-population people? I’m not cynical enough about humanity to seek to deprive you of making babies. Those are future tax payers right there!We need to be realistic. Everything is a choice. Some choices not so great, like slashing the tyres of your neighbour’s car, because he chooses to rev it in the shared driveway at 2 in the morning. Tyre slashing is a choice. Not so appropriate, and definitely not legal.You could choose to cheat on your life partner. It’s a choice. It’s perfectly legal. Just not really very nice.So back to the people doing the march for “choice” thing. When someone says they’re “pro-choice”, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know they’re talking about how they support the supposed right to an abortion. Abortion. That socially awkward conversational topic everyone likes to ignore, and has nothing to do with the wonderous pig product, bacon. I’m sorry, but sometimes we must put on our big kid pants and have uncomfortable conversations.And what’s an abortion? It’s the either surgical or medical destruction of a unique human being that happens to be minding her own business, hanging out, in the uterus of another human being. As nature intended and evolution designed. Nothing to do with religion, or weird head scratching philosophy, it’s just science. We were all there once, everyone you love, everyone who annoys you, even my inconsiderate neighbour.Those people marching for “reproductive rights”, they’re marching for the supposed right to destroy another human being, a human being who is their own child.They can dress it up in whatever empowering language they want, but hands down that’s not a great choice.Perhaps then, instead of marching for this, we, as a society, need to start offering people genuinely caring and authentically humane options. Offering tangible and life-affirming choices to women facing such a crisis that they think destroying their own child is the best option for them.The reality is simple, for all the rhetoric we want to dress thisissue in, abortion isn’t a choice like eating bacon. There’s a vital need for honest exploration of exactly what this ‘choice’ is, and the reality of that ‘choice’ for all who enter abortion clinics to make it.