The Incubation Generation

Thu May 23, 2019 1:37 am

These past few weeks have been tumultuous in the fight not only for human rights, but most of all, especially, for women’s rights. A number of states — Alabama, Indiana, Georgia, Ohio, and Utah, most notably — have passed this nation’s most controversial abortion legislation to date. For example, Alabama’s abortion bill threatens doctors who perform abortive procedures with a felony and 99 years in prison; it also stripped allowances in case of incest or rape. Now the only way a woman can get an abortion in Alabama is if her life is in danger or the fetus is suffering from a “fetal anomaly.” Similarly, Georgia’s new anti-abortion bill is extreme in that the cut-off time is six weeks, a period of time at which many women don’t even know if they’re pregnant. The penalty for obtaining an abortion is “imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 10 years,” though it is not clear who will actually face prison time, doctor or woman. Of little comfort is the fact allowances for incest and rape remain. Ohio’s new abortion bill is direct and blatant spit in the face of science. Ohio’s bill removes allowances for incest or rape, strips insurance coverage for birth control, or “devices that prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum,” and says the only allowance for women is in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, a procedure may be performed in which the “fertilized ovum” is moved from the fallopian tube and into the woman’s uterus — here’s the kicker, though: such a procedure isn’t even scientifically possible.

What is even happening?

The national race to pass new legislation began last fall, after President Trump chose Brett M. Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, adding what some predicted would be a fifth vote to uphold new limits on abortions.
-- The New York Times, 05/15/2019

It would seem conservative-majority states are hurriedly making out their anti-abortion legislation because with Kavanaugh now on the panel, it’s more likely their bills will succeed at challenging the long-standing Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973.

Could there be another angle?

Other recent news follows the low birth-rate in the United States. In fact, it hasn’t been this low in 32 years. In 1936, following the Great Depression, fertility was 75.6%, compared to 59% in 2018. The CDC attributes this alarming trend to dropping fertility rates.

Birth rate is important for humanity as a whole because it determines how well we are replacing ourselves. According to NBC:

For the nation’s population to reproduce itself at current numbers and remain stable, the total fertility rate would need to be at least 2,100 births per 1,000 women. So, essentially, for the population to remain stable, each woman needs to have at least two babies. At 2,000 there would be enough children to replace fathers and mothers. The extra 100 is to account for deaths.

A publication titled Abortion, illegitimacy, and the American birth rate, written by J. Sklar and B. Berkov and published in 1974, just one year after the Roe v. Wade ruling, provides some interesting and potentially illuminating information. The summary of the publication reported the following findings:

In sum, it appears that legal abortion depressed overall fertility, but particularly illegitimate fertility, by giving women an opportunity to terminate their pregnancies when other means of birth control either had not been used or had failed. If legalized abortion had not been available, an estimated additional 39,000 illegitimate babies and 28,000 legitimate babies would have been born in 1971 in the United States. While this makes up a small part of total births (3,500,000), the illegitimate births prevented represent almost onetenth of all out-of-wedlock children born in the country in that year. In addition to preventing these births the legalization of abortion appears to have reduced the incidence of pregnancy-related marriages and thereby may have helped to limit subsequent marital disruption. Finally, legal abortion prevented large numbers of illegal abortions from occurring. Our data indicate that well over half-most likely between two-thirds and three-fourths-of all legal abortions in the United States in 1971 were replacements for illegal abortions. Further declines in illegitimate birth rates for the country as a whole will depend, in considerable part, on the extent to which legal abortion becomes more readily available and more widely used. Theoretically, greater use of efficient contraception could also cause illegitimate fertility to decline. But there are many reasons why women do not use efficient contraception even when they know about it and have access to the materials (25). Even though the use of abortion throughout the nation is now legalized by the Supreme Court decision, this does not necessarily mean that services will in fact be everywhere more readily available. Our interstate analysis suggests that should the liberalization of abortion laws be reversed, not only would there be an upturn in illegal abortions and pregnancy-related marriages, but also a marked rise in illegitimacy, particularly among women who do not have the means to obtain an illegal abortion.

Could it be possible this is some desperate attempt to force women to complete their pregnancies, will be damned?

Whatever your feelings on the subject, and despite all the knowledge of the science of pregnancy, abortion and adoption readily available at our fingertips, there is still such a stigma surrounding them — that women obtaining abortions are using them consecutively in lieu of birth control; or that these women are promiscuous gluttons of men. Factually, however, this is not the case. So the rest of this post will be educational, correcting the incorrect myths that are shaping these disturbing laws.

Let’s clear the air about abortion

Abortion is consistent with lower crimes rates: a study conducted by professor John L. Donohue III (Stanford Law) and economist Steven D. Levitt (University of Chicago) conducted a study in August 1999 that found a correlation between legal abortion an low crime rates. How did they reach this conclusion? “The abrupt drop in crime coincided with the coming of age (roughly 20 years later) of young people born after the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Also, in states where abortion became legal before 1973, the drop in crime started sooner. States with high abortion rates have experienced more dramatic declines — the authors estimate 15 percent higher declines — in crime. The researchers also observed a decrease in the rate of crime among young people. Young people ages 18 to 24 engage in more criminal activity than any other age group. If the size of the 18-to-24 population decreases, whether because of lower birth rates or because of any other event, the number of crimes also drops.”
“About half of U.S. abortion patients report using contraception in the month they became pregnant,” reports Guttmacher Institute (January 11, 2018). Forcing women to have babies, even when they took all necessary precautions and still became pregnant, just because tender little sensibilities can’t handle the fact that some kids are mistakes is heinous.
Abortion laws do not stop abortions from happening: they only make them more unsafe. In fact, according to Guttmacher Institute, “In countries where abortion is prohibited altogether or permitted only to save a woman’s life, 37 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 had abortions,” whereas “in countries where abortion is available without restriction as to reason, 34 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 had abortions.”
Most women seeking abortions are at or below the federal poverty level, according to Guttmacher. Let’s say a pregnant poverty-ridden women decides to go ahead with the birth because she’s surrounded by bullshit like, “Adoption is still an option!” or “There’s nothing that could make me murder my child” or “There’s all kinds of programs that will help you raise the baby.” Once the baby is born and she applies for WIC and food stamps and government subsidized healthcare, the people who shamed her into having the baby suddenly are the same ones saying, “Quit having kids if you can’t support em!” and “Why should she get food stamps?! She ain’t workin, she’s too busy having babies she can’t afford!”
House Bill 182 in Ohio, proposed by Rep. John Becker, proposed two instances in which health insurers could cover abortion procedures: one of those circumstances was if the mother's life was in danger, or if the mother experiences an ectopic pregnancy, which is when the zygote begins to form in the fallopian tubes. The bill states that a procedure can be done to "reimplant the fertilized ovum into the pregnant woman's uterus" -- this procedure doesn't even exist.
What doctors call a "heartbeat" at six-weeks is actually just the electrical activity of a group of cells. According to Sarah Horvath, OB-GYN with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:

“At six weeks, the embryo is forming what will eventually develop into mature systems. There’s an immature neurological system, and there’s a very immature cardiovascular system... [the activity] is a group of cells with electrical activity. That’s what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system.”

Just some horrid adoption statistics
Let’s give the good-ole adoption sitch a look-see. The following stats are courtesy of National Foster Youth Institute:

More than 23,000 children will age out of the U.S. foster care system every year;
After reaching the age of 18, 20% of the children who were in foster care will become instantly homeless;
Only 1 out of every 2 foster kids who age out of the system will have some form of gainful employment by the age of 24;
There is less than a 3% chance for children who have aged out of foster care to earn a college degree at any point in their life;
7 out of 10 girls who age out of the foster care system will become pregnant before the age of 21;
25% of children who age out of the foster care system still suffer from the direct effects of PTSD;
Tens of thousands of children in the foster care system were taken away from their parents after extreme abuse;
8% of the total child population of the U.S. is represented by reports of abuse that are given to authorities annually;
In 2015, there were over 20,000 young people whom states failed to reunite with their families or place in permanent homes.

The following stats are courtesy of Adoption Network:

A separate study to describe the characteristics of girls in foster care who exhibited sexually abusive behavior focused on evaluating the sexual abusive and aggressive behaviors of 155 female children and adolescents, aged 4-17 years, and found that:

84% of the girls had been physically abused;
95% were victims of ongoing abuse by the biological parents;
81% reported sexual abuse;
68% were sexually abused by more than one individual;
95% were neglected, and 51% of that neglect was classified as severe and chronic;
92% had 2 or more changes in caregivers by age 16;
Over 1/3 (about 39.2%) experienced 4 or more different living situations that lasted less than 1 month;
100% of them exhibited sexually abusive and inappropriate behaviors toward other children, including exposing themselves, violating personal space, sexually aggressive remarks, sexual touching without permission, and sexual touching of much younger children.

Conclusion
Grow up. Accept the fact that some kids are unwanted. Accept the fact that it’s none of your business what a woman does with her body. By “saving” these fetuses from abortion, you’re actually condemning them to a life in which the cards are statistically stacked against them. How many of the half a million already in foster care are you personally going to adopt? Or are you gonna just wait for them to age out so you can continue bitching about the poverty levels and the amount of people on food stamps and WIC and living in Section 8 housing? A statistic you’re contributing to by sticking your nose in the extremely personal and private decisions of another individual.

Sources