A Time for Change

I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object…Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today’s intellectual field, they call themselves ‘pro-life.’

— Ayn Rand

According to CNN, another of the Bush measures bit the dust as Barack Obama struck down the rule “prohibiting U.S. money from funding international family planning clinics that promote or provide counseling or referrals about abortion services.”  Thank God!  President Obama rightly stated that family planning aid had been used as a political football and stated that he had no desire to continue”this stale and fruitless debate.”  

The policy says any organization receiving U.S. family-planning funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development cannot offer abortions or abortion counseling.

“It is time we end the politicization of this issue,” Obama said. “In the coming weeks, my administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world.”

President Obama signed the policy on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which declared that  a woman’s right to an abortion during the first trimester of er pregnancy fell within the right to privacy protected by the 14th amendment.  This policy was reversed by Reagan in 1984, cancelled by Clinton and reinstated by Bush in 2001.

And with one stroke of the pen, President Obama brought us out of the dark ages of women’s health and into the light.  It is so sad that people like Bush politicize this issue.

The pro-life movement, after all, is really anti-woman.  They are so overly zealous about “protecting the unborn” that they blindly ignore the living, breathing women who have every right to make choices about their own bodies.

“For the past seven years, UNFPA funding has been a victim of false accusations and misinformation that had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with sound policy,” he said.

“Approximately 180 industrialized and developing countries, including all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, contribute to UNFPA. The United States was the only country to withhold funding for political reasons.” 

This is why I will never vote for any of these religious zealots again or for people who owe them.  For far too long the Republican party has been held hostage by the extreme  religious right.   I cannot trust people who ignore the reasonable and rational for the emotional.

I wonder about people who would murder, injure and maim those who perform abortions, which has been happening for 30 years.  How does that jive with their pro-life views.  The unborn have a right to live, but the fathers and mothers of children living on this Earth have no right to continue to live their lives?

What about the women who are living today?  Do we not value them as highly as we value the unborn?  Are they not more valuable to us because they live and breath?  

It is unfathomable to me how these people can be so vehement against abortion and then say, at the same time, that they want less government in their lives.  What they really want is to superimpose their own zealous religious beliefs upon all of us, whether we believe in the same manner that they do or not.  That is not what our country stands for.  The United States of America was built upon fundamental individual freedom and they want to take that away.  if they ever succeed, a huge part of the beauty of being a citizen in this country will die.

Thank you President Obama for bringing the rational and reasonable back to Washinton.

“One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives.”

— Ayn Rand ["A Last Survey — Part I", The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975.]