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The Goddess Speaks
GOVERNMENT should not have the right to decide who lives and who dies. Government shouldn’t
be playing GodOne of my colleagues recently made the point that to support legal abortion and oppose legal execution is to be logically inconsistent. His argument was if you are prepared to take a life in one case, why not the other. It's an argument commonly used to discredit pro-choice activists as illogical liberals, although that was not my pro-choice colleague's intention.
Nevertheless, the flaw in his conclusion is it assumes the issue in both cases is the willingness or unwillingness to sacrifice a life for some greater good. But that is not the issue. The issue, in both cases, is excessive government power.
The right to safe and legal abortion is necessary to assure a woman's sovereignty over her own body. What the majority of people believe about when a child gains life is irrelevant. Whether we as a society feel abortion is immoral is irrelevant. Whether health, rape, poverty or other factors are involved is irrelevant. Or to put it more precisely, all those things are entirely relevant, to the individual and her community. None of them has any business being legislated.
Abortion is a political issue only for purposes of control. It has nothing to do with wanting to save lives. If that sounds too conspiratorial to you, ask yourself the following question: If men could get pregnant, would we be having this discussion?
The pain most of us feel at the thought of destroying an unborn child would presumably be as strong, but the idea of making abortion illegal would vanish.
What abortion and capital punishment have in common is power. Legislating restrictions to abortion gives the government the right to interfere in a woman's control over her body. Legislating a death penalty gives the government the right to kill out of vengeance.
I do not deny there are evil people in the world who do terrible things. How could I when the families of Byran Uyesugi's victims are fresh in our minds? But I don't recall any of them wanting the state to kill him. It doesn't help victims and it doesn't help our effort to create a community based on healthy values.
We have a right to live in a society that believes and acts on the belief that murder is wrong.
There are those who would say abortion is murder, but that is an article of faith, not fact. In addition, so many of those same people also support capital punishment that one is forced to realize it is not life in general they are fighting to protect. They are fighting for the power to legislate their view: that "innocent" life is worthy of protection and "sinful" life is not. As a sinner, I strongly disagree.
Democracy is a beautiful and fragile thing. Its health demands constant vigilance against legislative tyranny.
It is dangerous to yield to the state sovereignty over our bodies and it is dangerous to yield to the state permission to kill out of vengeance.
Stephanie Kendrick is assistant features editor
for the Star-Bulletin.
The Goddess Speaks runs every Tuesday
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