So today I was watching the special order speeches on C-SPAN this evening while making dinner. The group that I happened to hear was a pair of pro-life/anti-abortion Republicans. I wasn't paying particular attention due to preparing my dinner, but I heard Steve King (R-Iowa, 5th District) quote a person on the pro-abortion side as wanting abortions to be "safe, available and rare". He responded by saying that "rare" was certainly the right direction, but actively ignored the other two adjectives. I found this bizarre because making medical procedures unsafe is in no one's interest. If the potential mother dies in the procedure, the fetus is almost certainly going to bite the dust as well. Even if the mother is merely hurt or rendered fallow, this is still not in their interest as it would likely lead to such a woman being less likely to want to conceive again. I suppose it could be some sort of twisted desire for "divine justice" on the pregnant woman which might prevent others from seeking such procedures.

I suppose that I'll never really understand the anti-abortion movement since it is fundamentally at odds with my thinking on long term sustainability and population control. We either need to cut the birth rate or increase the death rate in order to make Earth a long-term place for humans to live. To me, this makes abortion the sort of thing that should be encouraged (though probably not compelled [probably]) rather than something that should be made into a huge social stigma. Then again, I am not exactly in the majority on this issue.

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