THE ABORTION PILL:
Something to Moo and Cluck About?????
3/14/06
Once a month, as the full moon sails high in the sky, millions upon millions of human eggs are hoping to get lucky. They've waited a lifetime, since the birth of their host body, the mother ship, sitting dormant in their spherical holding cells, on the port or starboard sides, waiting for that lucky month, the one and only lucky month, when they will get to be the Chosen One to travel down the great fallopian tube to an unknown world beyond, the uterus, where they might just meet up with a white knight in shining armor who would join with them in holy matrimony and stay genetically adjoined with them forever.
The egg and her knight, once joined, would make a short journey together and then take up residence in the most magnificent of places, a fleshy paradise on the wall of the uterus, where they would live and grow and bask in each other's love, glowing with energy and harmony, multiplying and manifesting a perfect life together that all started in one beautiful moment of passion.
Meanwhile, on a nearby farm, in a henhouse, a rooster is having his way with a gorgeous specimen of femininity. She is a Rhode Island Red, with nice big round hips, sleek legs and shiny feathers. They are having a moment, a miracle. The egg inside her body is being fertilized. In the morning, she will cluck and squat and push out into the world a neat round perfectly formed package filled with her hopes and desires. If nature works perfectly, and she sits patiently enough on the egg keeping it at just the right temperature, she will soon have a child.
At the very same moment, a dairy cow, pregnant, lies sleeping on a soft bed of hay inside a dry barn. It matters not to this mommy-to-be that she was artificially inseminated from the ejaculation of a bull, procured via a finger stimulating his prostate up inside his bum. She is pregnant, happy, feels kicking and maybe even some Braxton-Hicks contractions.
In Massachusetts (my home state,) Gov. Mitt “I'm pro-life” Romney awakens in the middle of the night, fixes himself a glass of warm milk.
President Bush, flying high in the night sky in Air Force One, is served a free-range organic helping of poached eggs on white toast with salt and pepper.
The egg and her matrimonial sperm make their way down Fallopian Lane, still on their honeymoon, when suddenly, the mother ship, now lapping up Ben and Jerry's Phish Food Ice Cream out of the pint container and smoking a Marlboro Light, takes Plan B, the Morning-After Pill. She is a widowed mother of three, and though feels passionately about the man she just made love with, knows he isn't marriage material and knows she can't afford one more child. She's already behind on the mortgage. So in turn, the joined egg and sperm now find themselves in a sea of hostility. A storm of hormones rush at them from all directions. The uterus, which was supposed to be nurturing and wonderful, i.e. God's Country, is instead abrasive and hostile. It rejects the lovers. It contracts and it belches, not allowing them to take shelter and implant in its wall. It forces them out. They falter, they flail, they choke, they die . . . they end up a goopy bloody mess of death and despair in the middle of a Kotex maxi-pad two days later.
Daybreak. A half-asleep farmer trudges into the henhouse, awakens the Egg Queen, just having had laid her prodigy, by snatching the egg away. It's this hen's version of the morning-after pill reality. She clucks, she complains, the rooster sticks his chest out and tries to peck the farmer's leg. But he is wearing a super-strong rubber boot. He gets away unscathed, and still half-asleep, a wire basket in hand full of beautiful organic free-range eggs that he will sell later in the week to a local gourmet foods store. Yes, his master card bill might just get paid.
Weeks later, the dairy cow, now suckling her newborn son, sees a similar pair of rubber boots approaching her. The farmer has come for mommy cow's calf. In order to continue producing milk, she must give birth once a year, and the suckling calf must be taken from her so that her large and full breasts can be yanked and her milk expressed into a communal milk tank twice a day. Her young boy is slaughtered. Luckily, nobody ever tells her that. She thinks about him every day. Her milk helps to produce a delicate variety of smoked gouda that is sold in a chain of specialty stores called “Planet Moon” up and down the eastern seaboard. Her owner, who works days at a local plastics manufacturing company because he can't make ends meet just being a farmer, will use the extra money to buy his wife a new car. The one she is driving at the moment is leaking gas and won't pass inspection.
This is reality. An egg is not an egg is not an egg. And those touting pro-life politics when it comes to the morning-after pill are killing plenty of fertilized eggs. Abortion? Birth control? Agriculture? Human domination of the planet? Aren't they all relatively similar?
Tout whatever birth control politics you want. But this is the way of our culture. Brie cheese equals birth control. Chicken Caesar salads equal birth control. Chocolate ice cream in a cone on a hot day equals birth control.
Civilization equals birth control.
I suppose in other words, anyone eating eggs in the morning must be pro-choice. It only makes logical sense.
3/14/2006
Cute, but most people consider themselves totally different form "dumb" animals. Which is not entirely true. Humans have much more complex intellectual abilities for abstract thought and use of language. Whether that justifies Plan B or not is another issue. I think the fact that the fetus is so small at that point and the body often miscarries, makes it very hard to argue against Plan B unless you are Catholic or a fundamentalist following God's holy plan.
3/14/2006
You're right, we're talking about a couple of joined cells at that point, and until that moment that they implant on the uterine wall (8-10 days after conception from what I understand,) the woman's body does not even produce the hormones that would signal "positive" on a pregnancy test. For all intents and purposes I wouldn't consider it a "pregnancy" being interrupted -- yet. That being said, I do sympathize with not wanting to intentionally flush out a potential embryo after conception, I don't think that's just a Catholic or fundamentalist notion. It's for that reason that I choose not to either take the pill or use an IUD -- those both allow for conception some of the time as well. I certainly would never support politicians who would make that choice for anyone else though.
Thanks for your comment.
-Jacooz
3/15/2006
Technical note: The hormones in the birth control pill prevent ovulation, so no form of conception takes place.
3/15/2006
I think that's a misconception, so to speak. It prevents ovulation most of the time. In case one slips through, it also prevents implantation in the uterus. Anyone know more about this?
-Jacooz
3/16/2006
Good one! Sad............
love
ao
5/19/2006
Regarding whether or not the pill prevents conception after ovulation (should ovulation accidentally occur), from my understanding it does. As explained to me by a doctor upon my concern that a low-dose pill was TOO low he explained in great detail that the pill does many, many things besides prevent ovulation. It creates many hormonal changes within the uterus that cause it to be a very hostile environment that also prevents implantation. That is acceptable to me because I believe preventing implantation is fine; I believe that it's AFTER implantation that an "official" pregnancy has occurred and a new, separate life has begun.
