(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Hey, Anti-Abortion Fascists: Being Born is Not Always a Blessing! [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-04 One of the most common foundational claims of gestation slavery advocates is that being born is always a “blessing,” no matter the circumstances. When little girls are raped and impregnated, Republican politicians and pundits describe it as an “opportunity from God,” a “blessing for the child,” a “chance for a new person to be born who could grow up to be president of the United States.” Gestation slavery advocates refer to rape and incest pregnancies, along with all other unwanted pregnancies, the same way they refer to horrific accidents in which children and other innocents die. “It’s God’s will,” they say, adding that humans are “not allowed to question God’s decisions.” A rational person wonders why a god would kill children or allow them to be raped. Or, if the god is so opposed to abortion, why does it let millions of miscarriages happen? If I was a loving, all-powerful, omnipotent god, I’d arrange the world so there was no rape or incest. When I’ve been an abortion clinic security escort and in other debates with gestation slavery advocates, I hear the following memes shouted or they’re on placards: “How would you like it if your mother had aborted you?” “Your mother should have aborted you.” The second statement is usually uttered as a shrill invective. Looking in the fevered eyes of gestation slavers, leaping back from them to avoid spit that flies out of their mouths as they scream “whore” at women seeking reproductive health care, I take the statement as a threat. What they’re really saying is, “Somebody should kill you, because you’re a ‘baby-killer.’” The first statement, posed as a gotcha rhetorical question, has an answer the gestation slavers don’t like and try hard not to understand. You see, I prefer to decode and sometimes defy cultural and evolutionary programming. One installed program is that most mammals have an inherent, desperate desire to stay alive. Of course, most humans fervently cling to life, even in the worst circumstances. We may or may not “fear death,” but we’re sure that once our body dies, we’re gone from this earth in any rationally provable form. The good news is, human existence has been litigated by scholars, religionists, philosophers, ethicists, so we have reliable answers to the dilemmas posed by human reproductive choices. The core debate regarding birth is between pro-natalists and anti-natalists. Pro-natalists spout various memes that include some or all of the following: Humans are a “sacred” species, better than all others. Being born is a blessing no matter what. The good in life outweighs the bad. The “creator of the universe” has given us the entire planet so we can increase our population numbers and dominate all other organisms and the biosphere itself. Every person should be grateful to be born. In contrast, anti-natalists believe in a qualitative approach to human birth. The most astute scholar who has written about this topic is Australian academic David Benatar. His two books, “Better Never to Have Been,” and “The Human Predicament” have been vilified, censored, banned, suppressed worldwide. When you study his books, you see why they cause so much alarm—Benatar directly challenges the claim that being born and staying alive is a blessing. His core argument is remarkably similar to that of Pali Canon secular Buddhism, which says life for all sentient beings is pervaded by “dukkha.” Dukkha is most commonly translated as “suffering.” A much more accurate definition is that the Buddha was noting the obvious fact that all biological organisms are subject to the stressful push-pull, pleasure-pain dynamic created by having a “body.” Hunger, thirst, cold, heat, aging, windstorms, firestorms, predatory attack, earthquake, loss of kin and other unpleasant and potentially injurious or fatal conditions are included in common things we experience. All creatures suffer, but humans suffer most because we live in sentient, psychological, cultural, historical, anticipatory awareness. The 100 billion animals slaughtered per year in the United States to feed non-vegans suffer greatly; there’s evidence that pigs, cows, and other exploited animals have anticipatory awareness to know ahead of time they’re about to be beaten, crammed into a cattle truck, or gutted while still conscious. But humans have a wildly over-amplified awareness of past and future suffering. Not only that, our suffering doesn’t come solely from biologic realities such as thirst, hunger, injury, and aging, it comes from psychological and spiritual spaces. There’s a vast, ever-expanding list of things people are angry, sad, upset about and want to change. I’ve NEVER met even one human, including monks in monasteries, self-help gurus, New Age cult leaders, wealthy people, priests, pastors, actors/artists/musicians, who is truly content all the time or even most of the time. Indeed, one of Benatar’s most powerful arguments is that when you do a deep dive into your moment-by-moment consciousness, if you’re a truly self-aware, honest person, you learn that your ratio of happiness to unhappiness is tipped in favor of dissatisfaction. When I first read Benatar, I tried his self-assay method by keeping track of my mood, body sensations, thoughts, and spirit as intensively as I could for entire days or weeks. I graded my overall feeling in the moment as happy, neutral, or unhappy. Of course, there are gradations of each of these states of being. Happy could sometimes mean “ecstatic.” Neutral could sometimes mean “calm,” or “bored.” Unhappy could range the gamut from mild irritation to full-on depression. After monitoring myself for nearly six months and analyzing the data, I found my moments of true happiness were a tiny fraction of my overall consciousness. About 70% of the time, I was either neutral about the moment, or dissatisfied. Further, the intensity and consequences of happiness versus dissatisfaction indicated I was much more aware of negative states than positive ones. This tendency is understood by behavioral biologists as being evolutionarily adaptive. It helps you survive if you’re slightly more aware of negative situations and potentials, because those things can injure or kill you; they trigger our built-in fight or flight response. Our current form of “journalism” and media reflect this. Notice “news” is mostly scandals, crime, accidents, political corruption, environmental degradation, and other sad stuff. The same goes for movies, online content, and television. There are hundreds of shows about bad things, but very few shows about wonderful things. The more intelligent and aware you are, the more you suffer. The more you know about reality on a planet plagued by wars, ecological destruction, interpersonal and systemic injustices, the more scared and/or upset you become. Ironically, Benatar’s dire view of human existence, through which he concludes it’s far better not to be born than to be born, is at least partially affirmed by most religions--especially the religions whose followers most oppose abortion and contraceptives. We must remember that a fair reading of the Bible, Koran, and other religious “holy books” proposes that humans used to be perfect and blissful. Then humans made terrible mistakes. The first two brothers? One murdered the other. This, after their rebellious parents directly insulted, disobeyed, and lied to the creator of the universe. Thus began human experience in a “fallen world” so evil that the creator god later killed everything in it, except for those lucky creatures that booked passage on an ark. Life on earth is not acceptable, the Christian Bible makes clear. Humans are born sinners and get worse and worse as they grow older. All manner of losses, wounds, betrayals, injuries, pain and “sins” will be experienced by every human born. Only the murder of a god’s son, or following a “prophet,” and a life of constant fear, self-loathing, and compliance to religious dictates saves you from eternal damnation in a lake of fire or other supernatural punishment. Our true home is heaven, the Christians say, reminding us of when the Christian charlatan Oral Roberts demanded millions of dollars from his rubes, threatening to “die and go to heaven with Jesus” if they didn’t deliver the cash. Seems to me that if Oral had been a “true believer,” he’d have rather been a happy guy with Jesus in heaven than a rich sinner on an evil earth. Of course it’s no surprise cognitive dissonance and deep irrationality plague religious people who believe every fetus should become a born human. Their beliefs make absolutely no sense. They believe... The fetus in the womb is innocent of sin, bound for heaven. But as soon as the fetus is born to become a baby, it’s a sinner and will be a sinner the rest of its life. Unless the new human is fortunate enough to find out about and comply with the creator’s commands, the creator will send it to hell forever. Take a moment to consider the Christian anti-abortion position as outlined above. If the salvation of a human soul and avoidance of a lifetime of inevitable sin and suffering are the goals, THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO THE FETUS IS FOR IT TO BE ABORTED. The aborted fetus will never experience the joys of life but more importantly, it will never experience life’s hardships, nor will it cause any. The aborted fetus is forever innocent, in heaven, with its god. How cruel it is to insist this fetus be instead born a sinner into a sinful world! You can bet I’ve left gestation slavery screamers with their mouths hanging open, unable to come up with even one rejoinder to prove me wrong, when I explain abortion is the best thing that can happen to a fetus. That’s when the anti-abortion person fires off what they hope is a brutal personal attack, suggesting my mother should have aborted me, and if she had done, how would I feel about that? The rational, logical response I give them is: “If my mother had aborted me, I’d never have known about it.” I go on to explain that if I had been aborted, I would never have: Experienced sickness, heartbreak, aging, fear, pain, loss, hatred, etc. Polluted, consumed, and otherwise contributed to anthropogenic mass extinction. Harmed any sentient being. “Not having been born would have spared me, the world, and my mother a lot of pain,” I tell them, sometimes adding, “I wish she had aborted me, or never got pregnant with me in the first place.” This utterly blows their tiny minds. They can’t understand why someone would not want to be born to suffer, age, and die in the world they describe as “evil and sinful.” Benatar’s books are fascinating and challenging. If you’re familiar with existentialism and existential despair, Benatar’s rationale will be familiar to you. His presentation is modern and irrefutable. Each of us gets to decide if it was good that we were born, and whether we want to keep on living. If we had full body autonomy, that decision would be an inalienable legal right, and would apply to abortion, contraceptives, and euthanasia. A fertile female human has an extremely consequential decision to ponder: should I create a new sentient being that will inevitably suffer in a dystopic world. In future articles, we’ll talk more about a professional due process approach to truly “planned parenthood.” The main thing we want opponents of abortion and contraceptives to understand is the decision to create a new human rests solely with the woman. Forcing a woman who does not want to be pregnant to stay pregnant and deliver a baby is not just fascist, cruel, misogynistic gestation slavery, it’s also guaranteed to add to the suffering of the woman, and our world. The ethical goal is to work towards a paradigm in which every child born is wanted child, whose parent or parents are fully eager, skilled, and ready to raise a healthy, stable human being. For these reasons and many others, we must fight harder to defeat gestation slavery, to ensure that abortion and contraceptives are free, safe, and easily available to every female on this planet. Because being born is not always a blessing, and anyone who claims otherwise is a dangerous fool. 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