old crosspost: ‘Abortion is murder’

‘ABORTION IS MURDER!’ screams the ham-faced Christian lady outside the Planned Parenthood clinic, wielding a homemade protest sign covered with icky photos of late term abortions.

‘LIFE IS SACRED!’ whines some inconsistent so-and-so while munching on a chicken sandwich.

So for the next few moments, I’ll believe them. I’ll assume for a moment that abortion is murder and should be treated as such. A few wacky conclusions that logically follow from this position:

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…

…the most pointless superhero ever?

To be clear, it’s the delivery I’m objecting to here, not the message – circumcision is a medically unjustifiable procedure most often performed solely to satisfy the parents’ aesthetic or religious preferences. It’s not something to which I’d ever subject my sweet little (hypothetical) baby, and I wish more parents would follow suit.

That aside, the comic is just fucking weird – using artistic media to protest circumcision is great; it’s the idea of a superhero whose existence revolves around babies’ crotches that I find lol-worthy.

I initially kept my mind open upon hearing about it, thinking that the comic was more tongue-in-cheek than cheesy, overwrought melodrama. I thought wrong.:

Cutting Corners

This image makes me recall a conversation with a former friend about a year ago, in which she (a chronic procrastinator, with her piles of unpaid parking tickets & overdue power bills) expressed total shock at the concept of late-term abortions, musing about what kind of person would “just wait around”until the last minute to schedule an abortion.

Presumably, the sort of person who can’t afford to take several days off work to have and recuperate from an abortion. The sort of person who didn’t realize she was pregnant until the second trimester. Or the sort of person who doesn’t own a car.

Several months ago, when I aborted, I bypassed all of the above – no gas-guzzling car ride to a clinic flanked with screeching protesters; no awkwardly invasive sonogram. …because I couldn’t afford it.