Hey hey! Welcome to my humor blog! Join us on a madcap romp through the world of strange science, fun facts, and human foibles! Now let’s talk about abortion!

Oh. We’re not supposed to talk about abortion. It’s a “touchy” subject, kind of like Hell is “toasty.” I just got to thinking about it on account of all the so-called “heartbeat bills” that are getting passed that criminalize abortion at the stage a fetal heartbeat can be detected, or about the time when a woman starts feeling bloaty and crabby for no reason. 
I suspect the whole heartbeat thing has to do with how we romanticize the heart. It’s where we imagine love is, it’s what we paint on our valentines, it’s how young girls dot their i’s. Seems like a good place to draw a line, but here’s the thing: any line we draw is going to be arbitrary. Even the moment of heartbeat detection depends on what device you use to detect it. Are you bent over a belly with a warm stethoscope, or jamming a wand up a personal area? Is a heartbeat the beat of a heart, or a flickering of electrical activity in a group of cells that aspire to be a heart?
Doesn’t really matter. The only thing that we ought to be able to agree on about abortion is that we can’t agree on a thing about it. It all depends on what we as individuals believe about human life, and its preciousness or insignificance, and that’s personal. Many people abhor the thought of snuffing out even potential human life, and there we’re getting into unfathomable territory: the existence of the soul, and the moment of its inception. Is it here, at the eight-cell stage? At the kidney-bean stage? Is any of this obvious? Some people believe it starts with the gleam in the father’s eye. That it is sinful to obstruct the safe passage of a raft of sperm cells on its glorious emission.
That’s why the one thing that has been proven to dramatically reduce abortion numbers across the board–the provision of free birth control–is still controversial.
Heck, whether you believe in a soul at all is not a given either.
I myself tend to the non-preciousness side of the scale. I think a viable dodo egg is far more valuable than any human blastocyst. It’s a supply-and-demand thing in a world choked with people. But that’s just me. I also would have no trouble deciding whether to snatch an infant out of a burning building, or twelve jars of unimplanted embryos. No trouble at all.
But here’s the other thing I believe about abortion. I believe that there are some politicians who know in their maturely-beating hearts that abortion is a great sin. That is why they got into politics. But I believe there are far, far more politicians who thunder on about abortion, with trembling fingers and quavering voice, and don’t actually care at all; might even have underwritten a few. For them, abortion is a lever to move as many voters as possible to their party so they can do what they really care about: assure that the vast wealth of the country remains in the hands of the few.
You might think your legislator is doing the Lord’s work, and that’s your right, but maybe he’s just working you over.