Gather Up Your Bombs

So the Victorian government will probably legalise abortion sometime soon. The Bill has been put forward, it's being debated, and the odds look to be - just - with the pro-choice side.

Of course I mean "legalise" in the sense of "remove from the Crimes Act", rather than the sense of "allow to happen with no repercussions for those involved", since that's what happens already and has done for years.

This is, naturally, controversial, with the usual noises about baby-killing from the usual people, like Bill Muehlenberg, who is himself an excellent counter-argument to the "what if Beethoven had been aborted?" argument. And of course Mirko Bagaric has weighed in, saying abortion should be completely criminalised and nevr allowed under any circumstances; given his previous forays into public life, most likely he is worried that if we abort too many people, there won't be enough left to torture. Or maybe he is thinking, what if Tony Mokbel had been aborted? Then Mirko would have nobody to pay him large amounts of money to try to avoid the justice system. Oh, Mirko, how terrible that would be, and what a moral giant you truly are.

Pro-lifers are wheeling out the usual schtick: zygotes are people too, if something looks a bit like a baby it is one, culture of death, God God God etc.

The funny one is the argument that more people will have abortions now. Imagine all those girls, desperate for the fun and excitement of an abortion, who are prevented from having one now by the fact there is a never-enforced law against it. The minute it's no longer a crime they will rush out and fulfil their perverted abortionary lusts. Why wouldn't they? Abortion is something these kids do for kicks! So we mustn't make it legal. Let's keep things as they are, with abortion being available pretty much anytime anyone wants it, rather than changing things to make abortion available pretty much anytime anyone wants it. Otherwise the abortion rate will surely skyrocket!

It's sometimes hard, when I write, to decide whether to make jokes about a situation or simply put down the stream of bellowed obscenities running through my head when I listen to pro-lifers like Bill "Feel the Love" Muehlenberg.

This is the curious thing: here are people who believe the government is sanctioning murder. They think the aborted foetuses are in fact fully-fledged people. They think thousands upon thousands of children are being slaughtered every year. Wow, that's pretty awful. It's like Rwanda or something. Right here in our country. Better do something about it, right?

"Let's write a letter to the Herald Sun! That is LITERALLY how angry the issue makes me!"

Seriously? You think this is mass infanticide and you're writing letters? You're asking for Medicare funding to be withdrawn? Some of you, like Mirko, would even allow exceptions for victims of rape or incest and so forth.

Doesn't seem very moral of you, Mirko. You're willing to let children be killed because their mother was raped? That's terrible!

Imagine if people were taking their children to the doctors to have them killed. One-year-old, five-year-old, ten-year-old children. Imagine if this was approved by the government. Imagine if this happened thousands of times a year.

Horrible, yes?

This is what pro-lifers think is happening now. According to them, anyway. They say that's what it's all about: killing children who have as much right to life as any of us. Killing people. It's not, they say, about wanting to control women, or about wanting to punish those nasty sluts who get themselves pregnant because they can't keep their legs together. According to them, they believe that government-sanctioned homicide is occurring daily.

And they write letters and opinion pieces and have civilised debates about it, and argue over government funding, and how to "reduce the rate", and talk about the psychological effect on the woman, and say maybe it's OK to murder kids if mum got pregnant in an unpleasant way.

Seriously? If you think this is a slaughter of the innocents, you should be taking to the streets, screaming it long and loud, getting violent, doing everything you physically can to prevent the little kiddies being killed.

How can you sleep at night, pro-lifers, when you think of all the children being murdered and all you did to stop it was a fifty-word email? How do you sleep? Hey, you know it's happening; it's not going on a thousand miles away in the Third World. It's right here in your town. You can go down to the clinic, you can block the doorways, you can grab those potential pregnant murderers, take them away at gunpoint and hold them till they deliver. You can have a go at taking out the politicians who allow this with a sniper rifle. Sure, you could get hurt, you could get arrested, but don't you have to try?

In short, pro-lifers, blow up a clinic, or shut the fuck up.