Surgical Sexist Birth Control: Abortion

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[dropcap]A[/dropcap]mong the sins of the Trump era is the selection of a new supreme court judge which will, according to programmed hysterics, doom America beyond its present rapidly failing rule over a global capitalism becoming more deadly by the moment. Of course any court decision, like all others in our market culture of profit and loss, will benefit some at cost to others and that is true whoever sits in the powerful position of administering justice according to the laws of markets and private profit. Until we become an actual democracy and public benefit takes precedence over any private gain, that will be the case. But among the present motivations toward panic engineered by established power to keep decent people obsessed with an individual when a system threatens collapse on all our heads, to some the issue of legal abortion is deemed most critical to the survival of the species. Or a segment of our one race with two sexes: Women. Well at least a minority of women from the materially developed world since it should be understood that most women would not have an abortion if it were offered to them for free or even if they were paid for it, legally or not.

The breakthrough in seemingly gaining control over their bodies offered by the legalization of abortion was indeed a major benefit to many women but seen as an attack by many others, both on their morality and women’s bodies. Most important and too often not considered is the terrible state of birth control itself when women are forced to undergo surgical procedures which remove living substance from their bodies all because our system has been unwilling to create safe, efficient, affordable birth control to men. And it is men who, during fertile years, are able to provide life-creating seed every single moment of every single day of every single year, while women can only procreate during a few days out of every menstrual cycle. So who needs to wear an internal birth control device or even more profitably, take a pill every day? Guess? While men are still limited to what is called the barrier method, which translates to millions of condoms and billions of dollars, but also lots of pregnancies when mistakenly or incorrectly applied. This primitive technique may have been developed by cave men using animal membrane but while it is now a massive profit maker for pharmaceutical companies it isn’t nearly as effective as birth control pills, which sell and profit far more in that market but still occasionally fail and more important force women to take a drug almost every single un-fertile day of their lives. The real “barrier” is unfortunately lodged between our ears.

Wouldn’t it make sense to develop a birth control method for men at least as functional as the pill is for women? Given that fertile men are daily producers of the stuff of life while women remain so only for a few days a month, why haven’t we created such a method? We have, but it isn’t profitable enough so it isn’t on the market and women will have to continue to ultimately have a surgical procedure which removes living matter and future life from their bodies because selling tens of millions of pills makes more sense to investment capital than providing one injection a year to a man. How’s that? One shot a year, like a flu shot, for a man, and we could have it but for the market forces of private profit and the public good be damned. 

 Such a drug has been studied, worked on, developed and tested for many years, and a medical science laboratory has claimed full confidence in its safety and need but keeps running into more market demands, especially from big pharma, for more hundreds of millions of dollars spent on testing thus producing no chance of profit in our magical, sacred, and far more important than life marketplace. But isn’t the magic of the market what has brought so much progress, high tech, comfort, safety and security let alone excess wealth, to so many of us? Yes, while also bringing regress, low tech, discomfort, wars, menace and insecurity to even more others, with both lists producing private profit to investors in health, weapons, peace, food, shortage of food, shelter, lack of shelter, etc. Isn’t it wonderful?

But let’s just stick to the subject of alleged freedom for some women to pay the price in ending life long before it functions as conscious human by, formerly, scraping out their insides with surgical tools while now applying a vacuum cleaner that sucks out the unwanted zygote, or whatever our original form has evolved to by the time she is able to get to a doctor or facility or business to perform the “procedure”.

And in the 21^stcentury of scientific advances almost beyond credence for many of us, women are still not only subject to this primitive form of birth control after the fact of potential life creation, but socialized to see it as a freedom and form of liberation? Hello? Not to mention the socially divisive issue it has been and remains with people driven to extremes of fanatic violence, bigotry and contemptuous disrespect to make an already potentially painful experience that much more a producer of social animosity when we most need a coming together of humanity.

Imagine what might happen if we put this issue to a vote, instead of relying, in usual American fashion, on minorities winning a court case and in the process displeasing and alienating the majority which never had any say in the matter? Women and men, not only in America but the world over, would vote for the once a year injection and probably in overwhelming numbers. To bring about this true liberation for women, and men as well, not just some individual judge but the market forces of capital will have to be replaced by the democratic forces of humanity. That obviously calls for changing something much larger than one or another representative of capital in a white house, before we reduce our planet to a massive global outhouse.

email: fpscott@gmail.com

—Frank Scott