We have gotten way too serious about abortion and the other bad parts of the human procreative process if we are really proposing that any sex without the intent to create progeny is bad. Yes abortion is bad, that isn't the issue! It is just better than giving the prudes in our society the power over women's bodies that laws forbidding abortion always create. Nothing in my life is as certain as the fact of government excess in controlling people's bodies when the power to insert itself into that level of our private lives is handed to it. It has always amazed me that the very people who rail against the governments attempts to control guns that have only one purpose, killing, want the same government to control women's bodies which were designed to bear children in this way. It goes to show the anti-abortion forces value their guns more than their women's freedom. Then of course the curse of human efforts to control our fellow man and woman is always with us. How about the child the anti-abortion folks cry. How about the child after it is born into a world where there are no people who want it I reply. And so on and so on the irrational discussion perpetuates itself. It is irrational to propose that the fetus has no relationship to the child. It is equally irrational to propose that the control of women's bodies in this way does not constitute an establishment of religious belief on the bodies of women who do not share that belief.

This dispute is all about the establishment of religion in a secular government. It is our religious leadership that promotes the use of government power to ban abortion in every case. I see no agnostics or atheists in the anti-abortion crowd. I do see religious leaders in the pro-choice movement but they are rare. The purpose of this issue is to make those who believe in taking care of every child born in our society look like they don't really care about children after all. The real truth is that those who are the strongest foes of abortion have no agenda related to child health care or education except to see to it that they pay as little of the cost as possible. The very same people crying, "oh the poor child" in the case of an unborn fetus will deny the pregnant mother the smallest social services related to her pregnancy. Why is it the governments business what she does with her fetus if the government is unwilling to offer services that will make its life viable before during and after its birth? Either the government has a real stake in the life of that child that lasts for as long as it is vulnerable or none at all.

Perpetuating this non-debate is in the interests of the people who propose legislation or judicial action to end abortion. If they get their way there will be the inevitable excess in government intrusion into our personal life. That excess will bring the inevitable backlash. So as long as they support the end to abortion but never achieve it they win. If they actually achieve the end of abortion they begin to lose. No one looks good defending abortion; abortion is not the real issue. More children in Africa lose their lives every year to Aids and Malaria than have been lost to abortion in this country in the last decade. Money small enough to be unnoticed by our Government could reverse that process of death by disease. Yet we spend our money dropping bombs on the children of Iraq rather than save the children in Africa. It is not human life that the anti-abortion politicians are interested in preserving, but the power they wield in the lives of our citizens. Power is the disease of the anti-abortion crowd and that power once it is given them will pervert our nation's respect for privacy.

Winning elections with non-issues is becoming the mainstay of politics in this nation. Abortion is a non-issue if society offers sex education and real viable birth control options, but the same people who oppose abortion oppose those solutions also. They want to tell all of us when sex is OK and for what reasons. They also want to weight the dice so women have less control of when they get pregnant once again, as they had before the advent of birth control. I think that constitutes an establishment of religion more damaging and perverse than any other being contemplated by the right wing of our nation.

Try to remember that your sex life and the women in your life are more personal than your gun the next time you vote. Also try to remember that the several million children living in poverty in this nation and the hundreds of millions living in poverty and dying from disease outside of this nation are as human as that fetus you are so concerned about. Try not to hold it against them that they have had the misfortune to already be born into a world made worse by your politics of sexual repression. If you do not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution then how can you seek such Darwinian solutions to social problems? If you care about the fetus so much why do you care so much less about the child after it is born. And finally if you care so much about restricting the power of government in our lives how can you propose the government as a tool of religious belief.

If abortion is not a religious issue why are the pulpits on Sunday a major source of anti-abortion rhetoric? No final resolution to this issue will be found as long as the world has no real effective universally acceptable method of birth control. Thus do those who care about children become cast as uncaring because they care about the rights of grown women more than the rights of an unborn fetus. It is sexually repressive religion that forces them to choose between damnation for using birth control and damnation for using abortion. Thus abortion is in part an evil of religion's own making. Abortion rather than sex education and effective birth control is the confused woman's reactive choice to an unwanted pregnancy. Sexual repression confuses people who then make choices that are less than optimal for their lives. Thus does our nation suffer from the political uses of an issue that disposes people to hate their neighbors. God bless and keep you, our anti-abortion faithful, our pro-life faithful, our troops and our protestors safe. And may God help us all learn to save the living with as much fervor as we now use in trying to save those in the process of becoming alive.