The hubby is away on a four wheeler trip with his brother and won't be back until Sunday. It's the first time we've been away from each other overnight voluntarily. It was like playing at goodbye when he left late this morning, all the increased tingling feeling and yummy tiptoe kissing without any of the agony.
I heard something lately that helped illuminate my own point of view on the health care reform and that is: heath care is a commodity and not a right. I keep hearing how health care should be the right of every American citizen.
Why? If health care is that important, then why isn't food or shelter? If the government is going to provide health care, shouldn't it also ensure a chicken dinner and a two bedroom bungalow with attached garage?
Of course the system needs reform. But not on the basis of a new governmental and unconstitutional right. It should be market based to lower the cost of health care.
We don't need more insurance, insurance is a third party. Everyone knows third parties drive up costs, that's what makes whole salers so successful, they cut out the middle man. We need insurance for catastrophic events, to cover for anything that would bankrupt a person such a cancer. We need to pay out of pocket, directly, for regular health services.
It's like car insurance. We don't buy car insurance for oil changes, that would be crazy. We just figure to pay that out of pocket and we look for the service that we like best. We can go to the person around the corner that we know or to the national chain or to Walmart to save money. The insurance is to cover for car wrecks and major damage.
Same deal should apply to health insurance. But it's not a right. And if it was a right, wouldn't the right to food or to shelter be even more important to assure? If it's a crime for an American to be without health insurance, what does it mean that so many are homeless?
Also, as it comes closer to passing, I'm beginning to look seriously at the possibility of my tax dollars going to pay for someone else's abortion. It makes me want to commit tax fraud for the first time since I began earning a wage.
I don't like talking about abortion too much, as it is a hot button issue. If someone says they're pro choice, I don't engage them in a discussion on the topic. I used to; I used to debate this in middle school, when my father was a pro life lobbyist in the New Hampshire Senate.
My friends were mainly pro choice with a liberal mind set in general. The things about their arguments that bothered me most were the statements that a fetus is not: a. human or b. alive.
They had this point of view that, especially early on in pregnancy, during the first trimester, the pregnancy is mainly a bunch of cells. It doesn't have a soul, it's not a person; you'd have to use a microscope to see it.
This still bothers me. If it's not human, what is it then? Sex's sole biological purpose is for reproduction. Two human beings who have had sex and conceived are not going to give birth to a species of plant. Does a fetus assume humanity at some point in it's cellular development? If so, at what point does the product of human reproduction become human?
It's a ridiculous argument. Of course a fetus is human. He or she has human DNA. And not the mother's DNA, not just any DNA. Her very own DNA, the unique code of human life that will guide her growth in life from conception through childhood, adolescence, early adulthood and into old age. She will go through many different physical stages in life, a life that started at conception.
And of course the fetus is alive. From the point of conception the human is developing exactly as planned, cells dividing, growing. That's life. If she were dead, it would be called a miscarriage.
Pro choice defenders often use the phrase that woman should have control over her own body. I absolutely agree. A woman should. But a fetus is not a part of her own body, a fetus is another person entirely. A person that didn't ask to be conceived, that was conceived by an action of the mother.
At this point, my friends would raise the ever present question of "What if the fetus is the product of rape?" If a person has been raped, they should not be forced to carry that pregnancy. No one questions this being a horrible and emotionally gut wrenching situation.
But firstly, only about two percent of all abortions are due to rape or incest and secondly, let's not close our eyes to what it would be; we would be allowing the death of an innocent human because of the violent act of another. It is a terrible and sobering choice.
That's the main thing about the whole situation, I guess. It's closing one's eyes to the reality of what abortion is. Legal abortion is allowing a mother to have the right to kill her own offspring before she brings that offspring to term.
If this is what we want, if we have decided that the unborn have no rights, are not human, not somehow fully alive, then fine, look that straight in the face and agree to it. But let's not hide that truth behind some high sounding rhetoric and stirring calls for "woman's rights" as though the woman were the only human whose rights are involved.
It amazed me, by the way, when Hilary Clinton referred to the death of so many unborn Chinese girls as "infanticide."
Wait a moment while I close my mouth........ So, abortion is infanticide only when the abortion involves only female fetuses? Where is the logic? I venture to say, there is none. Either unborn children have a right to life or they do not. Gender does not make a difference to the morality or amorality of the choice.
Pro choice supporters will never agree with me. My friends and I never reached a lasting compromise and that was fine; we continued as friends. Maybe legalized abortion will continue on indefinitely in this country. I resigned myself to this a while ago.
But don't ask me to help pay for other people's abortions, because that's crossing a line I can't live with. And now I'm going to my lonely but snore free bed.
