Life is Precious

Originally this was going to be an essay on abortion. I started a draft on the topic roughly two years ago with the inception of this blog, but never ended up finishing it. Given recent events, I had started to come back to the topic, but began to stall. It's such a loaded issue, and both sides of the aisle never look at the problem soberly - it's always so emotionally charged and divisive, conversations almost always end in a bad way.

All that said, we just witnessed the tragic mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Upon further introspection, I decided I would enjoin the two topics into one cohesive essay. Nonetheless, this body of work is not for the faint hearted. I have come realize many people look at issues through a prism of intellectual laziness, which is unfortunately the hard truth behind why we cannot solve any of these problems.

I will begin by stating I am pro-life. I believe you are too, you just may not realize it yet, but more on that later. I want to begin with my junior year in college. I had a law professor obsessed with abortion. When I say she was obsessed, I mean she was absolutely overjoyed by the topic. We spent nearly 4 weeks discussing abortion, watched a Netflix documentary, and she monologued until she was blue in the face. At one point, I remember a male student from Canada - who I inferred was liberal based off our class discussions - whispered to me across the table that her obsession with abortion was starting to freak him out.

The walk back from the class to my apartment was about twenty minutes long each day, and at the time I often spent it pondering why this women was so compelled to impress abortion upon us. I never truly came up with an answer to that question until recently, but I had one takeaway - I was uncomfortable with how that stretch of the semester transpired, and I could tell even people that would often disagree with me politically felt the same way.

I think it is first important that we define an abortion. Before you read my definition, I want you to close this essay or look away and spend five minutes thinking about abortion and what it means to you. Then I want you to watch this video from Jordan Peterson linked below. It's imperative you watch it, it's only six minutes long, and will add immense color to what I am going to write.

Jordan Peterson Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5k9EDgY8UM

Below is how I view an abortion:

What is an abortion? It is a termination of a pregnancy. What is a pregnancy? It is a passage to life. What is life? A miracle. So what is an abortion? The antithesis of a miracle.

If you identify as being pro-abortion enough to post about it on your Instagram story, odds are I just really pissed you off, your calling me expletives in your head, and you are now considering exiting my essay. If you disagree with me, you probably defined an abortion as the termination of a pregnancy by means of a women right to chose, because it's about women's healthcare.

Jesse Kelly, a nationally syndicated talk show host, said one of the most clever things the left did was frame abortion in the context of "women's health." Words matter, and you can easily jin people up when you exclaim people are coming to invade your healthcare rights. The problem, however, is abortion is not about women's health. If bringing a baby to term could jeopardize the mother's health and possibly kill her, then by all means I understand abortion, but those cases are few and far between with how advanced medicine has become. So where else does health care come into play? It doesn't. It comes down to the decision of not wanting to bring a child to term, of which that is a conscious choice.

One of the comments summarizes Peterson's opening well:

When he says abortion is clearly wrong, he isn't referring to specific circumstances which may or may not justify an abortion. He is referring to the fact that a fundamental level, when you have an abortion, you are denying an unborn child (or what would be a child) its life. Whether you are pro-choice, or pro-life, the baby is a result of rape or incest, or the parents can't afford to look after it, or it will be born disabled, or whatever the case may be, it doesn't matter. Abortion is clearly wrong on this very fundamental level, but as he says, it's more complex than that.

I think we can all agree that an abortion is not something someone strives to incur. As Peterson outlined, you wouldn't recommend your best friend get an abortion. Nobody holds a party to celebrate an aborted child (well some sick people do, but that's the minority), which is why this issue is nested within an orbit of other problems people dislike talking about or rather just ignore. So we are going to get uncomfortable.

Having sex is a choice. As Jason Whitlock bluntly states it - when a women voluntarily opens her legs and a man sticks his unprotected penis within her, that is a conscious decision. Sure the condom can break, and yes Plan B, while it isn't totally reliable, it's still an option. Is it wrong that a pill that likely costs less than a $1 is up-charged to $50 as a means to take advantage of people in a desperate situation? Yes, but that is a problem for another essay.

If you drive drunk and kill somebody, you go to prison. If you rob a store with a firearm, you go to prison. If you murder somebody, you go to prison. Life is a summation of choices, so why should you be exempt from the consequences of your decision to have sex if a pregnancy ensues?

I think the deeper question to ask, which Peterson touches upon - is should people be causally sleeping around on the scale to which they are today? When I was in college I was privy to witnessing a lot of cheap and sloppy sexual situations. As a society, should that be acceptable? I am not saying we shouldn't engage in sex, rather I am stating that to me its supposed to be a sacred experience between two people. Yes, I have had a one night stand before, and it feels degrading. The next day I could not shake an immoral feeling that stuck with me. I wouldn't go as far as to say you should not have sex until you are married, but I think its important you are in a committed relationship if you want to have healthy and consistent sex.

In my opinion we have turned the sacred institution of sex into a casual pursuit of pleasure. Again it's not my right to tell you to not sleep around, but rather to make you think twice about doing it. My viewpoint is that women are sacred, and the dawn of the birth control pill and mass contraception has led to a culture that acts in defiance of the sacredness of women. The ability to bring life into this world is nothing short of miraculous, and I don't think that can be understated. This blog completely rejects the notion that men can get pregnant as some on the left would argue, so we are not even going to entertain the idea.

In contrast, who is the ultimate victim of abortions, and who are the winners? While this is a multi-layered answer, at the most foundational level women are the victims and men are the winners. In the pursuit of affection, men are culturally incentivized to sleep around as it makes them look cool amongst their peers, and who doesn't want to get laid often? With abortions so easily accessible, unprotected sex is more common. If a child ensues from intercourse, in general, it is easy for a man to walk away, while a women bears the burden.

In the 1960's Lyndon Johnson made it possible via legislation for a women to get paid a stipend for each child they had out of wedlock. As a result, the institution of marriage was destroyed in minority communities, as black children for example suffered from a fatherlessness rate exceeding 75%+, which is still the case today in many areas. On one hand, men were encouraged to walk away, while women were financially encouraged to have children - which again cheapened sex and destroyed the nuclear family in many areas. It is a harsh reality to outline, but one we must confront.

Yet the point remains, men are incentivized to treat women less than sacred knowing they can easily get an abortion. Often men will be the ones encouraging a women to receive the abortion, while the woman has to live with the trauma of their choice and the man can easily go on with their life.

It is no secret that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood was an evil women. Just read the following from her, taken from USA Today - https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/23/racism-eugenics-margaret-sanger-deserves-no-honors-column/5480192002/:

In promoting birth control, she advanced a controversial "Negro Project," wrote in her autobiography about speaking to a Ku Klux Klan group and advocated for a eugenics approach to breeding for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

In a 1939 letter to Dr. C. J. Gamble, Sanger urged him to get over his reluctance to hire “a full time Negro physician” as the “colored Negroes…can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubt.”

Like the abortion lobby today, Sanger urged Dr. Gamble to enlist the help of spiritual leaders to justify their deadly work, writing, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

She was an advocate for killing what she viewed as "lesser beings" in miniorities and special needs children. In the year 2022, her mission has partially been achieved as minority women are significantly more likely to get an abortion than a white women. Black women outnumber white women in abortions 5-1 to 4-1 depending on the study you look at. Hispanics are roughly 2-1 to 3-1. Does that not bother you?

Look at the map below, in particular at the concentration of Planned Parenthoods. Many are located in poor minority communities in predominantly liberal cities.

Take a further look at a place like California:

I don't see many abortion clinics in middle America. Sure the population is less dense and people are more conservative and religious, but that map illustrates a stretch right down the middle where virtually not a single Planned Parenthood can be found. In contrast, Planned Parenthood clinics have been known to sell the body parts of late term aborted fetuses. In one instance, the NIH (National Institute of Health) had given aborted babies to the University of Pittsburg, where they took the scalps off the fetuses and implanted them on rats for the purpose of study. I have written about this in a previous essay, and I have seen the photos - it is not something I encourage viewing, it's rather horrifying.

In addition, Planned Parenthood has allegedly failed to report instances of abuse to authorities, and offered children as young as 12-13 an abortion, and sent them back to their abusers. It's easier and more profitable to administer an abortion, than confront the harsh reality that a child is in danger and take the appropriate actions to protect them. https://www.lifenews.com/2018/05/30/planned-parenthood-caught-doing-abortions-on-12-year-old-girls-not-reporting-sexual-assault-to-authorities/

Some more deranged people on the side of "pro-choice," are advocates of eradicating illnesses such as Down Syndrome, but what they fail to acknowledge is the simple fact that a person with Down syndrome or autism is still a human being with just as much value as anyone else.

Franke Stephens has Down syndrome, and is an advocate for life, watch the following speech from him - https://twitter.com/TaxReformExpert/status/1521533852031856642?s=20&t=h7rRJekZ8BAEpyqGUBrKlQ. Margaret Sanger did not think his life had any value, and today her institution not only survives - it thrives.

Read the following passage from Rand Paul:

What differentiates the baby below to one at a similar stage that was enabled to come to term?

How can the act of birth be occurring in one room, where a massive team is committed to bringing a human to life, while an abortion can be occuring in the room next door for a similar fetus. Is that morally acceptable? Is that right? I read the following from a mother who's child passed away shortly after birth,

In the four hours he was breathing, his father and I loved him for a lifetime.

How can we celebrate life so much on one hand, and then neglect it on another?

In a debate around abortion, most people will tell you majority of the population supports abortion. The issue however, is that statement does not tell the full story. Once a mother is more than halfway through a pregnancy, the support for abortion wanes, and most people are not favor of it. With that context, observe this sixteen second clip of mayor Eric Adams of New York, where he says an abortion should be allowed at any time - up until the moment before birth: https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1525923950613643264?s=20. Some legislators in California have gone as far as advocating for termination after the baby is born. While those people are the minority, they cannot be ignored, and they highlight the disparity between normal liberal people that believe in choice up until a point, and the morally lost obsessive abortion crowd, which I take particular aim at. I cannot understand the explicit jubilation some people like my college professor get from abortion.

You don't know how hard that clip was to find of crazy Eric Adams. Many on the left have gone too far in their support for abortion, and arrived at a plateau that does not value the simple fact that life is precious. People often try immensely hard to get pregnant, and when a mother incurs a miscarriage they are often devastated. In places like New Zealand, they have gone as far as giving women time off if they have a miscarriage. So why do so many elevate the idea of abortion? Why do some people seem to value life more than others? Europe has far stricter abortion laws than America, where is the public outcry over that stance?

Take the following from a speech given by Senator Steve Daines https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/11/abortion-senator-turtle-eagle-eggs/:

Under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940, deliberately destroying — or even disturbing — a bald eagle’s egg or nest carries a $100,000 fine and a sentence of up to a year in prison for a first offense, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Sea turtles are protected by the Federal Endangered Species Act of 1973. In Florida — which provides further safeguards — any act against a sea turtle’s nest and eggs is considered a third-degree felony, wielding a penalty of $100 per egg.

So we have ultimately hollowed out the institution of sex, while turning the practice of abortion into a largely silent medical business. Many are convinced that it's about women's healthcare, but it's not - unless the mothe'rs health is in peril, it's about choice. As currently constituted, an unborn sea turtle or eagle has more protection than an unborn human.

Now I want you to pause and watch this two minute clip from Jason Whitlock before I delve into the tragedy that occurred in Uvalde, Texas. https://twitter.com/whitlockjason/status/1530576378051104768?s=10&t=8ZPZ30fT_ngEgjY6sOdtrw

I have a hard time writing about this topic as it is such a profound evil, it's hard to comprehend. My mother and I had once been discussing politics, when she told me my issue is I try to think rationally about irrational occurrences - in this instance, one cannot rationally comprehend such evil.

Viktor E. Frankl, a Holocaust surviver and renowned human rights activist once said the following,

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Evil is a harsh reality to contend with. It exists, and it can only be stopped by the eternal vigilance of good people. In combating evil, we do not have a choice. Yet outside that school at Uvalde, Texas, police officers made the choice to not enter the building and save the children, they even went as far as restraining parents from going in.

Courage seems to be a virtue in exponential decline. When an individual obtains a firearm license and makes the decision to conceal carry, they make a silent pledge that if evil is to present itself, they will confront it. Just a short time ago a man had entered a Church in Texas to commit mass murder, and he was stopped by an individual with a gun. No good person wants to have to kill another individual, but in that situation the absence of courage is devastating.

As Whitlock outlines, this is what living in a pro-choice environment looks like. We are all duty-bound to be courageous when called upon, but some occupations have a heightened responsibility to be vigilant. Just like a politician has the onus to serve people, law enforcement has a similar obligation to protect. However, we have conditioned people that it's acceptable to make the choice to not live up to your responsibilities. It behooves me how those officers thought it was okay to remain outside. In my America they would be prosecuted for 20+ years in prison for gross negligence, and their Captain who gave the order to stand down would receive double the time. The police chief would also be fired and possibly prosecuted for instilling a culture that does not promote courage. Examples must be made.

Tim Point, a retired Navy Seal Chief, shed color on the idea of authority. On one hand, an officer - whether it be the military or the police, must listen to their superiors, but in matters where children are at risk, an individual in a position to save them has a moral obligation to protect them, and disregard their commanding officers orders.

However, how can we expect police to do their job when a war has been waged against them? In some places like Massachusetts the police union has become massively corrupt (take a look at this article from Howie Carr - https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/04/17/howie-carr-trooper-laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank/). Both factors have contributed to a decline of good policing.

Yet in all this, I have come to an epiphany over the last two years that most of Washington is rotten to the core. How can we expect other people to act responsibly, when our very own legislators, who took an oath to serve, made a choice to do the complete opposite. How many mass shootings have to occur before meaningful action is taken?

Take Ted Cruz for example - he voted with all the democrats to send $40 billion to Ukraine, when the American people are in dire need. He also pretended to care about implementing term limits - in essence he is all rhetoric until it comes down to enriching himself in someway. He is a model citizen of what he once called, the "Washington Cartel." He pretends to care, just like the rest of them, which is why we continuously have these kinds of tragedies. He is one of the greatest frauds of the generation.

In contrast, look at people like Joe Biden who politicize tragedies like Uvalde as soon as they occur in attempting to peddle gun control. Or Barack Obama, who posted this thread on Twitter while the bodies were still fresh:

Nineteen sets of parents have to bury their dead children, and Barack is out and about politicking. It's no wonder that these events keep occurring, our leaders continue to operate at a level that disregards solving problems, but rather looks at them from a lens of making them politically expedient.

In Obamas very own hometown of Chicago, gang violence is out of control. The murder rate continues to climb, and while they tout some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, it has not deterred gun violence from stopping. Could Obama step in and try and make a difference? He could, but he rather just play politics. His failure to be a leader disgusts me so much, that should I ever get elected President, I am going to turn his $500 million presidential library into an orphanage, and replace it with a shack across the street that houses an image of the Twitter thread above.

Just like our society has tried to simplify issues through a prism of race, we are now trying to simplify school shootings and mass murder down to gun control. It's rather intellectually lazy, and avoids the ultimate crux of the problem. We no longer view life as precious.

Just outside my building, a girl gives free yoga lessons on the lawn multiple times a week. Take this statement she posted on Instagram:

I want to latch onto the following statement, "and now states are banning abortion??? Why? So that more kids can be born into fucked up situations and be so unwanted and unprovided for their whole lives that they become so mentally ill they choose to kill innocent people?"

Darryl Cooper, host of the Martyr Made podcast, is one of the great intellectuals of our time in my opinion, and he shared the following article on Twitter - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/17/the-reckoning/amp. It's a very long and dark read, but to say the Sandy Hook shooter became a killer because he was unloved is a failure to observe the situation. He had two very loving parents, yet somehow he became a monster on a scale that is not comprehendible.

Likewise, the following video was shared on Cooper's thread from the Kennedy Report, which analyzes a clip from Jordan Peterson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iilvT3SnGwU. School shooters are essentially nihilists, or people that believe in nothing. However, they take it a step further as normally a nihilist would just commit suicide - these people actually resent the human race. Kennedy outlines how we are actually teaching people today via the culture to in-fact resent the human race. The system teaches you things like you are the product of random evolution, society is not just, as different classes of people are subjected to different rules, we stole the land from the Indians making us inherently bad and white Christian settlers are evil, everything we do is contributing to the destruction of the planet, COVID has made it seem that we should not intermingle, as we are merely vessels for disease and should stay separated unless we take the same medicines - the list goes on. Kids are being taught to essentially hate the human race. We've gone from nihilism to an-nihilism (like annihilation for those that missed the pun). We have been told since 1990 that the world was going to end in a decade if we didn't commit to climate change, yet somehow we are still here. At the same time, it looks like very little is being done to solve the problem, so people have essentially become nihilistic.

Now in the case of school shootings a large element is the perpetrators wanting to be "copy-cats" of the Columbine event. Many have manifestos, and as a means of preparing for this piece I glanced at the one written by the Buffalo shooter. It's largely just a ramble of irrational thought as a means to an irrational act of incomprehensible evil. Yet, the elements of nihilism gone too far stand out. When you analyze similar manifestos as Jordan Peterson and the Kennedy Report has done, or even glance at one for five minutes, you will see a similar theme across all of them - they hate humanity.

Take this other statement from the yoga instructor, "this is a mental health and systematic crisis. It's honestly terrifying. It's also a huge reason why I have very little interest in having kids and bringing them up in this world." She is a nihilist without realizing it. I have no issues with people not wanting to have children, as it's not for everyone, but her remark about raising kids in a messed up world is very revealing. The world has always been messed up in a way, not long ago for example Genghis Khan was raping women and children in remote villages and then slaughtering them when he was done. Yet people still had children. I would like to ask the yoga instructor - are you happy you were born? Sure the world is a messy place, but are you thankful for your life? Or would you rather you weren't born?

Getting back to our theme however, all of these issues from abortion to school shootings are exacerbated as we no longer view life as precious. On one hand, it's not my right to tell you to not have an abortion as a large gray area surrounds the issue. I believe life begins at conception, yet somebody with a more scientific view may disregard my perspective. They may ask me to prove that the budding fetus is a human life at inception, to which I would ask them to prove it's not. In either case, we are unlikely to ever connect on that single element of the debate. So rather than ban abortion, I want to do as Franke Stephens outlines, and make it "unthinkable." My hope is that one day we put more emphasis on bringing life into the world, instead of terminating it. Rather than companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla, making it so easy for employees to get an abortion, why don't we put more emphasis on maternity leave? Take the following meme below

The caption that followed this meme had said, "Back to the factory with you women." I think a society that has to legislate abortions away is an immoral society. I want to make the thought of getting an abortion an idea that less and less people entertain. My hope is that our society starts celebrating life more often, rather than terminating it. We must stop neglecting having these tough conversations as maintaining surface level debates has only made issues like the ones discussed in this essay endure more painfully.

In contrast, in looking at our leaders and why school shootings continue, I want to quote Matthew 6:24 from the Bible:

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money”

In the context of this quote, our leaders are ill with a disease the medical community cannot create a vaccine for - greed. Why not use that $40 billion we sent to Ukraine towards making our schools safe? Why does Obama have to make such a tragedy so political? Our leaders on both sides of the aisle have a blatant disregard towards the notion that life is precious. They are self-absorbed in their own game of enriching themselves, and you know who is caught in the cross hairs of their greed? You.

Remember when I said I think you're pro-life too? I think many people are liberal without truly knowing why. Our society has put an emphasis on appearances rather than reality, and most people are convinced that by just being liberal they are good people. They care about things like climate change, social justice, and gun control because the system has conveyed caring about these issues in the way they want you to makes you a good person. Most liberal people in the younger age bracket are more concerned about having fun, and pay little attention to the nuisances of politics. At their core, they are pro-choice, because they are pro-goodness, and the system has said pro-choice is goodness. Our society has elevated pursuing pleasure above all else, all while getting lost in the teachings of an out of control system, while our "leaders" are playing a grander political game - and the idea that life is precious has been lost. As a result we currently value abortions more than raising strong families, and we have a tragic epidemic of mass shootings because our "leaders" have put greed over life, and their example has filtered to other segments of the population and culture.

It's important to acknowledge that none of us have all the answers, and in matters where emotions are high and people are on opposite ends of the spectrum it becomes even more important to sit down and try and have a dialogue. Politics has become extremely divisive in the age of technology and faceless debates behind a keyboard on Twitter. Yet in all the tragedies and complex debates of the moment, if we approach them from the standpoint that life is precious we may be able to reach a common ground and make progress. If we continue to let our leaders politic while elevating the idea that family values are not important, we will continue down a dark path.

When it comes to being pro-choice, we do not have a choice in having courage, protecting our children, and treating life as precious.

Interesting video from Trump I found: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/trump-in-1999-i-am-very-pro-choice-480297539914