Embrace the gore

Many people seem shocked and appalled by the abortion display. I say embrace it. If you can’t look at those photographs and still say abortion should be legal, then you should be pro-life. If you can’t visit a slaughterhouse without retching, you should be a vegetarian. Our society depends on a number of activities many people just simply ignore and try not to think about. How did you think meat got on the table, that the medicine you took actually worked, or that our birthrate is as low as it is? The answer is that slaughterhouses butcher millions of animals, scientists experiment on all kinds of organisms (including ourselves), and people use birth control and occasionally have abortions.

Your existence in this world means the death of other creatures and the suffering of some living ones. This is how the world works. Stuff just doesn’t magically appear for your convenience, it all came from somewhere. The tap water you drink means other people and/or ecosystems had it taken from them. The same goes for everything else we use from this earth. The only way to alleviate the suffering we cause is to improve our technology and use resources more efficiently. I’m sorry, but there’s no going back to the “good old days” (they probably never existed).

So if you really believe what we do is wrong, give the world solutions, not empty rhetoric. You are at this school to help improve society, to give us alternatives to our current way of life. Our blessing and curse as humans is the ability to understand our universe and the complex interactions within it. We must apply this accumulated knowledge to improve life based on our sense of morality.

To step back to the original topic and give my personal opinion: Abortion is horrible and no one wants it. Though you may personally be able to commit to marital sex and never aborting, many people in your same society cannot. There are many reasons a woman may need to abort (health, social, economic). If at this point you’re wondering “how can he believe any of those reasons justify abortion?” read the article “Why I am an Abortion doctor” at http://tinyurl.com/277vm6.

In those “good old days” (the 1960s), some people did their own abortions, often resulting in septic abortions, a problem rarely seen now that abortions are legal and performed by professionals. For some people, the economic and social issues related to pregnancy are so serious, they would rather attempt self-abortion than carry to term. If you believe abstinence is a real solution and our society would be improved by making abortion illegal, you are ignoring the needs and condition of your fellow man/woman, and spouting blind and empty rhetoric. If we want to reduce abortions, we need to improve birth control techniques and sexual education in schools.

That’s it; it’s not a difficult problem. As abortions are sometimes necessary, the only solution is prevention through education and technology. Now go think about the hard stuff, like how to peacefully resolve warring nations, or ease the environmental impact of growing countries, or solve world hunger and disease, or improve the lives of people in our own country.

Arlo White is a mechanical engineering senior and a guest columnist for the Mustang Daily.