Not all life is precious. Americans prove that daily. Just look at the energy being expended on “what may be” in the womb. Children already born could use that same vigor. It could hone their direction. The attention would improve their lives immeasurably.

Instead, wrong-headed Americans focus on an organ just a little half of mankind contains. To the detriment and exclusion of the women nestling this vessel too many men have made it contentious. To them and a fair number of misguided women, their sisters should be sacrificed for what’s inside the womb. Or may someday occupy it. The hell with what is.

Theirs is a thoughtless repetitious conceit readily offered – until unapologetically dismissed on those occasions when reality insists it must be validated. This happens often in the “fetus always first, women always second” world of skewed priorities. That the woman is the patient is immaterial. What may be takes precedence.

Isn’t advocating a 10-year-old Ohio girl carry her rapist’s child the depth of degeneracy? I debated placing “girl” in the last sentence because there are forced-birthers who’ll declare any female who becomes pregnant must be a woman already.

No. She’s a 10-year-old. She was raped. She didn’t consent. She shouldn’t have to endure every kind of life-altering change imaginable just because others don’t care where her chips may fall. Afterwards, that is if she survived giving birth.

Anyone disputing that is wrong.

From what I understand delivering a baby isn’t as simple as the men in the forced-birth movement make it. Even if these men had somehow experienced the matter personally, what 10-year-old girl’s body is sufficiently developed for the ordeal of giving birth? There are mature women for whom giving birth presents difficulties. How can anyone in his right mind believe a 10-year-old will skate through it?

The adults who determined she’d have an abortion were so responsible they ought to be lionized and lauded. They saw clearly. The same cannot be said of the know-nothings who would’ve preferred the girl been tortured by and perhaps maimed through forced birth. Or now seek some sort of retribution against the doctor who performed the necessary procedure.

The complete strangers who opposed the girl’s abortion blithely have discounted the dangers inherent to prospective mother and child. They doubtlessly would’ve fallen back on that reliable dodge of the numbly devout – God’s will.

Is it His will that a child suffer rape? Of course His infinite mysteries are far beyond the ken of such mere mortals like ourselves. We cannot comprehend how depredations against a child will benefit the world.

Was that explanation smug enough? Did it justify the callousness necessary to condone a heinous crime the self-satisfied will swear is “a gift”?

Hopefully not. Hopefully like me you’d be moved to beat the Holy Spirit and living shit out of the mealy mouth issuing it. Especially if the mumbler a priest.

Such people are distraught a young life wasn’t derailed. They’re displeased the possible child she might’ve issued – viable or not – couldn’t have been exploited as proof of their self-proclaimed righteous yet ultimately most inhumane cause.

Certain aspects of the girl’s circumstances reminded me of Where Angels Fear to Tread, a novel by E.M. Forster. As in the book, people on the periphery have deluded themselves their worst intentions are the best. For the girl, her matter was resolved favorably. In the book, tragedy visited revealed the bad characters of the good people.

Probably the most fervid, loudest, obscene “My body! My choice!” blowhards during our current Covid conditions, they’re likeliest the least to extend the same preferences of self-determination to women in seeking full-range gynecological services. They’re the same who are on the same route to impede in-vitro procedures. To hamper both as well as other aspects of others’ lives with which they disagree, they will invade our privacy either through government fiat or “good neighbor” intrusion.

Imagine that. Disclosing the intimacies of your life before unkind, willfully ignorant strangers suspecting you’re deviating from life as they’ve come to believe you should lead it. Your privacy invaded, your life disrupted, your thoughts on public display, all for your own good.

That should be farfetched. Especially in a nation whose loudest morons incessantly bray about “Freedom!” and “Liberty!” Two concepts which they’ve shown the loosest grasp. Indeed, there’s already proposed legislation circulating in Dawgpatch and Texas and other parts of less dynamic America which insists just upon the above. Ultimately, it’ll lead to civilian spy networks that’ll keep tabs on women of child-bearing ages. These “people’s communes” will make sure periods are had. Or else! If missed an indecent deputation, ah, um, committee – or as we shall know them, a mob – of concerned citizens will charge themselves to investigate the absent menstrual flow.

And once as many millions of American women as possible bearing breeding potential have been classified as inferior beings, slotted in second-class almost persons files, okay, breeders, whose privacy will be subject next to societal third degree because of non-conformity? Or seeming non-conformist? Or simply just the target of a grudge?

It should be amazing those who’ll defend their privacy to outrageous lengths have turned around and now outdo one another in showing none for others. Give them the chance to shine the spotlight into strangers’ dark places, they’d burn holes into the scenery. But then hypocrisy goes hand in hand with absurdity.

This is the sort of rotten wheat that nurtured the psylocibins which convinced Colonial New Englanders into believing neighbors practiced witchcraft or conspired with Satan. Except it’s been transposed into the 21st century. It’s our here and now. We all ought to know better. Yet too many Americans considering themselves paragons of respectability have found unnatural comfort in lunacy.

Just the resort to save themselves from thinking rationally.