Abortion as a political plaything

“It's great to live with saints in Heaven, but it's hell to live with them here on earth.” I looked for the source of those words in my Bible, but I couldn’t find the sentence anywhere. I think they were lost in translation and my Hebrew is a little rusty. But verily, those words are true.

I would amend it. I think “self-anointed” needs to be in there. Abortion opponents are a good example. You find them in frightening numbers in state capitols, including ours. They could make an embarrassed God himself into an atheist.

Nowhere on earth is that hell more apparent than in legislatures around the country. The pious in costume as serious public servants interfere with peoples’ lives quite piously. They practice medicine without a license and the results are predictable. Hell on earth for great numbers of women and their families is the result. “No abortions” replaces “good morning” at breakfast.

Women are driven from sterile clinics to back alleys where “sterile” is like snow in July. Doctors, all across the state, try to find a fetal heartbeat. Nothing else seems to matter to our legislators.

Women don’t have abortions as casually as having their toenails clipped or their fingernails polished. They come to that decision for life-changing issues. A teenager may miss college and marriage. A happily married mother may find another child too much for budget, housing, care time; an older woman may find the burden beyond her energy level and strength. None of that means anything to some legislators across the country, and certainly not here in Iowa. They are concerned about the fetus until it is born.

Our madame governor and her willing underlings are not alone. From 2011 to 2017, there were 483 new restrictions enacted across the country. Yet, Kim Reynolds talks of “the destructive culture of abortion” Most of us go through life unaware of anyone having an abortion. There is no culture of abortion, and certainly not here.

There were 3,760 abortions done in Iowa and not all for residents. There was a 15 percent decline in the abortion rate in Iowa between 2014 and 2017. No law determined that, but a personal decision did. Abortions in Iowa represent 0.4 percent of all abortions in the United States. It is not a pandemic. it is not a “culture.” It is a personal, not a state decision, and should have remained so.

But people will continue to have abortions no matter the restrictions. They can be done safely, but not in Iowa. In 2017, there were 862,320 abortions recorded in clinical places nationally. The numbers have gone down in recent years.

Gov. Reynolds signed the new law, passed in a single day, in a special session of the legislature, on the stage of an annual conference of fringe Christians. Most, bills are signed in the governor’s office. She has said without moving her lips, “This is how to pander to a fringe religious group.”

People will continue to have abortions no matter the restrictions. People will die here because Gov. Reynolds likes center stage, with a cheering crowd in the hell of her making for all of us.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.