Scientist Darwin wins over pious popes

Ed Raymond

As humans we should love being able to think and reason

But I’m sure females hate the fact they bleed from their vagina once a month for half their life span.

After coming out of the swamps, humans have attained dominion over all living things. As far as we know, we can think and reason better than our closest competitors in the chain of being.

Humans have thought of some ingenious ways how this has come to pass. Many say we must have faith that various mysterious and omniscient gods created everything, checked and supervised humans out of human wombs, and created humans to dominate a quadrillion creations.

The scientific facts indicate we all started in the green swamps several billion years ago. The scientific critical facts of evolution have many rivers that need to be bridged, but the construction continues by the minute.

As the facts are determined, faith in old prophecies by seven great religions is challenged by empty churches, mosques, monuments and the selling of places of worship as just real estate.

Planet Earth is now reeling in orbit with a population of more than 7.8 billion. Suffering from climate change and feasts and famines depending on where you live, we are consuming the earth’s resources at an alarming rate.

Population experts say about 100 billion humans have lived and died on earth. How many billion prospective and real human fathers and mothers have been killed in wars, plagues, and environmental disasters is difficult to comprehend, but the evidence is we have way too many humans on earth.

It happens with other species. Yellowstone Park authorities estimate they will have to kill several hundred bison so the rest will survive on the resources of the park.

The average human female has about 500 menstrual periods in her lifetime today. Sex bioethnic experts estimate a woman who has sex just once a week during her reproductive years will have to dodge 29 pregnancies if she has two children and no abortions. She has to be very careful about birth control the other 1,040 times she has sex.

Good luck with that.

Why do human females have periods?

Some day, scientists will figure out when animals in the chain of evolution started to have menstruation. Other primates suffer through it, although not as often as humans do. Some species of bats and elephant shrews bleed.

Myths surround the monthly bleeding. Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar, opined that menstrual blood stopped seeds from germinating, forced fruit to drop from trees, and could clear a field of pests – if a naked bleeding woman walked around in it.

I remember reading about an Asian society that forced women to live in separate huts while bleeding.
Expert OB-GYNs have estimated that about half of human conceptions advance to a full pregnancy.

The Christian Bible states that a “perfect” God checks out every fetus in the womb. He evidently misses some stuff.

Besides the birth of cisgenders, lesbians, non-binariies, asexuals, gays, transgenders, bisexuals and “queers” rejected by many “Christians,” He misses enough syndromes, body parts, viruses and thousands of other problems that would fill libraries with medical journals with published papers.

But some religious parents were lucky. Osama bin Laden had 53 brothers and sisters fathered by a Muslim patriarch who married 11 wives.

The world’s record for numbers of children by one set of parents, according to the records of a Russian monastery, is still held by Feorder Vassilvev and his wife Valentina. In 40 years of sexual productive life between 1725 and 1765, they had 29 multiple births resulting in 69 children. Only two did not survive infancy. If you don’t believe, Google. Would a Russian bishop lie?

Is the battle between Christians and Muslims to see which religion could out-baby the other finally over?
One critic used part of a statement by former President John Kennedy to ridicule the duel: “Ask not what your country can do for you,, ask how many kids you can have for your country.”

So far, abortion records go back only 7,000 years

Perhaps, some day a drawing of an abortion by Neanderthals will appear on a newly discovered European cave wall.

We possess a lot of records of abortions prevented or performed around the world. Amnesty International has tracked birth records in Paraguay, a Catholic country of 7.15 million, and revealed more than 1,000 girls 14 years or younger gave birth in 2019 and 2020. Paraguay’s laws on abortion only allow abortion if the mother’s life is in extreme danger. The age of sexual consent is 14.

During the same period, the Divided States of America with more than 300 million had 2,253 births by girls between 10 and 14.

A 2015 Paraguayan case aroused international rage when a 10-year-old girl, raped by her stepfather, was denied an abortion. No word in the story whether she survived the birth.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the leading cause of death among girls 15 to 19 in Paraguay is pregnancy and child-birth complications. The report indicated 80% of sexual violence cases occur within families.

The Catholic Church supported the denial because of “sanctity of life” grounds! A 10-year-old?
As principal of Horace Mann Elementary School in Fargo for 11 years, I and the teachers always had fun observing the change in many sixth grade girls in the spring of the year.

In the fall they were busy beating up slower developing boys on the playground who had “transgressed’ them in games or on equipment.

But in early spring the attitudes changed. They talked about boys with a different tone and even looked like they wanted to hug one.

Most of the boys were unable to figure out what forces of nature were going on; that sex was here to stay for all their lives.

Sex is a powerful force. The Kinsey Institute New Report states that 80% of men and 40% of women have orgasms (“wet dreams”) while sleeping. Some women claim they can have an orgasm just by thinking about them. Brain studies have proved it.

Abstinence is the only perfect birth control – but seems to be difficult

Of the 17 top contraceptives in use today, too numerous and complicated to discuss here, effectiveness ranges from more than 99% to about 70%. Some in the most-used category are 90% to 95% effective.
Well, nothing’s perfect. A failure might call for an abortion or a commitment of about $275,000 to raise a child to the age of 18.

Every citizen who has an opinion about abortion should read “The Abortion I Didn’t Have” in The New York Times Magazine (12/2/21) written by Merritt Tierce:

“I was a brain. I got pregnant with him when I was 19. My son’s father is kind, gentle, handsome, friendly, and funny. When we had sex, we couldn’t use condoms, because having them around would have been admitting an intent to sin….irresistible desire…..

“I didn’t consider abortion. I couldn’t. At the time the Church of Christ College I went to required daily chapel attendance and disallowed mixed bathing (no men and women in the pool at the same time!). I had to take Bible classes to graduate, but that was fine because I wanted to be a Christian. I handed out little wallet cards that showed a mangled fetus with a Bible verse: ‘For you created my innocent being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb…My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in a secret place.’”

Her 17-page article covers how the birth of her son changed her entire life – not necessarily for the better. It is a great discussion of how an abortion or unwanted child affects lives.

The final abortion question: Is a fetus a person? Is a woman?

Both can’t be persons when the fetus is completely dependent on the woman.

The battle between pro-life and pro-choice forces boils down to the power of daily sexual desire, evolutionary ability of Homo sapiens to breed offspring almost every day, that life begins at conception, and whether a woman carries a fetus to birth because politicians, pious popes, Ghislaine Maxwell and Franklin Graham demand it.

Bull elk bellow for mates only in the fall while human hunters stalk them through the mountains – while thinking daily about the sex they’re missing.

Meanwhile, women with unwanted pregnancies try to deal with a personal disaster created by politicians and politics, conservative Catholics and Protestants, and a culture that uses sex to sell everything from perfume to GMC pickups.

Remember the TV show Sex And The City? Another series is in the making. Sex is a fascinating subject because we are soaking in the hot tub of it.

Meanwhile, evolution chose human females to have babies instead of males.

Mary Ellen Lundberg of Minneapolis wrote in the Tribune: “teenage girls and women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s have dreams, hopes, aspirations and goals for their lives. They need birth control available to them, including abortion, so they can have children when they are physically, emotionally and financially prepared to do so. Abortion needs to be part of birth control services, allowing a woman to decide when and if to have children and how many she wants to have.”

Abortion can’t be defended better.

Both life and death begin at conception

As to the constant declaration by some Christians that life begins at conception, I say: “of course, no big deal.” So does death begin at conception.

Fetuses do not begin to live “life” until they are born and nursing. Some Christians yell “MURDER!”at abortion clinics and protests. That’s all we need is another bunch of prosecutors, lawyers and bishops accusing women of killing fetuses while “celibate” priests are raping and sexually abusing children and adults, resulting in billions of dollars of penance money.

Sex can be expensive. Ask Donald Trump.

This makes as much sense as the Vatican and the pious popes and bishops saying Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo and the LBGTQ+ community are “intrinsically disordered” as they completed and decorated St. Peter’s and other Vatican buildings.

As countries contemplate what the excess population is doing to life on earth due to climate change, food production and the sudden migration of millions caravaning from failing countries to those that are developed, attitudes about abortion are constantly evolving – like everything else on a warming planet.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, more than 50 countries have liberalized abortion laws in the past 25 years and 20 have completely eliminated bans. Most Roman Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America, recognizing that the arc of history is moving to complete acceptance of abortion, are declaring the criminalization of abortion is unconstitutional.

P.S. You might find this interesting. In the 21st century a woman in a Greek airport set off a security alarm because she was wearing a steel chastity belt. Her husband had forced her to wear it. The subject of chastity belts for both sexes, available in many interesting and painful designs on the Internet, is fascinating. There’s the old adage that the human body contains several quarts of blood – but not enough to run brain and private parts at the same time.

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