The Supreme Court dug deep into the past to find a thin, medieval argument* against abortion in Alito’s biased opinion dubbed Dobbs. Roe v Wade was waylaid after a good run of roughly 50 years, and our theocracy was restored to the vision of our founding fathers great grandfathers, back in the good old days when women had no say in anything** and democracy was just a dead Greek concept.
*No offense to Henry De Bracton and his 13th Century treatise, but really? HDB, 13th C, WTF SCOTUS?
**Recent events lend credence to Clarence Thomas’ desire to silence women, starting in his own house.
The rift between the extreme wings of right and woke has widened to seemingly insurmountable distances, like a marathon apart which is arguably unfathomable to the average lazy American. The right wing nuts subtly shade their true intentions under the same “states rights” that they use in their revisionist historical defense of their likeminded rebels in the last civil war.
But as a wise man once sang “we don’t need your civil war”.
So I am here to make peace and propose a modest plan to solve these problems. If Jared can fix the Middle East, how hard can it be to fix our country?
Let’s start with identifying the key issues.
First, we have a bunch of people who hate the idea of aborting fetuses. They rush to defend the unborn.
Then we have others who would argue that the first group stops caring about those same babes as soon as they draw their first breaths of hospital air. These people talk about needing villages to raise the kids and no one wants to hear from the village people because an orange madman stole their gay music.
Group #1 despises the welfare state, food stamps, handouts, and any other breaks given to anyone who is not earning top dollars. Their tax money should not go to the fucking rabbits who can’t afford their bunnies. But if you save them from supporting social subsidies, their spare change will trickle down to the gutters in which the lazy welfare class belongs.
Group #2 says that first you’re forcing people to have kids they can’t afford and now you won’t ask the rich to pitch in to help?
G1: it’s their own fault for not knowing better. We didn’t get them pregnant. And if you give a man a fish, he’ll only want some free chips and soda to go with it. Where as if you feed him to the worms then you can get more worms to catch more fish and maybe some nice lobsters…
G2: but you won’t even let us teach these stupid kids sex ed, so it kind of is your fault… and that worm analogy makes no sense. You’ve also tried turning contraception into a four letter word, you stupid cont!
G1: wise man once sang “we don’t need no education.”
We could continue this argument back and forth forever, with both sides only digging in deeper and finding more worms to fling at each other. But I promised a pragmatic solution, so we’re moving on.
Roe went back a half century. Alito went to Old English law in throwing it out. I found a modest proposal from 1729 that seemed to fit our modern problem perfectly.
You see, back in the 1700s, there were a bunch of poor Irish lasses growing kids like they were potatoes (seasonally) and imposing on high society with their hungry families. A righteous man of the cloth named Jonathan Swift figured that you could unburden the poor from the extra mouths to feed, saving them serious money, while simultaneously setting the table for a new bumper crop that would provide sustenance and profit.
In the words of a fat bastard “baby, it’s what’s for dinner.”
Swift’s sweet Soylent green plan would grow the produce to the ripe age of one, when the plump little butterballs would be a healthy turkey weight. They’d have had only mothers’ milk to this point, so it’s the perfect time to put them to good use before they start adding to the food bill.
Per Swift’s secret source, infant food was pretty tasty then. Today we have so many different spices and fancy kitchen gadgets that we can surely top the three century old recipes. Betcha it tastes like chicken, and you can use chicken in everything.
Let’s check some boxes:
1) No more talk of subsidizing pre-k or free school lunches when they never reach that age.
2) End the need for abortions. You don’t have to worry about going broke raising a child anymore, nor fret over a chain around your neck and wallet for decades to come. A year on the nip and you’re done, and we’ll even pay for your son (by the pound).
3) No more stigma of the lazy pregnant drain on society. These girls are being industrious, fetal farmers.
4) After a year, unless you’re working on a new meal ticket, you’ve no excuse not to join the real world of work, to the extent that a woman ever can.
5) A lot of people like looking at babies. A lot of people love cooking shows. Combining the two is guaranteed ratings.
6) With the miracles of modern medicine (don’t call it science), the birthing years are extended. This is a sustainable food source until the cow is put out to pasture. Nobody’s ever accused baby burps and farts of causing greenhouse gases.
7) Speaking of cows, one could argue that we’re replacing beef with baby back ribs, but before you put our favorite farmers (Monsanto) out of business, think again. The recently paid parents are likely to celebrate their new wages with a nice steak dinner. (Eating your own young is gauche, and the price of a well-prepared infant should generally keep it to the top of the food chain anyway).
8) Solving overpopulation issues. Reducing immigration too. No more anchor babies when anchors (are taken) away. Densely populated places like China, India and Mexico can import product for more exotic varieties. Ever wonder how China enforced its one child policy in the past? Hint: it wasn’t stray cat in the dish.
9) Economics. Different sites cite slightly different values, but it seems the consensus is somewhere around $300k to raise a kid today to the age of 18. Forget about college because that’s an argument for another day. With a median household income of somewhere around $85k today (taking 2021 numbers and inflating them), eliminating $16.7k of annual expenses (per meal ticket) effectively raises the household income to over six figures!
10) Aside from the profit-driven welfare queens of Reagan’s imagination, the anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-sex education religious cultists are most likely to be knocked up. Instead of having them be fruitful and multiplying into further generations of judgmental pricks, now they can multiply to bear fruit of their loins. Swift noted that a reduction of papists was another benefit. Some things never change.
This is just a starter proposal. The dirty details can be worked out later.
Anecdotally, before you besiege me and my mentor Jonathan Swift, I grew up poor white trash, in a family overflowing with six children. Obviously, it would not serve to have served me as supper, lest I could not solve these modern problems. But suppose they had alternately raised / braised our family; our insufferable six would have been halved and the amount of drama would have exponentially decreased. Sorry, sisters 2-4-6, but sacrifices are sometimes needed for the greater good. We would have been slightly less poor white trash.
Surely Dickhead DeSantis will take it up a notch by cutting babies in half (like Solomon), sending tops to the border with Canada with the lower extremities being sent to Mexico as a way of making some kind of statement about owning the libs or something. But that’s just wasteful.
Satire is a kind of sarcasm which is called the lowest form of humor. But it feels appropriate when dealing with the lowest form of human; not babies, but Republicans.
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