Long Shadow #WEP #WEPFF #essay #prochoice #crime or #PunxsutawneyPhil Pics

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My birthday is on August 21!

Picture from a birthday party in 2016.

There are two topics for my Long Shadow post. The first involves abortion (trigger warning). The second is just a collection of happy pictures from a place where a shadow matters once a year.

Long Shadow

(564-word essay)

Crime rates rise and fall from many factors, some that take decades to reveal themselves. There are ways to impact the crime rate immediately, such as altering laws, improving crime prevention measures, and giving law enforcement better training and resources. It has been postulated that permitting abortion and expanding birth control have a long-term impact on crime rates.

The reason behind it is that children who are wanted by someone with the means to properly care for them are less likely to fall into a life of crime. (The study may have focused on "blue-collar crimes" instead of "white-collar crimes.") Most notably, the odds of becoming a prostitute, drug dealer, or burglar decrease.

The idea is that someone who is prepared for the responsibility of parenthood is more likely to provide a good education, proper nutrition, a stable home, and the mental and emotional love a child requires. An excellent book to read on this topic is Freakonomics.

Some people are willing to trade a higher rate if it means abortions and birth control are more difficult to access. A fair amount of those people also do not view rape, child molestation, pedophilia, or sexual slavery as crimes. There are even some who wish to make human trafficking legal, particularly in regard to the sale of female children. Rather than as fellow humans, females are often seen as objects to them.

This type of thought may explain why so many "pro-life" protesters in America march outside of free or low-cost obstetrician clinics, intimidating women who are seeking pregnancy care as well as those considering abortions. The same protesters are less likely to stand outside of upper-class locations with obstetrics residency training, which is where the medical procedure is generally learned. Training tends to include the procedure because not all pregnancies are viable, and sometimes can result in the imminent death of both the mother and baby. However, some people strongly believe that life begins when cells can mimic a beat, but a woman of childbearing years should die if her pregnancy goes poorly, even when medicine makes that death avoidable.

Death as a predestined outcome. This means that, perhaps, some unwanted babies need to be born to grow up to become killers, sexual-assaulters, robbers, gang leaders, drug dealers, etc. Perhaps Americans need a certain amount of crime so that there are "bad guys" and thus the possibility of "good guys"?

Legal arguments as to which medical procedures a qualified medical professional should have the option of offering to a patient could be based on how it impacts society as a whole. Do religious morals have the same impact for people who do not believe in them? Should the religions and cultures of others be imposed upon people who do not share them? Where do laws come from, and do any exist for non-religious reasons?

If a law allowing abortion and expanded birth control were firmly in place, no longer teetering on the edge, would it cast a long shadow of reducing crime? If so, is that worth having some people sacrifice their moral or religious beliefs that what someone else does impacts their own afterlife?  If science could remove a fetus in the first trimester and grow it to term, would that be better? Would that help or hurt the hundreds of thousands of children in the US who are waiting to be adopted?

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You want to talk about a LONG SHADOW?
Punxsutawney Phil is a groundhog in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. I was in Punxsutawney a few years ago. (Not on Groundhog day. Sorry.) Here are a few pictures from the town where, for one day a year, a rodent's shadow is newsworthy.

"According to the tradition, if Phil sees his shadow and returns to his hole, he has predicted six more weeks of winter-like weather." ⛄❄

Tourist Phil

Tourist stuff in town.

Me with Liberty Phil

Me with a hand-carved Phil statue

Dentist Phil