Diagnosing America's Cancer

File Under:  It Is In Our Hands

V22.2, how many of you know what that is?  Can you guess?

To many of my compatriots in the health industry, you will recognize what that is immediately.  That is the ICD-9 diagnostic code for "Pregnant state, incidental."  In laymen's terms that is: a normal pregnancy, without complications.  This is what a doctor would put in your medical chart or on an insurance claim to denote that the patient is pregnant.  Why is this important? It is important because:

You only diagnose diseases.

If you look at pregnancy as a disease, it makes an ironic sort of sense: everyone who has ever been diagnosed with pregnancy has died.  Making children the most lethal disease to ever afflict humankind.  That might bring a chuckle to some of you with children, but therein is the problem with abortion, women's health rights, and the debate surrounding the two.  In the modern world children are considered, and thus treated like, a disease.  Children are suffered not cherished; they are something to be avoided, medicated, or destroyed.  We have already, however grudgingly, conceded that everyone has a right to suitable healthcare.  How dare someone dictate to someone else what is appropriate healthcare, or more precisely what they should do about a disease that is infecting their own body?

Conservatives have latched onto the very valid point that unborn children are not diseases without human rights, and they are using it as a cudgel to bludgeon Liberals.  Liberals, with their ideology threatened, have hidden behind the shield of women's health rights and freedom of choice and are firing back.  What has essentially happened is that the issue of sanctioned murder has metastasized itself onto women's health like a cancer, rendering it inoperable because Liberals will not sacrifice the cancer to save the host.  In this stalemate millions of unborn children continue to die, healthcare reform suffers, women suffer, and the country suffers from divisive politics and a lack of leadership.

If you have a defective heart valve, a chemical imbalance, a stroke, underdeveloped lungs, a calcium deficiency, a traumatic head injury, amenorrhea, or any number of other illnesses, these are all valid illnesses with definable root causes inside the body and mind.  Everyone deserves access to technologies which alleviate the suffering from these diseases.  However, to address unborn children, ovarian cysts, amenorrhea, and erectile dysfunction with one policy, so as to say that they are one-in-the-same is morally, ethically, scientifically, and spiritually bankrupt.

Some 40% of pregnancies are unplanned, and of those perhaps 50% are unwanted.  According to scientists, humanity was unplanned, and judging form all the species that once existed but now do not or all the species, in all the galaxies that never existed at all -- one could say the Universe probably doesn't want us.  And yet, here we remain -- unaborted.  Without question both men and women deserve access to comprehensive healthcare for all their bodily systems.  That care does not have to be sacrificed in order for us to redress this Nation's position on medically unnecessary abortions.  To do so, all we must do is put down our cudgels and shields, and divorce the issue of women's health from the cancer of abortion.

"Waiting Between Worlds" by Zack Hemsey from The Way released 2011 on Zack Hemsey Publishing