Nowadays I do not read news on a daily basis anymore. It’s just too depressing. But I do have to catch up with the news at least every now and then, because I prefer to have at least some clue about what’s going on in the world. Basically, getting sad and angry roughly once per week is better than experiencing it on a daily basis. So I looked at the news today.

Firstly, COVID-19 cases are spinning out of control in my part of the world. Here’s the graph with daily COVID-19 infections over the last months in Latvia. Lucky me. I’m so going to enjoy living in the middle of an epidemic. Granted, Americans have been doing this for months already, but up until now I at least had the solace of knowing that things are relatively OK in my part of the world compared to various other regions.

COVID-19 cases in Latvia over time.

Moreover: Poland.

Here we have some news from Poland:

Thousands of women are protesting against Poland’s new abortion laws in cities across the country.

A court ruling on Thursday banned almost all abortions – with exceptions only for cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s health is at risk.

Abortions carried out when the fetus is malformed, which accounted for 98% of legal terminations last year, have now been outlawed.

Poland already had some of the EU’s strictest abortion laws.

Fewer than 2,000 legal terminations are carried out each year. But women’s groups estimate that up to 200,000 abortions are either performed illegally, or abroad.

This is just ridiculous. When abortions are carried out because the fetus is malformed or incompatible with life, most of the time those are wanted children. Losing a wanted pregnancy often feels the same as losing a child. It’s extremely painful and tragic. The society shouldn’t pile extra abuse on such people who got very unlucky and should be allowed to grieve in peace.

Here’s an example. Imagine a person who is 12 weeks pregnant and discovers that their fetus is incompatible with life. Their child is bound to suffocate and die immediately after birth. Next imagine that they decide that they would prefer to terminate this pregnancy, grieve about their lost child, and try to conceive again some months later. But no, the law instead forces them to carry this pregnancy to full term.

This is torture. Pure torture. It’s mostly emotional torture, but there’s also some physical torture too, because unhealthy pregnancies can end up with lots of physical pain for the pregnant person.

And why? Just why? The sheer pointlessness of this torture is mind boggling. Why inflict all this avoidable extra suffering upon random people who already got very unlucky for medical reasons? If the fetus is at least healthy and compatible with life, a sadistic conservative person could argue that inflicting suffering upon the pregnant person is justifiable, because at the end the society gets a healthy baby. But here it’s just pointless suffering.

There’s suffering for the parents, but such laws also inflict suffering upon babies. Why would any society want more babies who are so sick that they experience constant pain and cannot possibly have at least a somewhat fulfilling and pleasant life? Of course, it’s possible for people with genetic diseases and disabilities to have good life quality. But at some point illnesses become so severe that anything resembling a decent life quality becomes impossible. Modern medicine allows us to examine an unborn fetus and detect various severe diseases. If doctors discover that some fetus is very, very sick, then terminating this pregnancy is better also for the child who won’t have to experience all this pain.

If Christians want to flagellate themselves or nail themselves to crosses (yes, they do that in some cultures), then they are welcome to do with their own bodies whatever the hell they want. But no, they want to torture other people instead.

This is evil. Pure evil. Religions can be a terrible force for evil. Just how can it be possible for people to think that it is a good idea to deny abortions in cases of fetal deformities? How can somebody be so blind, cruel, and sadistic? Their stupid and inflexible religious dogma states that abortions are bad, so they cannot comprehend a real life fact that some pregnancies simply are not viable for medical reasons. Either that or they fully understand the implications of their bans and are sadists who are happy to inflict torture upon random AFAB people who got unlucky for medical reasons.

By the way, up until recently hearing news about abortion bans felt frightening for me. It felt like a personal threat, a distant danger that could befall me at any moment. It was like watching news footage of bombs getting dropped on my city and knowing that one of those could fall on my home. Nowadays I finally feel safe, because I know that this particular disaster cannot happen to me (I hired a surgeon to remove my internal reproductive organs). Now reading news like this feels like watching footage of bombs getting dropped on cities in some faraway country. It still seems horrifying, but it’s no longer a danger for me personally.