It's always someone else's fault...

An Indie friend emailed me a link to a month old WaPo story that had just recently been posted to the Freeper-ish TimeBomb2000 BBS site which she is a member of. Incidently, I did an expose on one of the TB2000 administrators two years ago which provides a good insight into the moral relativism practiced by some rightwingers. Although I should point out that not everyone there is a winger/Freeper. There are plenty of leftists/libertarians there too.

The WaPo piece is a rant by a 42 year old woman lawyer and writer from Virginia bemoaning the unavailability of Plan B (aka "the morning after" drug) over the counter.

The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn't want. Well, not literally, but let me explain.

I am a 42-year-old happily married mother of two elementary-schoolers. My husband and I both work, and like many couples, we're starved for time together. One Thursday evening this past March, we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.

She goes on to detail her adventures attempting, and failing, to get a prescription for Plan B.

Other than the dismissive "rush of passion" excuse for her failure to do anything which might have prevented the pregnancy she blames everyone but herself for her predicament. Mostly she blames the Bush administration and by extension his religious right base. But she also blames her OBGYN, her Internist and the state of Virginia for allowing them to refuse to give her the prescription she wanted.

In any event, they were also partly responsible for why I was stuck that Friday, and why I was ultimately forced to confront the decision to terminate my third pregnancy.

And finally,

It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.

While I agree with this woman's complaints about the undue influence that the Pharisaical religious right has been allowed to exert under the Bush administration, I very much disagree with the way that she blames everyone for what was ultimately a problem of her own making. She falsely characterizes the relative lack of Plan B availability as "emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place." Um, no! Her diaphragm would have prevented the pregnancy... had she used it. It's nobody's fault but her own and her husband's for not reminding her to use the damn diaphragm.

To err is to be human. I certainly don't begrudge this woman her humanity or lack of perfection. I'm sure her mistake is one that many others have made under similar circumstances. But for her to then turn around and blame her mistake and the resulting predicament on all these external forces, none of which were in a position to remind her to use the damn diaphragm, is just plain dishonest and frankly it's childish. She has no one to blame but herself for the pregnancy. The only role that all of those external forces played in the entire sordid affair was in how conveniently she would be able to remedy her own failure. They didn't cause her egg to become fertilized. She and her husband managed that all on their own.

The other supreme irony here is of course her own blatent hypocrisy. By attempting to place the blame for her pregnancy on the "politicized" state of current Plan B availability, she did precisely what she blamed them for and politicized the issue.