Social Tip #21 - Kitty Abortions

My best friend woke me up one afternoon to tell me that she had to take her cat in to the veterinarian because it got knocked up and she had to get it an abortion.

A KITTY ABORTION.

Did you know they could do that? Do cats need abortions?

When I was a kid I had a kitten named Dixie and we got her de-clawed. Years later, the experts in Cat Fancy Magazine wrote that removing a cat's claws fucks them up. Thanks for the late warning. After the de-clawing surgery Dixie went crazy and bit everyone and we had to chase her around the house with oven mitts. For the next seventeen years she sat paranoid and angry behind a locked door and repeated the hideous activities of an indoor cat. She was the shame of our family.

Now cats are getting abortions? It is wrong to de-claw a cat, but it is okay to for my friend to get her cat aborted? Why are claws more precious than newborn kittens? And what about the claws on the aborted kitten fetuses, is no one concerned about those?

I don't want anyone thinking that I am some pro-lifer. I'm not at all. When it comes to humans, I'm not only pro-choice, I'm pro-abortion. Ending a human pregnancy is the only way. If you give birth to a human and keep it, then you have to raise it and save up for it to go to college. And if you give birth to a human and then put it up for adoption, it will spend the rest of its life hunting you down so that it can ask you if you will let it and its 19-year-old drug-addicted boyfriend stay at your place and if you if you will help them make a family tree for a class project.... cats don't do that. Cats are supposed to give birth to litters of kittens and then just give them away without incident, that's why they look so cute in boxes.

My friend went on to complain that her kitty's abortion cost more than a human abortion. Why? The cuter it is the more you have to pay someone to suck it into a vacuum? I don't mean to be crass, but kittens like yarn... can't you just take care of it with a knitting needle? I can't even afford birth control, how is my cat supposed to afford an abortion? Is this the type of thing you have to save up for on behalf of your cat, like a child's college fund? I don't want to have to pay for someone to go to college, that's why I don't keep any of my pregnancies. Like Ben Franklin says, a penny saved is a penny earned. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure..

... If you get your cat an abortion now, then you won't have to get its kittens an abortion later.

Ben Franklin, your platitudes are timeless!

What is most puzzling to me is that my friend is a card-carrying vegan and member of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). These people would sooner have me starve than eat a delicious McDonald's happy meal, but they are allowed to get an abortion? I looked into it and PETA says that they have no official position regarding abortion issues. I guess they don't care if you abort it as long as you don't eat it.

What PETA does care about is speaking for animals because they can't speak for their rights themselves. So, the big question: If a cat could speak up for its own rights, would it want to get an abortion?

(After extensively researching this issue on the net, I imagined that if a cat could speak up for its own rights it would go something like this.)