Oh, the times we are living in are rife with hypocrisy, aren’t they? Life is so precious, yet it seems to be everywhere living in the most miserable conditions.

There are nearly six billion people on this planet. God purportedly told us to be fruitful and multiply but I’m sure if She were alive today, She’d tell us to knock it off already.

I find the most heinous misuse of ethical double- talk is coming from our friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart mega-corporation. These guys really do put the shine on that “Burning Chrome” cyberpunk feeling one gets living at the end of the twentieth century. This company is like “Neuromancer” meets the cast of “Hee Haw.”

Let’s say you are an otherwise responsible college woman using protection like a good #Beta should. Then out of the blue, a rubber breaks and you see all of your possible futures narrowing into single parenthood. You’d have to drop out of school to take care of your baby. You’d have to go on the welfare to the shame of your kinfolk. You’d be working the truckstops at night to make ends meet. Your parents won’t want anything to do with you because you got pregnant and they think you’re a whore. What then?

The whole “be fruitful and multiply” thing was cute way back when, but it’s time to get smart. There are way too many people on this rock and like it or not, abortion is perfectly legal. What’s even nicer is that abortion pills are legal, and convenient to boot. None of that messy uterus scraping and soreness.

But Wal-Mart feels that it has an ethical obligation to keep private citizens away from legal birth control remedies because it doesn’t like them. The chain finds abortion objectionable, so in order to be true to its own personal ethics, it wants to keep Preven out of all of our hands.

Life is sacred, but they don’t find guns objectionable. Head back past the fishing poles and soccer balls and pick one up. Apparently it is only wrong to kill a person when he hasn’t come out of the womb. Once out, however, we’re all fair game for any cracker with a .22 rifle and a six pack.

The people I find objectionable are the ones who defend Wal-Mart on the basis they’ve made an ethical choice we should respect. I know I need some cracker from parts south making life decisions for me.

Oh please, Wal-Mart, show me the error of my ways. Ban those Marilyn Manson records so I don’t get corrupted. While you’re at it, make sure that any artist that criticizes your company gets pulled off the shelf, too. Lord knows Sheryl Crow might influence someone to think negatively about your sporting goods section.

Personal ethical choices should be left in the hands of individuals. If Wal-Mart doesn’t like being in the business of selling emergency contraception, then it should have thought about that before it set up shop in every briar hopper county in the U.S., running smaller businesses out of town. Lloyd the pharmacist might not have been able to beat your low, low prices, but he sure as hell didn’t try to think for us.

I won’t hide my position on Preven Emergency Contraception kits. I don’t need to blur the lines between what is contraception and what is an abortion. I will call a spade a spade. This pill is an abortion pill, and I love it.

Gloria Steinem once said that if men menstruated, they would brag about how much and how long. That chick was right. And it has long been held that if men had to carry the babies, abortions would be legal, cheap and given away as free gifts for opening up new bank accounts. If men got pregnant, the human race would be in serious trouble of dying out, my friends, make no mistake about that.

As a group, we only tend to see the beauty and sacredness of bearing life when we can feel like we planted it in someone else. Most of my friends are parents, and I know half the thrill of getting their wives pregnant was proving they weren’t sterile.

In this day and age, we need to take the moralistic blinders off and start running this human race like we’ve got some brains. Evolution isn’t working any more. If it were, the planet wouldn’t be filled with six billion people looking to make more.

Opposition to abortion on moral grounds didn’t come about until late last century when a bunch of male doctors wanted to get midwives out of the baby-delivering business. Midwives performed abortions, and the best way to steal their business was to claim, after thousands of years, that abortion was murder. Prior to that, no one seemed too concerned.

The Bible goes into great detail about what is and is not a sin. If abortion were a sin, it would have said something about it. And don’t think they didn’t have abortions back then because they did.

The ancient world was filled with smart people who knew how to terminate pregnancy with herbs and a good massage.

Don’t eat pork or shellfish; don’t wear two kinds of cloth; never cut the hair on the sides of your head. All of this and they just forgot to mention abortion? I think not.

They didn’t mention it because they didn’t see it as wrong. The best evidence for the Moral Majority that abortion is not murder and isn’t a sin is that the big book of rules doesn’t cover it!

My ethics tell me I shouldn’t force my beliefs on other people. And no corporation should either.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.