The Weekly Screed (#754)

A high-tech solution
to the battle over Roe v. Wade
by David Benjamin

MADISON Wis. — Visitors to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, had a thousand reason to be distracted. They were buzzed by drones, dazzled by chrome-crusted cars that run (without a driver) on everything from Wesson Oil to isotopes, and hypnotized by wide-screen ultra-definition, four-dimensional TV with sound so piercing that no bodily orifice was safe.

I was there. I saw all this stuff. So I understand how 180,000 conventioneers managed to overlook perhaps the most politically significant high-tech breakthrough of this — or any — decade. The brainchild of a small Texas startup called Ayudi Solutions, a tiny gadget cunningly called Robo-Bort 3000 poses the potential to end America’s long, divisive debate over abortion rights and contraception.

To illustrate the genius of this amazing device, Dr. Fallopia Crenshaw, Ayudi’s CEO, held out a handful of raw arborio rice and said, “Go ahead. Find Robbie.”

(“Robbie” is Ayudi’s copyrighted nickname for the Robo-Bort prototype.)

Picking out this minuscule medical miracle from the rice grains proved impossible because “Robbie” is virtually indistinguishable in both size and color.

But what does it do?

“Right now, if I were to set Robbie loose,” said Dr. Crenshaw, “it would perform a perfectly safe, 100-percent infallible, painless abortion in a span of roughly 30 minutes, on a fertilized human egg as far as six weeks into gestation. And all this happens in the home, with no need to visit a clinic, without the intervention of any medical professional, while the consumer rests comfortably, reading a magazine or watching ‘Oprah.’ And she doesn’t feel a thing.”

I frankly found this claim astounding and insisted on more details about the Robo-Bort technology.

Happy to comply, Dr. Crenshaw gripped the infinitesimal gadget gingerly with a tweezers and placed it beneath a microscope. Revealed there, under 400-percent magnification, was a fully articulated advanced-tactical combat vehicle painted for intra-uterine camouflage, with tank treads and a formidable cannon-like tube protruding from its tiny turret.

“What we’ve created, through microtechnology advances unique to Ayudi Solutions, is an itty-bitty variation on the U.S. Army’s famous Abrams Fighting Vehicle,” boasted Dr. Crenshaw. “Right now, Robbie is dormant, because his little electric engine is hormonally sensitive.”

The Ayudi CEO said that the Robo-Bort’s power plant “starts to churn away — like an Energizer bunny — as soon as it gets a whiff of estrogen.”

Dr. Crenshaw explained that, after a consumer has registered a positive pregnancy test but opts against carrying her fetus to term, she need only tuck Robbie into the “appropriate opening” in her body. “And Robbie takes it from there!”

“Activated by the pungent ambience of estrogen, Robbie motors into mortal combat with that unwelcome zygote,” said Dr. Crenshaw. “His sensors are programmed to seek out that fertile embryo wherever it’s nesting in the uterus. Robo-Bort uses a triple combination of radar, sonar and lidar sensors — each less than one-hundredth of a millimeter in size — so hyper-sensitive that no egg can hide.”

Robbie, said Dr. Crenshaw, homes in on the chemistry of the incipient fetus “like a cheetah going after a gazelle on the Serengeti.”

Once the egg has been identified and targeted, Robbie becomes, in Dr. Crenhaw’s colorful description, “a suicide bomber.”

The Robo-Bort fighting vehicle, said its proud inventor, “empties its batteries, obliterating itself and frying the uterine invader in a fiery laser blast that wipes out every living cell within a one-centimeter radius.”

Dr. Crenshaw added, “But, of course, the woman inside of whom all this mayhem is taking place feels nothing. Not a pang. Not a twinge. Her only knowledge of what happened down there is — about 24 hours later — a stain on her panties.”

Dr. Crenshaw declined to discuss the political impact of Robo-Bort, but Raoul Spongeworthy, professor of contraceptive mechanics at the prestigious Polytechnic Institute of South Slovenia, called the Ayudi innovation a “game-changer.”

“This is an entirely digital appliance,” said Prof. Spongeworthy of Robo-Bort, which Ayudi packages in a sealed plastic capsule, bathed in sterile isopropyl alcohol. “You don’t buy it from a medical supplier or even get it at the drugstore. This miniature robot will be available at Best Buy, or online from Amazon or Big Lots. They’ll probably have these little assassins on sale in the checkout line at Piggly Wiggly, next to the breath mints and The National Enquirer.”

Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice organizations are aware of the Robo-Bort development but have thusfar refrained from comment, apparently awaiting the device’s official market rollout, scheduled for Mother’s Day 2016.

However, as one pro-choice advocate associated with one of the Democratic presidential campaigns, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “This little doo-hickey might be smaller than a fish egg, but if it does what they say, there’s gonna be thousands of anti-abortion activists choking on it.”

Asked to provide contact information for more details on Ayudi Solutions and Robo-Bort, Dr. Crenshaw regretfully refused, citing past attacks by pro-life extremists.

The Consumer Technology Association also chose silence.