Capital Punishment Stops A Beating Heart
One morning there was a story about Democrats for Life and how Democrats for Life are against abortion but support measures like better sex education (well, better -- abstinence education isn't really sex education) ("The penis does this and goes here AND YOU MUST NEVER DO THIS" etc.), and better childcare programs for young/single/working mothers (and hell, probably better childcare for working families), and better access to birth control, and all sorts of things that would actually improve the situation. Things that I'm solidly in favor of.
I've gone through a lot of evolution in terms of my - well, can I say political identity? - in the last 10 years, going from being a staunch Objectivist to being slightly to the right of unwashed, tree-hugging hippie pacifist. (I take showers.) When I got to college, I firmly believed that abortion was immoral. At my first quarter at Ohio State, I took an intro Philosophy class, and the second assignment was a paper about abortion. We read arguments (about violinists and kidneys and theives coming through the window, if I remember correctly - or maybe the violinist and kidney thing was my example, or maybe I twisted it somehow...) on either side of the debate. And I pulled my first college all-nighter reading, and writing, and thinking about abortion, and decided unequivocally, once and for all, that I'm pro-life.
I think abortion is immoral. In the case of rape, I think the child should be brought to term and given up for adoption. (Side note - has adoption just completely dropped out of the debate? Is it no longer considered a viable option? It wasn't mentioned in the Democrats for Life story, or on their website, and it doesn't seem to come up in public discourse much any more. Or am I just missing it?) In the case of the life-of-the-mother, I do believe that it's acceptable, for reasons that I worked out at about 3 in the morning when I was a freshman. I'm sure I still have the flowcharts and syllogisms somewhere. Incest, I do not know. Please, people, stop committing incest. Erg. I would come down on the yes-it's-okay side, but would prefer to try to head that one off at the pass.
And yet I hate pro-lifers with the kind of fiery passion normally reserved (in my soul, at least) for members of the Bush administration. Well, and civilian hummer drivers. (But, hey, good news! The new, marginally smaller H3 gets gas mileage in the double digits now! Hurrah!) The interviewer spoke to a mainstream pro-lifer who said that the Democrats for Life were going about it the wrong way, because we need to stress the fact that abortion is IMMORAL. It should be ILLEGAL because it is IMMORAL.
Right, because the years of waving grotesque signs and screaming at people on the street have clearly solved the problem.
The reason I can't fucking stand the pro-lifers is that their best idea about how to deal with this problem, the problem of abortion, is to wave signs and scream at people. They feel morally superior and don't have to think a whit about it.
So, I'm philosophically pro-life and politically/functionally/for practical intents pro-choice. I think abortion is immoral, but I think abstinence-only education (that is, denying young adults honest information about sex) is immoral. I think that denying birth control to unmarried women is immoral. Rape and incest are immoral. Accepting a society where you deny a woman access to both an abortion (as in states such as Missouri and South Dakota, which each have but a single abortion clinic that every day face legal maneuvers aimed toward shutting them down) and to decent childcare is immoral.
But all that won't fit on a legible sign, and who would I go scream at anyway? It's a complicated problem. It has multiple causes. Perhaps someday we can address these. But the cause of the problem is not the fact that people are allowed to have abortions. The legality of abortion does not result directly in unwanted pregnancies. I suspect there were one or two unwanted pregnancies before abortion was legal.
The other facet of the debate is the control over women's bodies issue. I sympathize with this. I agree that women, rather than men, should have the power of decision-making over their own bodies. And yet, the thing that it comes down to for me, and the reason that I'm at heart pro-life, is because the new clump of cells isn't the woman's body. It's in the woman's body. It needs the woman's body to survive. Half of it once was a part of the woman's body. But I can't get past the turn where you say that it's not its own thing. Because it is its own something. Not necessarily a baby, or an unborn child, but something.
I guess the point that I'm finding myself at, after writing all this, is that regardless of whether you can get around that turn or not - and a lot of people I respect can - nobody wants abortions to happen. Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody likes abortions. But instead of throwing our millions of dollars on both sides at the problem - access to information, birth control, counseling, child care - everyone is throwing it at ads and political candidates who want to change things from the top down.
Abortion is a solution. It's a bad solution to a complicated (and age old) problem. Packing the Supreme Court is not going to solve the problem of unwanted pregnancies. It's going to cause more problems of needed doctors being put in jail, of unsafe medical procedures, and more financial strains on already strained women/families.
The more I think about it, the more puzzling the behavior of the abortion protesters becomes. What do they think will happen if (when?) Roe is overturned? Will they have earned a spot in heaven? Will teenagers stop having sex? How is this going to be miraculous?
I was ultimately disappointed with the Democrats for Life, because it sounded in the news story that this was a group that wanted to address the underlying causes of the problem that abortion solves, but their website is the same empty, stupid rhetoric about the Unborn. You know, 'cause it's working so well for the Right.
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