On [the platform formerly known as Twitter] I had a bit of a [back-and-forth with two followers who are ardently pro-life. This has happened many times before, and I’ve been called names by folks on both sides (though that did not occur today). While I agree with my pro-life followers in theory, I have reservations about practice that make me come down on the side of “a woman’s right to choose.” I haven’t been able to spend a lot of time on this, but it summarizes my thinking.
Sex isn’t going away
A core question in the debate over abortion is whether we can prevent people from having ill-advised, unprotected sex. (We especially want to prevent the ill-equipped from having unprotected sex.)
I doubt that we can achieve such prevention. Not anymore, and not wide-scale. The ubiquity of sexual opportunity is such that we cannot contain the situation or restore the morals that some would like to apply society-wide.
I’m told that Gen Z is actually having less sex that prior generations, but there is no questioning the availability to those who want it. It’s a swipe, a booty call or an underage Jager away. Meanwhile, the culture reinforces the notion of spontaneous sex, and that climate isn’t going away, either. Look at those cheery ads for those newfangled IUDs in which the models are literally dancing in the street over their ability to get down whenever/wherever. (Alas, too many young women embrace the carefree messaging without having the device implanted.) Or look at the fuss we make over some A-list actress who’s having a baby, regardless of the circumstances of the child’s conception. Entertainment reporters injure themselves in their efforts to out-giddy one another.
My wife watches the shows Four Weddings and Say Yes to the Dress. Both shows routinely feature brides who’ll be incorporating one or more babies or small children into the ceremony; and one cannot always assume that the kids were fathered by the groom-to-be. Then we have 16 & Pregnant, which is utterly judgment-free in covering the titular phenomenon. We live in a society in which such indiscretions are lamented, perhaps, but no longer stigmatized.
Then you have the sexual engine of the Web, which hums at high horsepower all day and all night, fanning the flames of human desire.
Bottom line, we are never, ever, ever going back to the days when, to be crass about it, you had to put a ring on a woman’s finger in order to get past second base. (And in at least some of those cases, let’s face it, people lied about their baserunning.)
Indiscreet sex is here to stay. Maybe not in the ever-decreasing number of homes where religion is still the center of family life, but pretty much everywhere else.
Which means that babies will be conceived. Not all of whom will be wanted. Which brings me to:
Dehumanizing the unborn
Believe me when I say that I am the last person to dehumanize the unborn. I have a personal attachment to that statement that we won’t go into here. Thing is, one doesn’t want to dehumanize the already-born, either. I would rather have an unwanted child remain unborn than be born into some of the circumstances I’m confronted with every day as a man who writes (formally and in tweets) on social issues.
Yeah, I hear the rebuttal: Well, it shouldn’t be that way, dammit. But if we’ve proved anything over the past century it’s that we’re woefully incapable of providing for society’s less fortunate wee ones. We care, we try, we pontificate, we donate, but we don’t get it done. If it’s true that it takes a village, we’ve been sorely lacking in building those villages.
I’m going to offer an analogy here that the two followers I have in mind probably will despise because I’m bringing dogs into a discussion of infants. I stand by it nonetheless.
Some months ago this poor creature was brought into a shelter in Las Vegas. All animal abuse is unforgivable, but the mistreatment to which he had been subjected was disturbing and utterly beyond the pale. (And yet the dog, whom the vets named Hercules, greeted his rescuers with face-licks and a wagging stub of a tail.) The shelter did what it could, the local media were successful at generating contributions for his care, but Hercules succumbed to his injuries. I’d been making donations myself, and had thought he was on the right track, so I’m unashamed to confess that I cried like a baby when I called the shelter for an update and learned of his demise. To invoke Creed, what was that life for?
Should a dog ever be abused that way? Of course not. Would I like to get my hands on the abusers? For sure. Even at my advanced age of 73 I think I’d be able to summon enough of the fury of hell to mete out some justice.
That’s not going to happen, though, and no matter how much we punish the perps, we are left with this question:
Would poor Hercules have been better off never being born than being whelped into his short life of terror and suffering?
This is why, no matter my rage at women who abort for convenience, I want kids born only to mother who truly want them.
There are far too many children condemned to live a life that may be better than the life allotted to poor Hercules, but not appreciably.
The question of religion/morality
I also dislike the notion of organizing societies composed of fallible humans into sinners and saints, all the more when we’re doing it according with the dictates of a particular religion, which in this case is (mostly) Catholicism. (As I ask my students, if you’re going to allow secular law to be explicitly informed by religion...then how can you argue against the imposition of Shariah Law?)
I’m not going to get down into the weeds of what constitutes a living being, but do I believe that abortion is murder? In at least some cases, yes. Clearly the abortion of a second-trimester fetus is the intentional killing of a (likely) viable human. But we have parsed the definition of murder to accommodate many killings that we abide in the name of larger interests. Various percentages of us are okay with war, capital punishment, the castle doctrine, assisted suicide, etc. So abortion is another exception to the rule. I hate it, viscerally—the queasiest fact of all is that we do 600,000 to 1 million of them per year, and I can’t imagine that all of those killings were “necessary”—but I tolerate the situation for the reasons outlined. When you’re running a society, idealism must be tempered by realism.
And I tolerate the situation because at the end of the day, this is such nebulous and confusing terrain that it seems only fair to leave the decision to the person in whose body the event is happening.