February 04, 2006
Contradictions from The Culture of Life
As I have said in the past, I don't know any woman who ever enjoyed her abortion, felt fabulous about the decision to have one, or thought, "What the heck, I'll just have an abortion if I get pregnant". No siree.
Prior to 1963 it was even worse. We risked our lives and/or our future fertility by participating in an illegal, back alley procedures, IF we were lucky enough to find someone who would do it. With means and connections, we could solicit a psychiatrist's testimony that we would either kill ourselves or become unfit mothers if we carried a fetus to full term -- a small price to pay to have an abortion safely in a clean setting. I think that every woman I know would agree that abortion is bad.
Lately, some in the pro-choice movement are openly saying that abortion isn't a great solution, and examining a fuller range of options. William Saletan offers them up in a NYT, January 22 Op-Ed piece. "The problem with using restrictions to reduce the number of abortions isn't that the restrictions are judgmental. It's that they're crude. They leap too easily from judgment to legislation and criminalization. They drag police officers, prosecutors and politicians into personal tragedies. Most people don't want such intrusion. But you lose them up front by refusing to concede that there's anything wrong with abortion. You have to offer them anti-abortion results (fewer abortions) without anti-abortion laws. The pro-choice path to those results is simple. Help every woman when she doesn't want an abortion: before she's pregnant. That means abstinence for those who can practice it, and contraception for everybody else. Nearly half of the unintended pregnancies in this country result in abortions, and at least half of our unintended pregnancies are attributable to women who didn't use contraception. The pregnancy rate among these women astronomically exceeds the pregnancy rate among women who use contraception. The No. 1 threat to the unborn isn't the unchurched. It's the unprotected. "
Catholics for a Free Choice takes the position that "valuing yourself means taking the greatest care not to create life you cannot bring to personhood or into the world is a moral and social good".
Unfortunately, the majority of those in the pro-life movement also object to contraception, even in the face of a global epidemic of AIDs. Perhaps it's just plain sex that t really scares them. Or maybe, it's the power of the sacred feminine unleashed -- but I'll save that discussion for another time.
So we're back to abstinence, which means resisting powerful biological forces . We cannot expect too much success with abstinence, when those biological forces are surging through inexperienced adolescent bodies like tsunamis.
As the government moves toward more repression (sexual and otherwise), kids are creating their own sexual agendas. An elucidating article in New York Magazine takes a look at what some adolescents on the cutting edge are up to sexually. A sample - "Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, 'just sexual.' The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open."
Here's an idea. We could avoid sex altogether by cloning, but, that too has its drawbacks. As the President warned in his State of the Union Address. cloning could lead to human-animal hybrids. (The Offal Office would do well to have one of those 700,000 new science teachers scan his speeches for scientific accuracy.) Not a bad alternative though, when you think of the horrors of birth control.
Photo notes: Above, a bumper sticker which I hadn't seen before I shot it, but have since come to understand is common. I know you're waiting for me to connect all those grizzly little skeletons to the text - but I shan't.
Posted by Dakota at February 4, 2006 03:51 PM