I like Amy Alkon because her heart is removed from these political questions about the same distance as is my own. On the question of meat: give it up vegetarians, no one is buying your emotionally ludicrous/pathetic identification with animals – they don’t give a —- about you and you don’t give a —- about them. Your only interest is in moral superiority, just another expression of your inherently passive-aggressive personality, but you don’t even have the courage to eat a mindless, soulless cow. Shut up.
On abortion, I confess that I really don’t care. What I do care about is that such a topic which has so little impact on national welfare – let’s be honest: 1 million abortions or 1 million new urchins in a country of 300 million people with a certain net influx of immigrants every year renders the question for national health moot – has such a warping effect on the national political debate. It is here that I become interested and have an opinion.
And my opinion is this. Whatever side of the fence you’re on, the fundamental fact is that an abortion is the conscious termination of A Pregnancy. That’s what the terrified girl thinks it is; that’s what the doctor thinks it is. So, inexorably, that is what an abortion is, whatever else it is.
I personally think pregnancies are special aspects of the human animal. I am not a religious person (mostly because I am lazy, I must admit) so I cannot regard pregnancy as “sacred,” but whatever highest regard I may give something, I certainly give it to pregnancies. Call me an authoritarian paternalistic bastard if you must, but I think pregnant ladies are special – because of the babies.
Moreover, it is clear from any NOW rally that the purpose of the pro-choice advocates is to make abortion available as a means of contraception, so that if all other birth control methods provided by science and the Griswold decision should fail to prevent a pregnancy, the girl or woman may still have it terminated. There’s no use in arguing with this description: I’ve been to the rallies, I know many women and men on that side, I read and I listen. This is what it is.
Fine.
So as a matter of pragmatism, the question is not “when does an embryo become a life?” but: shall we have a public culture that errs on the side of having the children and fostering personal responsability, or shall we have a public culture that promotes the termination of pregnancy when it is inconvenient? Keep in mind that even the majority opinion in Roe v Wade points out that there has never been and never will be a (valid) American abortion law that denies abortions to mothers where the pregnancy threatens the mother’s own health. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
In my view the answer to the above question, in view of all the other scientific and cultural appliances provided to prevent pregnancy in the first place, can only be that we should err toward the life of the child and the avowal of personal responsability.
Very socially inconvenient for me to hold such a view, but there it is. I must be honest with myself first.
But I don’t understand how reason could possibly counsel any other perspective, unless by “reason” you mean “instrumental reason,” in which case you have removed the question from the realm of morality to the realm of technology. You have in fact determined that the question is subordinate to and must conform with a prior, higher determination: that you shall not be inconvenienced where a technology exists to mitigate that inconvenience.
Faced with the question of which is a greater expression of cultural health, do you really think this latter position is the more cogent?
Well pardon me if I don’t want to live in your baby-killing machine world, Commarad Frau Alkon.
