When abortion suddenly stopped making sense

Roe v. Wade - Abortion Won the Day, but Sooner or Later That Day Will End  — by Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Real Choices: Listening to Women; Looking for Alternatives to Abortion.

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.” 

The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. 

But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion. 

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names. 

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad. 

Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting. 

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” 

For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine. 

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made. Abortion can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. 

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child. 

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals. 

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.” 

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along. 

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.) 

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.” 

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life. 

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?” The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters? 

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear. We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child? 

Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really a person because it is so small. Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people? That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to kill them? What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? 

What about a woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older? At what point is it all right to terminate her? 

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father, and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the cells came from three different people. 

When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other. Obviously, law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us. 

Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion. 

Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to be something both sides agree on. 

I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” 

Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it. 

Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression. 

*** 

And so we come around to one more March for Life, like the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes. 

I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion woman could tell you a different story. 

The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us? 

In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters. 

One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind. 

 ~ Frederica Mathewes-Green 
National Review January 22, 2016
(I’m glad for anyone to reprint anything. However, the publication that commissioned and paid for the essay in the first place asks that you note where the essay originally appeared.)

Read more at: National Review

Life and Law -- the Limits

Conflict among us requires law; limits imposed
on our individual freedom for the sake of all.
Must we legislate on behalf of a mother
and her the unborn child?

When my life bumps into yours and we affect each other, then perhaps the law should assert some constraints on our behavior. That's the general context of American jurisprudence, protecting the rights of persons where there freedoms overlap.  We share the roads, the airwaves, the marketplace, the schools, and more by law.

Courts struggle to apply the law to today's question. A person born in this country is a citizen and protected by the Constitution, but an unborn child just minutes away from being born isn't anything.  (Thirty-eight states do have laws identifying the killing of an unborn child as murder or equivalent.)

We're left to work with laws and rulings that have to be stretched to cover the questions.
For an unplanned pregnancy, the interests of the mother are acknowledged by all. She has a measure of autonomy when it comes to decisions she makes about her own body. The problem arises if her body is the shelter for another person.  We understand their needs, but only if both are persons do they both have rights.

Many have been persuaded that there is only one person involved, but that's not in the ruling.

The Supreme Court did not say that the unborn child wasn't a person.  Or that abortion was a constitutional right, or that it was moral or just.    

The last question ...

In its perhaps most controversial ruling, the court did allow for a "right of privacy" which it "discovered" in so-called "emanations" or "penumbrae" of our constitution. The consequences of Roe v. Wade have been culturally divisive and deadly.  

The court did not declare that abortion itself was a constitutional right, morally acceptable, or ethically appropriate.  What the court did say was, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins ... the judiciary at this point ... is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." 

The court went further with a key admission:  "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case [i.e., "Roe" who sought an abortion], of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment."

If somewhere along the timeline from conception to delivery, 'personhood' begins, then a line is crossed.  Life does begin before birth of course, and we do have a problem. 

The extraordinary conflict is that everyone knows the child is alive and present before birth, but you can describe it in terms (like 'fetus') that allow you behave as though that were not a fact. Everyone knows. For the expectant woman with limited financial resources, the choice is offered, and she hopes she's doing the right thing.  There are life circumstances that can make that option a less difficult choice than the alternative.

Pro-life and pro-choice advocates agree, no one wants to have an abortion. No one wants to have an abortion, but circumstances along with today's imprecise legal definitions may encourage them to choose that path.

What if this application of the law was made more by preference than by understanding? 

You can read it all, beginning to end, if you care to know.

 Ethical resolution will come, one might hope, but it's unlikely to be an easy path.

Advantage

How might we maintain our advantage as we move forward?

It's an interesting question.

US Border Patrol agent looks over Tijuana, Mexico,
along the old wall at the US-Mexico border at the
base of a hill in San Diego, California.
(AP Photo / Gregory Bull)

In conversation with a sociology professor, we were wandering through the issue of the border and the extraordinary inequality it illustrates.  Those on the far side have little hope of achieving the level of opportunity they see just a short distance away.

Given the chance, the professor proposed, we should help, but perhaps only if we can avoid any loss, only if we can maintain our advantage.

Why would that be the condition required before we do something that helps?

If our kids were in a bind, we'd help.  If it was schooling, or if it was healthcare or food or shelter or safety, we're all in, regardless of the cost.  We'll help carry their burden.  But it's not our kids.  Or our country.

Do we need the advantage, though?  The millions who live in deprivation are not our enemies.  The ones who oppress them, however ... they're the problem.

When you think about it, that's always been the trouble both inside and between nations including our own.  Those who rule emerge from the rise of power and influence among the elite, the wealthy and influential.  Governments and industry tend to merge into a competitive creature whose goal is continuing advantage.  That's their definition of 'good', is it not; e.g, competitive advantage, economic advantage, military advantage, relational advantage, those are the 'good' outcomes.  Anything wrong there?

Today's political rhetoric illustrates the point rather well.  There are values that should perhaps be added to the equation.

From the Ice Age Until Now

Graphic by xkcd, my favorite webcomic.

I had to review the content of the graphic several times and pursue some details elsewhere

to see the content objectively.  I wasn't able to find any misrepresentation of the available science
apart from the recent NOAA scandal on the deliberate exaggeration of the rate of rise.  Fake news, it turns out.

There’s a common line among climate skeptics that "[t]he climate has always changed, so why worry if it’s changing now?" The first half of that sentence is undeniably true. Due to orbital wobbles, volcanic activity, rock weathering, and changes in solar activity, the Earth’s temperature has waxed and waned over the past 4.5 billion years. During the Paleocene it was so warm that crocodiles swam above the Arctic Circle. And 20,000 years ago it was cold enough that multi-kilometer-thick glaciers covered Montreal.


"What’s most relevant to us humans, living in the present day, is that the climate has been remarkably stable for the past 12,000 years. That period encompasses all of human civilisation - from the pyramids to the Industrial Revolution to Facebook and beyond. We’ve benefited greatly from that stability. It’s allowed us to build farms and coastal cities and thrive without worrying about overly wild fluctuations in the climate."  ~Brad Plumer

Angry at Government

A look at the run-up to the election, in case you were curious.

Most were angry with our government according to the poll last spring by the AP ...

... angry about immigration policy.
... angry about pointless congressional deadlock.
... angry about lies and lobbyists and moneyed interests being favored.
... angry about the economy and foreign trade deals and debt.
... angry about inequality and the wealthy elite.

It's not a recent phenomenon ...
Why would Americans be progressively more dissatisfied with politicians and government?




Note the trend since the turn of the century.


The difficult task is figuring out why.  Is it the president?  The trend spans the administrations of both parties.  It spans years of trouble in the international community and global change.

Can we point to things that might be common across these years?





Conservatives and liberals would perhaps blame each other, but the parties agree on their disapproval of Congress.  As a whole, Congress has been an impediment to reasonable policy and progress in addressing important issues; almost a dead end.  And angry people voted for change.

We're facing an interesting time, and many are truly frightened by the prospects.  There is nothing in our past that compares to today, of course, but there have been many difficult times.  The years following the world wars changed the nation, the years following Korea, Vietnam, and 9/11 changed the nation.  Everything has changed and continues to to do so, but we are a resilient nation, a durable people.  Perhaps the difficult times will provoke meaningful change for the better.  Many are praying that way.

It's perhaps worth noting that conflict continues unabated in the world, and it is largely economic.  The wars of conquest and empire from generations past have evolved into today's competition for wealth and advantage, and it continues both internally and on a global scale. That is perhaps much of what occupies government's attention these days ... becoming greater.  Not better or more honorable, not decent or upright ... just wealthier, more powerful, and economically bigger than the rest.

Any adjustments needed?

Classroom Exercise

Take a look at the graphic all the way to the end, then 
read the comments that were posted in response.

(Name removed) ·

New Caney, Texas

Nobody in the back row worked to get there. Not one.

Like · Reply · Mar 19, 2016 12:38am

👸
(Name removed) ·

Works at Pikey

He should have added that the students at the back of the class could have always aske to be moved to the front, but they chose not to. Someone taking advantage of things you don't is not "privilage", it is laziness on your part. THe students in the front row are not responsible for anyone but themselves, just like the students at the back. The only thing being taught here is blame shifting and laziness.

Like · Reply · Mar 16, 2016 7:44pm

(Name removed) ·

I love my White Male privilege.   The Privilege to be assumed a racist because of the color of my skin. The Privilge to be assumed to be sexist because I'm a male. The Privilege to accumulate tens of thousands in student loan debt because they gave the scholarships to lesser performing minorities based on the color of their skin or "heritage". The Privilege of being passed over on jobs because they need to fill quotas of women and minorities. The Privilege of funding all the welfare programs for poor people who aren't willing to work to better their situation, but would kill me if I walked down their street.

AND my Privilege to be blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong in the history of humankind because I'm a white male who broke out of my own poverty ridden childhood to become a successful member of society.

Like · Reply · Mar 16, 2016 12:32pm

______________

My own thoughts on the subject:

It's perhaps worth noting that conservatives often blame the behavior of the poor for their poverty citing drugs and alcohol, gangs and crime, and the 'sinful choices' folks make. Liberals often blame the rich for exploitation of the workforce, of resources, and their influence on government policies. Who's right and who's wrong? Both.

Poverty is complex with interrelated and unrelated causes. Society's responsibility is just to do their part. There's much that can be done to make a lasting difference. The first step is perhaps noticing that there's a problem, that inequality is systemic and deadly.

___________________________

And of course this one caught my attention:

👽👽
(Name removed) ·

University of Houston–Clear Lake

The students chose their seating. Much like people choose their plight in life. You want a handout and do not work to better yourself, then you have chosen to sit in the back.

Like · Reply · Mar 16, 2016 9:19am

How many ways can we duck the obvious message and its' association with today's reality?  While one might choose a seat in the classroom for a variety of reasons, I doubt any would choose poverty or deprivation for their families. I doubt that any would choose to live in a dangerous neighborhood where their children are exposed daily to violence and the drug culture. 

Having worked in several countries and circumstances, it appears that in general, the poor work harder than most, try harder than most, and are continually struggling for a way up and out for themselves and their children. Some made bad choices, of course, as is true of each of us and all economic groups without exception. The difference is the number and degree of impediments an individual faces as they attempt to improve.

As a general rule, poverty is not a choice; it's done to you.

____________________________________________

And perhaps the most insightful comment ...

❤   (Name removed)
·Clifton, New Jersey
You know, as someone that grew up in the suburbs to white parents (white step dad, but essentially my dad). I played sports and instruments and went to an amazing school where they knew my parent's first names w/o having to check my file.                                                                  I rebelled at 14 and decided to live with my black bio dad in, let's face it, the hood. I was suddenly surrounded by drugs and gangs and thieves, and girls that wanted to fight me for no reason.  My English teacher, most notably, was so amazed that I could read without help, as every other kid stuttered and stumbled over the simplest words when we were reading out loud. This is in HIGH SCHOOL.  These kids in the ghetto aren't taught that they can compete against white kids, they're taught that school isn't important and all they need to learn is survival in the jungle.		I know most people don't get a taste of both worlds, so maybe they don't understand, but going from a white school where they told me I could be president, or a rocket scientist, or whatever I wanted, to a school where they're like "omg you can READ", I truly understand how so few people can actually make it out of the hood. Their only role models are drug dealers and basketball players. I watched all my white friends prepare for college worrying about AP classes and SATs while my black friends were smoking weed and skipping class. You couldn't understand if you haven't seen it firsthand.                                                          I know this is long-winded but so many people truly don't understand how much harder it really is for people to make it out of an underprivileged situation.  I went from a straight A over achiever to a drop-out within a year of being in the hood because I couldn't take the violence, the feelings of hopelessness, and the harassment for "sounding too white" and having long hair.  It's not as easy as some might believe.       Like · Reply · 449 · Nov 22, 2014 2:37pm