“Pro-life” Harry Reid backs government-funded abortions

The law is inherently about drawing lines. It is difficult to avoid–voting age, speed limits, jail sentences, tax rates. In Roe SCOTUS tried to recognize some gradual increase in the rights of the unborn. However, any alternative would involve new lines being drawn. Perhaps the line is at conception or implantation or at viability. You’ve identified a problem with casual sex and a lack of responsibility. I’d agree, but it is difficult to imagine (even hypothetically) how the law can step in to legislate more responsible sexual behavior.

dedalus on March 27, 2009 at 6:39 PM

Abortion is one of the most vexing questions to face a democracy, because it sits at the intersection of life and liberty. There is no doubt that an abortion results in one less human being – even those who are squeamish about calling it “murder” can’t deny that someone is losing their life, a life that would have existed without the intervention of the abortionist. Even without entering the religious discussion of exactly when life begins, it is a matter of cold logic that one abortion equals one less baby.

There is also little doubt that outlawing abortion restricts the liberty of the mother, who will be obliged to suffer through a terrible ordeal to deliver a baby she doesn’t think she wants, or doesn’t feel she can care for. If birthing and raising a child were easy, we would not have the reverence we feel for the awesome love and selfless dedication that make them possible.

No matter which way society decides the matter, either life or liberty are going to suffer… so the way a society decides this issue says a great deal about its character.

For myself, as I have grown older, I find it increasingly difficult to take the pro-abortion position. I know this is partially an emotional response, as every baby I hold makes it harder for me to justify extinguishing their lives for the sake of convenience. It was easier to be reflexively pro-abortion when I was younger, because the quick and dirty “it’s nobody’s business but the mother” response is the abdication of moral reasoning – hey, it’s not up to me to decide, so I’m not even going to think about it.

I’ve come around to seeing it like this: with the rare rape exception, a pregnancy is the result of the mother making a choice, a choice that was once understood to have enormous consequences. Those antique Victorian notions of virtue and fidelity were not invented by grumpy old farts to make young people feel bitter and frustrated. If human beings are to consider themselves something more than animals, we must also accept the responsibilities of that elevated status, and thousands of years of experience have taught us that sex, love, and birth are part of one inseparable package. We know that a society can afford to have a few wantons and libertines circling around its fringe, but the core of the society has to aim for something higher, and nobler. Sexual liberty followed by abortion requires the father and mother to deny something obvious they have known all their lives, and much of the social unrest in modern societies comes from the cognitive dissonance produced by that denial of truth. If sex is just a pleasant diversion, and pregnancy an easily corrected inconvenience, what else is truly significant and meaningful in life? If my children can be erased because they get in my way, what could not be erased because it gets in my way?

Abortion is the sacrifice of one future in the service of another. It is the calculation that having one life with greater material prosperity and freedom is better than taking a chance on having two. It is the opposite of the optimistic belief that having more people in the world means having more good people in the world. A society that absolutely chooses liberty over life is a society on a downward spiral that is merely trying to manage its decline, and find a comfortable place to decompose. It seems to be the guiding principle in the dying West that we should devote our energies to managing failure, rather than celebrating success and taking risks to achieve rewards.

With due consideration for the extreme life-of-the-mother situations, it seems to me that one of the first steps we could take to reversing the decline of the West might be to affirm that we stand on the side of life above liberty, because we embrace the wild possibilities of love and sacrifice above the cold calculation of self-interest.

Doctor Zero on March 27, 2009 at 7:16 PM

Abortion stands today as a national disgrace. It is our greatest single symbol that the excess of the Hippie movement has corrupted the American soul and fundamentally changed our perceptions on what is acceptable. Abortion is no more than another form of the lack of responsibility and greed that has taken us to economic ruin as well. It is the very crux of what is bringing America to its knees.

We have lost our way.

Hawthorne on March 27, 2009 at 7:40 PM

When I was in college, I had a literature professor who explained that achieving mastery of the basics was necessary before one could become “experimental.” Learning and obeying the rules of English did not imprison the writer – it set him free. Without those rules, nothing meaningful can be written – language does not benefit from anarchy. But with a firm understanding of those rules, a writer can transcend the dry data dump of purely technical writing, and achieve soaring prose.

The hippie movement you described pulled a terrible con job on the women of the 60s and 70s, convincing them they could only achieve true “liberty” by casting aside all the old norms of marriage and motherhood. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, as they said. Sexually ravenous young men were only too happy to go along with this sexual revolution.

In reality, the libertine age that resulted has only reduced the true liberties of women, and allowed men to live in an extended adolescence that drags their twenties out into their forties. We gained the tawdry and superficial freedom of unrestricted license – sleep with anybody, put off marriage forever, and abort the odd unplanned pregnancy. We lost the true freedom that came from mastering the rules of love, fidelity, fatherhood, and motherhood… the freedom to grow up, and achieve higher and nobler things. We became writers who never feel compelled to finish their autobiographies… we just keep throwing out what we’ve done and starting over.

Because leftish American society is so painfully immature, it can never see how anarchy is the denial of freedom, not its ultimate expression.

Doctor Zero on March 27, 2009 at 7:56 PM

If you phrase the question about God’s existence in the most general terms possible, I can see how I might not be sure about the answer. However, once you put some meat on, all ambivalence disappears. Christianity is false. Islam is false. Judaism is false. And ridiculous, too.

An even longer version would be that I agree with Sam Harris. There’s no non-astrologers. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is at the core of any rational argument. Claims that religions make are too grandiose, and the support for them is too laughable.

radiofreevillage on March 28, 2009 at 12:52 AM

I usually hate to wade into discussions about religious faith, but in the context of the current topic: leaving aside the unprovable truth or falsehood of any religious belief including atheism, the aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition that sets it most clearly apart from Islam is the way it endorses behaviors most compatible with liberty, democracy, and technological advance.

Atheist philosophers who apply a lifetime of brainpower to reasoning out the principles of a moral society always seem to come up with most of the same things churches and synagogues have always taught. On the topic of abortion, I spent decades considering it, and eventually came to the same conclusion my local priest offered when I was eight years old.

While I’m not an atheist myself, I wouldn’t insist this is because the Judeo-Christian system is divinely inspired, but rather because it is fairly unique in promoting the concepts of responsibility and humility together. A Christian or Jew is taught that he has free will and is morally responsible for his choices in life, and also that he should be humble in respecting powers higher than himself. Of course, they are lessons often imperfectly learned, but through religion they were written into the base code of Western civilization. And while these principles are not entirely unique to Judeo-Christian teaching, it seems to me that no other faith tradition has quite managed the trick of mixing them together in such a potent combination – not to put down other religions, but the evolution of Western philosophy suggests something very special in man’s social evolution, and most of that evolution was nursed along by people of substantial religious faith.

Stated simply, the construction of an advanced and successful democracy does not require religious faith, but rather the humility to behave as if someone might be watching from on high… a behavioral shorthand for organizing one’s sense of duty to family, neighbors, and state, and keeping the state from dissolving into the arrogance and hubris that characterizes the avowedly anti-religious ruling party we have today. It seems like the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” types are always the ones who sign on to the trillion-dollar spending bills and huge government expansions, while the passionate pro-lifers also seem to be the folks who take all the amendments to the Constitution seriously, and don’t like the idea of the government pouncing on damaged industries and devouring them.

Doctor Zero on March 28, 2009 at 1:36 AM

I remember being a child looking up at the puffy clouds behind the tall oak’s leaves waving in the summer wind.

My mother’s yell carried across the field for me to come in for supper.

For some reason your post reminded me of this.

Thank you.

Saltysam on March 28, 2009 at 12:42 AM

I’m honored and humbled, my friend!

Doctor Zero on March 28, 2009 at 1:38 AM