Abortion: easy peasy
The author of this WaPo piece, Janet Harris, says that for most women the decision to have an abortion is not a difficult one:
Getting an abortion is expensive ”” not as costly as carrying a baby to term or raising a child, but expensive enough that half of all patients need help paying for it. And in many places, getting a safe and legal abortion can be more difficult because of parental-consent laws, distance to an abortion provider or a gantlet of hostile protesters outside the clinic doors.
Of all these difficulties, deciding whether to get an abortion is often the least of them. The situation may be difficult, but the decision is usually straightforward.
No doubts or questions? No pangs of conscience, even if the woman thinks she ultimately made the right choice? No remorseful aftermath for some? Not even any acknowledgement of the existence of a moral dilemma? Only practical considerations matter for Harris; her article is basically an amoral one.
Harris doesn’t even want abortion to be called “difficult” by others. Her reasons are strategic:
…[W]hen the pro-choice community frames abortion as a difficult decision, it implies that women need help deciding, which opens the door to paternalistic and demeaning “informed consent” laws. It also stigmatizes abortion and the women who need it.
Musn’t do that.
I hope we haven’t “advanced” to the point of considering abortion an easy decision with no ethical dimensions. Harris offers no evidence of what she asserts other than her own personal experience. She extrapolates her own amorality to women in general. She states as fact what she wishes were true. But we should all be relieved that it’s most likely not. If Harris ever got her wish, it would mean that the amorality of our society has advanced to a very chilling and dangerous point. It’s already pretty close, as articles such as Harris’s (and this one) demonstrate.
You may wonder why I use the word “amoral” rather than “immoral.” The thrust of these women’s articles is that abortion is a morally neutral activity, and they don’t even want the language of morality used regarding it. They believe we should have no right/wrong judgments whatsoever in regard to abortion.
It’s another example of the escalation that is part of the leftist activist agenda. At first, it is claimed to be enough that something become legal. Next, it is demanded that it never be met with disapproval or criticism. The next step is the requirement that everyone celebrate it.
I became pregnant during my 4th year of college and carried my first born up to term just as the semester was ending. I will never forget Barbi and think of her from time to time to this day. A lovely, intelligent, young Jewish woman in one of my classes. She visited me at my home to see the new baby, bringing a little stuffed animal as a gift. I can picture it like it was yesterday, our conversation outside of class one afternoon, when she said she would have an abortion without one moment’s hesitation or concern about the matter. I was dumbfounded then, and remain so. This was 1981, I was pregnant and unmarried and my husband and I were both finishing school. I had considered an abortion and could not do it. While I understand and feel compassion for women in awful circumstances (no means of support, etc etc) I have never been able to understand the Barbis of the world.
Sharon W:
You might be interested in reading this post, if you haven’t already.
“the amorality of our society has advanced to a very chilling and dangerous point”
Late eighties: a co-worker told me that when her daughter’s 8th grade classmate got pregnant, the other girls took up a collection for her abortion. The height of sisterhood. Don’t know if the adults intervened– probably not.
So abortion is rather like a haircut. Probably safe and sad to say that more women regret getting a haircut than regret getting an abortion.
In 1920, Russia became the first country in the world to allow abortion in all circumstances, but over the course of the 20th century, the legality of abortion changed more than once, with a ban being enacted again from 1936 to 1955. Russia had the highest number of abortions per woman of child-bearing age in the world according to UN data as of 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Russia
i wish neo would list out the different points of the left and then connect them to copying the moves of the soviet revolution (especially since USA 1968)
After the October Revolution in Russia, Alexandra Kollontai became the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration. Kollontai was also a champion of free love. However, Clara Zetkin recorded that Lenin opposed free love as “completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social” Zetkin also recounted Lenin’s denunciation of plans to organise Hamburg’s women prostitutes into a “special revolutionary militant section”: he saw this as “corrupt and degenerate.”
the feminist movement changed and copied the soviet free love movement, and if your going to have free love, and no marriage, your going to need lots of means of preventing and destroying
even the melding of the femnist movement and the lesbian and gay male movements were preceeded by the soviet free love and put to america by the beat generation
kinsey who is medically discredited is the number one cited medical source in law and legal reasoning today.
Thank you Neo. In reading your 2008 post and the comments, it occurs to me that amoral has taken the place of immoral because I believe that formally abortion was driven predominately by fear. There was stigma, likely financial duress (hence, Barbi stood out to me because she hailed from a liberal family of means, negating those 2 factors altogether.) It seems to me we have moved to a place where abortion for many is now driven by convenience or selfishness. Hanging on our office wall is a page from a 1st edition 1611 King James bible. It is the 23rd Psalm (and includes Psalm 24 and 25: 1-18). We purchased it for $25,000 which bought an ultrasound machine for a Crisis Pregnancy Center. Each year we send decent sized checks to 2 centers in our city. Because the one thing that is true about this subject is that the baby in the womb is silent and cannot speak for himself.
you really shouold make your coluns wider then the text would not be so long…
but then again… if your going to try to meaninfully discuss things that have their own sections in libraries, covering many shelves, what else can you expect..
or am i missing the point of cargo cult discussion is not supposed to be substantial.
Neo, perhaps the last step is requiring that people have abortions under certain circumstances.
“I hope we haven’t “advanced” to the point of considering abortion an easy decision with no ethical dimensions.”
I fear that ship has sail… sunk. Having offed 55 million lives since Roe more than suggests the corporate compunction is lost. The moral neutrality, as it pertains to abortion, serves along side moral dudgeon when it comes to meat eaters, gun owners, defenders of the Judeo/Christian ethic, Christianity, critics of deviancy, critics of death cults, and so on, and on. Post-modern America, for all intents and purposes, functions now under the rubric TWWNBPUW — That Which Will Not Be Put Up With – this in a country free to fuck most anything and kill the most innocent. I had commented once before that the Leftist/Liberal is irony deficient — the condition is critical.
“The next step is the requirement that everyone celebrate it.”
That’s what the homosexuals are demanding. They want everybody to approve their lifestyle as natural, normal and heallthy.
The women I know who’ve had abortions must constantly explain their decision Again and again they explain their reasons. They never get over it and constantly feel the need to excuse why they did it. You don’t spend a lifetime explaining easy decisions. You don’t have to continually excuse giving money to charity or any act of kindness. These women are haunted by what they did and in desperate need of validation.
Exactly, what morality or immorality can there be, to the decision, as to whether it’s time to get a haircut?
What morality or immorality can there be, if there is no absolute truth and only subjective, ‘personal’ truth? Once absolute truth is rejected, all that is left is amorality.
“It’s another example of the escalation that is part of the leftist activist agenda. At first, it is claimed to be enough that something become legal. Next, it is demanded that it never be met with disapproval or criticism. The next step is the requirement that everyone celebrate it.”
Which is why I keep asserting that, in any socialistic system, eventually all thought, speech and behavior must be categorized as either forbidden or mandatory. Isn’t that at base, what political correctness amounts to? It must be so because socialism’s very survival is dependent upon it. All forms of rejection of reality, must eventually be imposed.
Abortion for pleasure. Now, that is progressive. I wish they would qualify “progress”. It’s too ambiguous in the wrong minds.
Geoffrey Britain:
How do you form a consensus with groups of people with diametrically conflicted interests? Dissociation of risk is the opiate of the masses and elites.
I would say that we have something to learn from their progress, but I cannot reconcile the extreme compromises it would require to follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, a large minority, perhaps a majority, can and does.
BurkeanMama:
Their need to explain their “choice” is evidence that they possess a conscience. We all make mistakes. We need to learn from them to avoid repeating them. Furthermore, we should not encourage others to repeat our mistakes, and we should encourage them to make the right choices. It’s a traditional “parental” role, which is not limited to a mother and father.
Ray:
It’s not just homosexual behavior. The coercion employed to normalize that behavior was intended to deflect scrutiny from libertines everywhere, lead by the pro-choicers. However, their interest in normalizing dysfunctional and unproductive behaviors is peculiarly selective. The ambiguous and incremental nature of “progressivism” increases the risk of creating moral hazards.
Simply disgusting. Janet Harris is a disgusting creature, more beast than human.
Some behaviors are capital crimes against society because those who profess them cannot coexist with the unprofessed. Abortion and sodomy are crimes like murder and robbery because if any of those behaviors are allowed, the unprofessed becomes ruled, then dominated, then destroyed by the professors.
If Janet Harris can be so cavalier with fetus life, she can be quite cavalier with life that, unlike the fetus life, opposes her.
It is a few short steps from disposing of inconvenient fetuses to inconvenient children to inconvenient old or defective to the just plain inconvenient.
“The movement needs such recalibration precisely because it was drawn into a moral debate about the fetus’s hypothetical future rather than the woman’s immediate and tangible future.”
Per Harris, speaking for women faced with an unwanted pregnancy: It’s all about me.
More broadly, isn’t this “whose future has more value?” argument in line with eugenicists and health care rationing supporters like Ezekiel Eamanuel (“Total Lives System”)?
In my extended family we have cousins, nieces, and nephews all adopted. Some close to my age when abortion wasn’t legal everywhere and some young enough when abortion was legal and easy to get anywhere.
But, I often think Thank God the birth mothers didn’t go that route as life just wouldn’t be the same without them around.
Susanamantha, 4:20 pm — “Neo, perhaps the last step is requiring that people have abortions under certain circumstances.”
Red China’s only-one-child-per-family policy?
It’s expensive because they need to make a profit other wise the Gosnells run out of dens.