Abortion: various and sundry
Since I’m not really disposed to posting articles today, I’d like instead to point the good reader toward writers who are, frankly, better and more interesting in what they have to say than am I.
Biting acerbicism aside, H. J. M. White’s comment on this article (“You can see her trying to think.”) is entirely accurate:
Following the birth of her son last year, however, Sawyer had begun to have doubts about the ethics and logic of abortion. “I was calling the life inside me a baby, because I wanted it,” she wrote, after visiting picketed abortion clinics in America. “Yet if I hadn’t — as would perhaps have been the case ten years earlier — I would have thought of it as just a group of cells it was OK to kill. It was the same entity. It was merely my response to it that determined whether it would live or die. That seemed irrational to me. Maybe even immoral.“
“Trying to think,” or maybe “starting to think,” is exactly what the above is: a woman beginning to see the internal contradictions of the pro-choice position. When you reduce everything to hard fact, abortion proponents are really just playing at double-speak.
But there’s something else that’s significant here, in that it is a woman, herself pro-choice (or formerly so?) who is beginning to re-think her position in regard to abortion.
John Zmirak, whose articles I have been woefully lax in reading of late, remarked on something very similar to this in a recent article:
“Granted that there are women who blunder into premarital Sex because they’re exploited by older or more sophisticated men who lie to them, who promise a lifelong commitment in return for a one-night stand. And some of those girls get pregnant, feel abandoned, and have abortions.
“But is that really the average profile of a woman who has premarital sex — a clueless, damaged damsel who isn’t driven by any sexual desires of her own, but instead is searching for pure and perfect love, dragged down by the grubby cravings of filthy men? Is the average unmarried American woman — who is, by all accounts, ’sexually active’ — an emotional basket case whose father left her wounded, vulnerable to exploitation by heartless, Y-chromosomed hedonists? If so, she is barely culpable for any sexual sins — and hardly to be blamed for having an abortion. We should treat her purely as a victim, and not as a rational adult with free will who committed a sin. Why bother to absolve her? (Or, as the Church does ipso facto, impose on her — as on the doctor and anyone else directly involved — excommunication.) Is this the outcome of the pro-life position — purely strategic — that we never foresee any legal penalty for women who have abortions, only the doctors? If so, the price is too high.”
I asked the seminarian: “Have you ever dated? In fact, have you met any women? The ones I’ve known don’t fit that description — including the ones who don’t practice perfect chastity.
“In my limited experience, women have sexual desires, too. They are capable of making rational decisions, and should be held responsible for them — just like men. Why do they go out and have sex when they know they shouldn’t? Here’s a theory: Original Sin. And your idea of making men the gatekeepers, expecting that (since women are pretty much helpless) it’s going to fall to guys to be the new enforcers of chastity . . . Good luck with that one.”
If the pro-life movement is going to succeed, I personally think that it will do so only by winning the victory on a very specific battleground: the battleground of the minds and hearts of women.
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