Saturday, August 18, 2007

Abortion and the rise of illegitimacy

It's Not Enough to Be 'Wanted'

Illegitimacy has risen despite--indeed, because of--legal abortion.

Which is something even abortion advocates such as Kirstin Luker and Christopher Tietze saw even before Roe. Despite slogans such as "pro-child/pro-choice" (as glaring an example of linguistic and moral gymnastics as "We had to burn the village to save it"), children have taken the brunt of the damage readily-available abortion has inflicted on society.

Support abortion if you will, but do so honestly because you want to reduce the population, or because you think certain children ought not to be allowed to be born, or because you think it frees the particular woman who has the abortion. (Abortion's availability has left more women struggling as single parents in poverty, so overall the effect has been far from liberating.) But don't pretend that you support it "for the children." That's nonsensical.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No one is FOR or IN SUPPORT of abortion. If you want to be PRO LIFE, get involved in doing something about the thousands of children in foster care whom no body wants and who live in despair and hopelessness. Once we take care of that issue, then we can have a fair debate about abortion rights.

Christina Dunigan said...

First of all, there are plenty of people who are actively FOR abortion. They hide themselves in the prochoice ranks. They are population controllers. They are eugenicists. They are elitists. They are racists. They are there, and with influence far out of proportion to their numbers.

I'll skip to the end next. "Abortion rights". I'd say there's no such thing, because saying "abortion rights" might imply a right to an abortion. But in practice, there is such a thing as abortion rights -- the legally protected right of abortion practitioners to ply their trade. This is an entirely separate issue from women's rights, and the two are often in conflict, just as free trade rights can be in conflict with consumer rights.

Now let's go to the middle. You assert that we must tend to kids who are in foster care -- which they're in because of issues with their families, not because of the legal status of abortion -- before we can tackle whether abortion is right or wrong.

You might as well argue that we need to find homes for all the pets currently in animal shelters before we work to stop dogfighting.

It's absurd to say, "We'll discuss whether or not to stop killing the small ones until all the bigger ones are happy."

If you care about kids, which is more urgent -- kids who need better homes, or kids who are being torn limb from limb or poisoned to death?