Personally, abortion is too practical of a population control measure for me to write off — and practical measures are too desperately necessary AND scarce today to ignore the solutions they provide, especially given the fact that nobody is willing to do the hard thing and actually implement *better* solutions intelligently. The whole "choice vs. life" conflict is just another faux issue—even without getting into the literal craziness of putting a "vs." between the terms "choice" and "life," both of which distill into exactly the same single idea—in a long line of distractions. This is another excellent modern example of how language is expertly used to lead otherwise intelligent people to stupid conclusions.
Here's my better proposal, which makes abortion a moot concept entirely. Let's look at the bigger picture here, and instead call it for exactly what it actually is: "Pro-Stupidity-With-Entitlement-to-no-Consequences vs. Being-Held-Accountable-to-Choosing-WELL-in-EVERYTHING-YOU-DO". If people TOOK their right to control their own bodies instead of waiting for things to "work out" in their favor (i.e. don't let any other human being alive dictate your birth control practices or what you do or don't have access to), exercised a modicum of common sense when it came to comprehensively sexually-educating children (so they weren't so utterly susceptible to sex-media programming and thus *guaranteed* to make so many obvious idiotic choices out of insecurity and ignorance), and stopped having babies after the first child, the population problem would eventually correct itself - though it would still take at least 20 generations.
With that as the "best case" alternative available, how on Earth can rational minds argue against abortion - which is the rational ethical equivalent of clipping one's nails? People can rationalize *anything*; that's the nearly-universally-ignored inevitable consequence of creativity and imagination in the absence of critical logical thinking. It's also the literal antithesis of "rational thinking," an extreme shortage of which is responsible for just about all of humankind's existing problems (more by the minute). But if that doesn't fill in all the lines, there IS more to it: money interests. If skin cells ever become economically relevant, for instance, you can bet your bottom dollar that a social issue analogous to that of abortion will arise - in the form of something along the lines of "Washcloths = murder," and "Your epidermis can't choose for itself - so you have to," and other equivalently-idiotic rhetoric and drama which function only to bury real issues beneath trendy—superficial and thus meaningless—poster-children. (And how's that for an ironic turn of phrase?)
Bravo.
ReplyDelete