Abortion and society

Charles Martel left a very good comment about the way in which the Pill changed, not only women’s approach to sex, but their approach to abortion too:

(I’m going to use an anthropomorphic term here, designed,” only because it makes it easier to discuss how nature works.)

Nature designed the act of sexual intercourse to result in conception and reproduction. For thousands of years human beings knew that, and created structures designed to keep young people from running amok once they became ready to have sex — chaparones, courtship, early marriage. People in those times could not fathom not taking responsibility for a child once it was conceived.

Fast forward to 1960 and the introduction of The Pill. Within 10 years a “contraceptive mindset” becames common once the means to consequence-free sex became available to millions of people. That mindset includes the following assumptions:

—Sex is primarily a recreational, not reproductive, activity.

—Because of contraceptives, recreational sex quickly evolves a new category of behavior: “safe sex.” In safe sex, the only danger that intercourse now presents is “accidental” pregnancy — accidental in the sense that most people engaging in intercourse have no intention of procreating.

—“Safe sex” soon becomes a pseudo-ethical category. It becomes the obligation of each participant in an act of intercourse to make sure that sperm does not meet egg. To fail to do so could derail carefully laid educational or career plans — powerful considerations since society has prolonged adolescence into the mid and late 20s.

An inevitable extension of the “safe sex” mentality is that unborn children now must be “wanted.” That is, the people engaging in intercourse must consciously decide at the outset that they are willing to accept and nurture a pregnancy thyat results from intercourse.

If the pregnancy is not intended, the fetus is an accident that has resulted from unsafe sex. It can, therefore, be moved into a separate category: abortable.

So, the reason why I’m not so gung-ho about teaching children about contraceptives is that their use leads inevitably to the idea that if there’s an “accident,” there’s an emergency exit: abortion.

I’d like to add one other thing to the enormous societal changes that have taken place in the last forty years, making young people more receptive to the notion of abortion, and that is the absence of babies in their lives.

In the old days, people lived within communities that were heterogeneous in terms of ages level.  Whether in a small town or a busy city, you’d live in a community that ran the age gamut, from infants to the elderly.

We don’t live that way anymore.  In so many of today’s communities, people don’t just live in the community and then happen to have babies, as used to be true in the old days.  Instead, people target specific communities when they decide to start a family.

After moving into these family friendly neighborhoods, there are huge numbers of babies for a few years, and then that stops — all the families are done with their child-bearing years.  There are kids, but no babies.

When these kids grow up, they go to college for four or six or eight years, where they hang with young people and never see any babies at all.  If an older sibling gets pregnant and has a child, they probably see the sibling (or his wife) pregnant a few times, and then they see the niece and nephew at holidays, when the child is a pest.

When these young adults finish their college years, they move to urban areas, and live in the hot neighborhoods for singles, neighborhoods that, like their college communities, have no children.  Only after several years of a self-centered lifestyle do these people, now in their thirties, finally decided to take the plunge and have children.

In the search for good schools, these soon-to-be parents replicate the same pattern they lived out themselves as children:  they move into a neighborhood replete with identically situated families, and set up raising their own children into what will be a baby-free world.  And so the cycle goes, one that’s been in play since the first Levittowns appeared in the late 1940s.

Why does this matter?  It matters because, as long as babies are hypothetical, it’s easy to abort them.  It’s only when you have a very close connection to the whole process, from early pregnancy through birth and infancy — and this is true whether it’s your pregnancy, or a family member’s or a friend’s — that you realize that there is a straight line between the fetus and the baby.  You can’t draw a straight line from fetus to baby if you’re utterly unfamiliar with either.