Wednesday, February 07, 2007

The Thing The Pro-Life Side Never Addresses

While driving in this morning, I was listening to Laura Ingraham taking Rudy Giuliani to task for his mealy-mouthed "I'm against abortion, however, I support a woman's right to choose" comments on "Hannity & Colmes" the other night. Her beef was that if a fetus is life, then shouldn't it be protected?

What the pro-life conveniently forgets to mention in a bit of intellectual dishonest worthy of liberals is how exactly is that life protected without infringing upon the rights of the mother if she doesn't wish to carry it to term? In order to protect the baby, the woman will have to be conscripted into "incubator service" for nine months and how is that fair?

Yes, it's a terrible bind: Who controls who? Does the woman get to kill off an unwanted life? Does the baby get to enslave the vessel which it is contained within?

To the death-worshipping Left, it's a no-brainer: Kill the "unviable tissue mass"! Convenience uber alles!!! Swimsuit season's coming up and we don't want to be shopping at Costco, do we? Besides, every live birth is a symbol of the repression of women by a patriarchal society and thus must be prevented.

But the Right does itself no credit by ignoring the flipside of this situation: To save the baby requires the forced service of a woman's body against her will. It's no different than conscripting people into the military - we cannot lay claim to others' lives to do our bidding.

If we could have some sort of sci-fi method of removing unwanted fetuses from unwilling mothers and bringing them to term in some sort of Easy-Baby Oven device, then the issue would be moot. But until the 24th Century brings this along, we'll have to try and square these conflicting interests under the circumstances we have now.

I just wish the militantly pro-life side - rigid people like talk show host Mike Gallagher - would address this issue instead of issuing blanket fatwas demanding the baby take all precedence as if it existed in a vacuum.

1 comment:

Dirk Belligerent said...

The "You get drunk and f*cked that wino, so suffer the consequences, you stupid whore!" argument gets drowned out by the "What about rape and incest? You want a poor, defenseless 12-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather to have to go through the ordeal of carrying a baby to term with every day a reminder of her victimhood?!?" arguments and that's impossible to rebut without appearing to be a brute. (read: Mike Gallagher)

Unfortunately for the Left, the number of abortions performed because of rape and incest is infinitesimal (no pun) compared to the number of abortions performed as post-conceptual birth control because of economics (i.e. too poor) or – in the case of that notorious NY Times column – because the woman doesn't want to have to shop at Costco and miss out on the prime money-making months for her career.

This is all part of the no-fault world we live in: As long as you can prevent it or fix it, why bother exercising restraint? Want to f*ck that hot guy you just met? Go ahead with the protection of the Pill or a condom or whatever? Whoops! Looks like 98% effective doesn't mean foolproof and fail-safe, so it's off to the clinic to exercise the woman's right to choose; you've come a long way, baby!!!

Contraception and abortion have been hailed as the twin pillars of feminine empowerment, but all it's really done is facilitate recklessness and a degradation of the spirit. If the consequences of careless conjugal activity (i.e. sport f*cking) were a pregnancy that couldn't be disposed of, wouldn't that provide an incentive to cool your hormones? The argument that people are simple beasts who will behave as animals, so we may as well mitigate their suffering from their rutting is another example of the infantilizing nature of liberalism. People are too stupid to handle themselves, so they need Uncle Nanny to wipe their butts for them. Pffft.

Risk encourages restraint. If you're liable to suffer from doing something, a sane person will either play it safe or find something else to do, whether it be skydiving or muff diving. By removing the consequences, we've made life less valuable and much cheaper. I've got a years-overdue rant about the Girls Gone Wild thing I should get around to writing. Keep an eye out for it.