sas@lanl.ARPA (07/24/85)
Some of you are pretty scary... I hope that it is just the effects of not having to face your adversary in person. I happen to be enough pro-life to be offended by terms like "parasite" and enough pro-choice to cringe at some of the pro-lifers. Just to bound the issue, let me suggest the following upper and lower bounds. Abortion is, at BEST, an unhappy and relatively unsafe form of birth control. Abortion is, at WORST, the indiscriminate killing of unwanted children (healthy or otherwise), at an early age. I am sympathetic with all the young or poor or uneducated women who find themselves pregnant unexpectedly. To assume that since abortion is a 100% effective "cure" to pregnancy, then it is the obvious choice is a little disquieting. Alternatively to assume that the medical procedure known as abortion has absolutely no place is also a little scary. When a doctor tells me my pregnant wife will die before the baby can be delivered alive, and the only alternative is abortion, I applaud it. When my wife/daughter/friend tells me that she is pregnant and wants to finish college/go to Europe/Finish a project at work before she has a baby and therefore wants an abortion, I feel a certain lack of perspective on her part and resent the environment that encourages this. When my teenage daughter tells me that she is pregnant and does/doesn't want an abortion, I resent myself and the society that would let her get in that predicament due to negligence or stupidity. Abortion is no longer the issue. Let us cure not remedy! To argue that unwanted children and population explosions will happen as a result of much more restrained abortion is to ignore that social/ political/economic system has tightly coupled feedback loops built-in. Abortion is currently quite widely accepted and used as birth-control among the cited problem groups (teen pregnancy, unwanted children, already-too-large-for-the-income families). This hasn't eliminated the problem, only relieved some of the symptoms. I firmly believe that without readily accepted abortion, birth-control, adoption, and sexual responsibility would fill most of the gap. I believe that viewing abortion as birth control detracts from these alternatives. Pro-choicers want to protect the individual from invasion of privacy while pro-lifers want to protect the individual from (very) premature death. Perhaps the real problem is to protect the individual from a society that wants to shut out the concepts of responsibility and morality. Our society is fast becoming one of "anything goes" with "as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else" in small print. The problem is that the burden of proof falls on the victim. Lots of Pro-choicers out there are pro-seal pro-whale pro-environment also and should recognize how hard it is to get the attention of the public when the victims can't defend themselves. Think of the popular opinion of our justice system, that the victim never finds justice there and the criminal only too rarely. In each case the burden of proof is on the victim and sometimes the victim isn't even here yet. Acid rain and ozone depletion probably won't destroy our environment completely during our lifetime, the victims are our descendents. Abortion probably alleviates some of the symptoms of sexual irresponsibility just like coal-fired generating stations alleviate some of the symptoms of irresponsible energy-consumption. Coal smoke is polluting our air and water, it took a long time to notice and now we are running scared. Abortion is polluting our social and moral environment and we call the pro-lifers alarmists, maybe they are, but abortion is about as good of a solution to our social problems as burning more fossil fuel is to our energy problems. While "family planning" agencies promote abortion as the "obvious" remedy to the symptoms of unexpected pregnancy, I would hope that they would take up the responsibility to include sterilization as the "obvious" cure. Would "federally funded sterilization" be as effective as "federally funded abortion" to reduce unwanted children and promote population responsibility? Something as simple as a "drift in the moral climate" towards more personal responsibility might satisfy all but the most fanatic of each side. If every well-meaning pro-lifer who tried to scare pregnant women away from abortion concentrated on the positive aspects of the problem (financial, moral support during pregnancy, adoption if appropriate) and every pro-choice "family planner" or abortion clinic tried harder to offer alternatives to abortion, things might be a whole lot better. The majority of the participants in this newsgroup seem to be bent on polarizing the issue as much as possible. We can stand just as firm on middle ground! Steve Smith