(This may end up as more of a rueful observation than a post.)
Last night I watched PBS’s “American Experience’ because it was late, my satellite package has amazingly few channels that aren’t commercial junk (No TCM for example, and I miss it) and no baseball games were on. It was a new episode about the Love Canal protests during the Carter Administration, something I hadn’t thought about for a long time.
It was the first toxic waste dump scandal—PBS was celebrating “Earth Day”—- and a landmark in the environmental movement: one can get some sense of the kind of things going on from “Ellen Brockovich,” about a another community poisoned by chemical manufacturers. That account focuses on the legal battles, but Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal centers on the local activists, mostly housewives and mothers, who organized, protested and kept the pressure on local, New York State and national government officials to fix the deadly problem, something the bureaucrats seemed either unwilling or unable to do.
One feature of the tale I had forgotten: the furious women briefly held two EPA officials hostage, and released them promising a response that would make that crime “look like Sesame Street” if President Carter didn’t meet their demands for action in 24 hours. And Carter capitulated to the threat! It doesn’t matter that the women were right about the various governments’ foot-dragging and irresponsible handling of the crisis: a competent President should never reward threats from people breaking the law. Jimmy just didn’t understand the Presidency at all, the first of four such Presidents to wound the U.S. from 1976 to 2024.
That wasn’t my main epiphany, however. It was this: In the late 1970’s, before the feminist movement took hold, so-called ordinary women, mostly mothers, became intense and dedicated activists fighting for the lives, health and futures, of their babies and children, as well as their unborn children because the Love Canal pollution was causing miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. The women were heroic, and the public and news media were drawn to them because they projected moral and ethical standing by fighting to save lives.
Fifty years later, after “Women’s Liberation” and all of the cultural fawning over progress in finally giving women opportunities to share professional positions and political power, what are female activists and dedicated progressive warriors demanding? Not the government’s obligation to save their babies, children and pregnancies, but its imagined obligation to let them kill their unborn whenever the mothers feel like it. This is apparently the primary substantive issue driving women to support the Democratic Party.
How did we get from “Save our children!” to “Let us kill them!” in just five decades?
One main important engine of the change was the cultural and ethics rot seeded by the 1960s, which managed to remove the often crucial role of shame as a tool of maintaining societal norms. That exciting but frequently destructive era convincingly preached irresponsible conduct as a virtuous lifestyle—“If it feels good, do it!”—with guilt-free abuse of drugs and sex as primary cornerstones of the new cultural construct. The movement mandated not only a banishment of shame for irresponsible pregnancies resulting from promiscuous sex, but an easy-peasy solution to the inconvenience and other problems those pregnancies might cause.
In 1973, deafened to the law by over-powering cultural static, a liberal activist Supreme Court lost its mind, betrayed its duties and delivered Roe v. Wade, declaring abortion a right enshrined in the Constitution while knowing well that the authors of the document not only intended nothing of the sort but would be horrified at the suggestion that they had.
It was bad ruling based on terrible legal analysis and scholarship driven by the corrupting societal influences at the time. Roe should have been struck down once the fever passed, but it was not. And so it was that two generations of American women reached childbearing age believing that abortion was simply a matter of self-determination and personal autonomy, because that was the dishonest and misleading rhetoric the women’s movement used to protect and, despicably, sanctify it.
I happened to hear a recent interview with old Gloria Steinem, and she was right on message: abortion is a “right” because women must have control over their own bodies and the right to choose their own fates without government interference. Wait, Gloria—isn’t there another rather crucial player in all this? Another body? Another life? Another human being who deserves an opportunity to grow up, live, make choices? Steinem acknowledged none of that because she knows it’s losing advocacy, and of course the worshipful interviewer didn’t ask those questions. I’m trying to think of when I’ve heard an abortion activist address any of those issues.
Jefferson’s three “unalienable rights” that create the mission statement for our uniquely aspirational nation weren’t in random order, after all. It is life first, then liberty, and last, the pursuit of happiness. Life has priority over the other two if there is an ethics conflict. “The pursuit of happiness” doesn’t get to impede the liberty of others, and neither it nor liberty can overcome the unalienable right to live. Do they teach that any more? It’s right there on the parchment.
Just as decades of being taught to hate and fear Jews has created successive generations of Palestinians who take it as established fact that Israel must be destroyed and they cannot be persuaded otherwise, millions of American women now believe that being able to kill the same living human beings that the mothers of Love Canal crusaded to protect is central to their existence, so much so that it justifies supporting all of the disastrous political, cultural, legal, fiscal and international policies of current mutation of the Democratic Party.
Women were once heroes for fighting for life, and now they are self-righteous about fighting for death.
Ethics Alarms 
What usually isn’t covered is the fact that Love Canal happened because a greedy school district seized the land, used it for a school, then sold the rest of the land to developers knowing it was a toxic waste dump. It was actually a good toxic waste dump, built far above the standards of the day. The chemical company fought against it and put a notice in the deed that the land was a toxic waste dump and not fit for use. The school district removed that notice. The problems occurred when the dug into the ground for basements and dug through the top clay cap and into the storage containers below. That didn’t stop them, though. They kept on digging and building. Think of the children…
I watched my wife struggle during her fourth pregnancy (and before anyone comments, we both agreed to pursuing pregnancy each time). The hormones responsible for loosing her ligaments so the baby could pass through the birth canal made her joints so loose that moving around was painful, on top of all the regular pregnancy ungainliness. This was on top of chasing after 3 other children, the third of which we call “the Raccoon” because she gets into EVERYTHING and no lock is too tough for her. Pregnancy is hard. The more of them you have, the harder they are.
Women have, I will freely admit, an extreme disadvantage in the world as we know it. They are the ones who struggle one week out of every four. They are the ones who have to nurse the baby. They are the ones who have to choose between chasing a career and taking care of kids. They are the ones who are burdened with a pregnancy after rape.
It is also important to realize that abortion has been around as long as we have historical records, and likely longer. People have been getting rid of unwanted children for time out of mind. So abortion is nothing new. It was not discovered in the ‘70’s. And the phenomenon of legalized, or at least permissible, abortion was not limited to the United States. All across Europe the ability to kill the unborn was unfettered, and many people saw that as liberating, allowing women to step up in the work force, to pursue careers that previously were male-only professions, and the like.
Another consideration to taken into account is that there’s not quite the cognitive dissonance in wanting good care for children and wanting the ability to terminate them. The foundation is self-interest. If it is in my interest to have a child, I want everything I can have to ensure my child grows up healthy and happy. If it is not in my self-interest to have a child, I want to be free of that burden. There is a certain, terrible, logic behind abortion that makes sense if you understand that if everything is about me, then it doesn’t matter what happens to anyone else. The standard is me, and what makes me happy. That mentality really started to blossom post WWII, especially in the baby boomers, and I think about of our social ills today are the direct results of that mentality.
It also explains why so many hate Christianity. Because Christianity fundamentally says your life is not about you. You are meant to give your life away as a free gift. Our society today finds that thought intolerable.
I smell smoke. Did someone just grab hold of the third rail? Unfortunately, most of the feminists here are long gone. I remember reading that at the time of Roe Harry Blackmun’s daughter Sally got into trouble at the age of 19, and quit college to marry her 20-year-old boyfriend. She later miscarried and the marriage collapsed, but her experiences led her, her sisters, and the good justice’s wife to push him into the Roe decision. Supposedly the fact that he was general counsel to the Mayo Clinic for 9 years and supposedly saw first-hand the results of botched abortions also informed his reasoning. The fact is neither of those things should have mattered. What he wrote wasn’t was the law said. Never mind, say most women now, who’ve grown up on self-induced awesomeness that must not be checked by a one-night-stand gone bad.
Blackmun authored two of the worst SCOTUS decisions since Dred Scott, the other being his ridiculous opinion that baseball deserved an anti-trust exemption while other pro sports did not. He was a mediocre mind and a lazy scholar: one of Nixon’s mistakes.
Gloria Steinem argues that abortion is a “right” because women must have control over their own bodies and the right to choose their own fates without government interference.
Face it, the ONLY “control over their own bodies” argument that abortion advocates present is the control of their bodies after they get pregnant while they willfully and completely ignore their responsibilities regarding sexual intercourse.
Have you ever seen or heard abortion activists shout these things as arguments in protests supporting abortion? Why not? It’s because they want to believe that sexual intercourse is a consequence free zone so they can completely ignore their responsibility and reality – yes, they are delusional.
Sex is NOT and never will be a consequence free zone and a women’s right to “choose” doesn’t negate the right to life of a completely helpless human being in the womb. There are real world consequences that can happen when engaging in sex so either accept the consequences or be responsible and do the things that can help prevent a pregnancy before it begins. Of course there is the ultimate choice to not engage in sex until you’re willing to fully accept the real world consequences.
A woman’s right to choose her own medical treatment does not override the right to life of a completely helpless human being in her womb when she has already chosen to engage in sex knowing the possible consequences and/or made choices NOT to get immediate medical treatment after sex to prevent an unwanted pregnancy knowing the possible consequences, these choices physically assist in the creation and sustaining of a helpless human being.
Choices have consequences and, in my opinion, a mothers right to choose her medical treatment in regards to an unborn human being in her womb ends after she has already made multiple choices that have assisted in the creation of that human being in the womb, including refusing to seek available medical treatment to prevent a pregnancy before and after sexual intercourse. Disregarding individual responsibilities and seeking to strip a completely helpless human being growing in her womb of its human right to life is immoral.
Verifiable imminent death of a mother due to pregnancy or from giving birth to a human being is an entirely different issue, it’s a human right to life of the mother issue and MUST always be considered both legally and morally.
Again; it’s completely ABSURD for people to be marching in the streets protesting for the right to physically exterminate a helpless human being because it’s “unwanted” while they completely ignore all the responsibilities regarding sex that they have shirked, you should have thought about the consequences of your actions, or lack thereof, when you were shirking your responsibilities regarding sex one by one.
TEACH YOUNG WOMEN AND MEN ABOUT THE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES OF SEX and don’t let them shirk their responsibilities.
This is NOT a political issue, it’s a moral human right to life issue.
Legal or not, in almost all circumstances abortion is immoral.
The internet meme is “Accountability is kryptonite to a woman.”
Women have been raised to believe:
They can falsely accuse a man of rape and should face no consequences for it.
They can falsely accuse a man of fathering a child and it is OK, as long as she likes that man more than the father or that man makes a lot more money than the actual father.
If they and a man are both drunk and agree to have sex with each other, it is rape and the man alone is responsible. Women can’t consent to sex while drunk but men can.
They can hit men if they feel like it and should face no consequences.
Men are solely responsible for the outcomes of sex.
They should face lesser punishments than men for crimes.
They should be able to attack their romantic partner of his property if he makes them mad and there should be no consequences.
They should not have responsibility for their financial decisions. Men (or the government) should bail them out. Look at how many articles state that women get more student loans than men, get a higher amount, major in areas that pay less, and pay back a smaller amount per month, so women need to get bailed out.
Crying can get them out of any problem they caused.
So, why wouldn’t they think that they should be able to kill their baby if it is convenient for them?