It's Ba-ack!
Anybody who tried criticizing legal abortion in the 1970s or 1908s encountered the claim that one shouldn't oppose the welfare state and criticize abortion on the same time on the grounds that we need to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare” by making children affordable. It went away for a while in the 1990s. After all, we had slashed budgets and declining abortion rates. It's starting to come back both on Usenet:
and in the supposedly-respectable mainstream media (seen via Kausfiles last Tuesday):A true conservative would support he right to life by setting up a universal medical care system where mattes of health stay between the patient and doctor with just enough government oversight to assure competent treatment and absence of fraud. And a true conservative would never use the political process to try to forward a religion based agenda. A true conservative would deal with the abortion issue by putting support systems in place so that young mothers would not be forced to have abortions.
For some reason, we don't hear whether or not this was effective.Suozzi runs a county government, so more is asked of him than just a string of nice words. He has put $3 million in county funds on the table to support homes for single mothers, to promote adoptions and to provide information on all forms of family planning, including -- to hold the culture warriors at bay -- contraception, "natural family planning" and abstinence.
………
As he put it in his speech, "Anyone who really wishes to reduce the number of abortions has an obligation to help those women who choose not to have an abortion yet find themselves alone."
An anti-abortion idea that just might work
One of the most striking phenomena of the Clinton Presidency was a declining abortion rate. The decline may have been due to the fact that sex was in the news and treated as something ridiculous. Adolescents are resistant to sermons and sensitive to ridicule. If we want the decline to continue we want a President whose sex life will be the butt of even more jokes than Clinton's.
That's why I'm starting the Michael Jackson for President campaign.
2 Comments:
These people have a point, if you dig deeply enough into the manure pile. Those of us who find abortion repugnant -- whether we favor legal restrictions or not (I do) -- are well advised to support whatever educational programs we feel are likely to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancy. (My personal favorite is teaching my daughter how to say "No.")
Likewise, those of us who find abortion repougnant are well-advised to offer alternatives to those who missed our advice on not becoming pregnant. I believe that, in almost every instance, the best alternative for the pregnant teenager is to give up her child for adoption. We need to to everything we can to support that difficult choice.
I'm not sure I follow this logic. If I'm against robbery, and think robbers should be locked up, does that mean that I must support welfare and/or education programs so that would-be robbers "have an alternative"? If we don't provide any such "alternative", does that mean we must allow people to hold up banks with impunity?
The truth is I have no particular feelings for the victims of abortion, any more than I care for the innocents massacred in Rwanda or Darfur. I don't love them, and if they came knocking on my door I wouldn't invite them in for tea. But that doesn't mean I have to condone their slaughter.
In most cases they are missed by those who did know and love them, but even if they are not, is that the measure of right and wrong? Is murder only bad because the victim will be missed by those who go on living?
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