Abortion.
Yes, that’s right. It needs truth, first, as a service to our country and also as a means forward for the hope of establishing guardrails in a headlong rush to transhuman hedonism and its eventual self-immolation.
A momentary digression: why did the Right lose so badly, and make no mistake, this was a serious setback. The upshot is that neither side of the aisle is respected or trusted. Neither reflect the country as it is, not how it was nor how some want it to be. No administration should be able to perform so disastrously, cause so much pain and angst and be merely swerved off course slightly, and then offer no correction. And to know, confidently, that there’s no price to pay. Why?
I offer three main reasons: Trump, abortion and the youth vote. I believe Trump is now a liability, not because of his policies (his actual policies, not the media distortions) because they were grounded in reality and in “our” America. The “our” refers to an America that baby boomers and their ancestors died for — grounded in individual freedom and the Constitution. Trump has become a liability because he was a constant irritant and the terrified progressives, including 90% of the media, turned that into an existential threat — to them. He was that, indeed, and sadly, they succeeded.
After four relentless years of corruption, lying, real insurrection and utterly ruthless and unscrupulous personal attack, Trump imploded. He will be rejected only because the haters wore common sense down to a pretty tiny nub and his followers are tired. Trump cannot be resurrected and trying will exhaust “our” America even more. We cannot afford him, or anyone who might be part of the resuscitating team. So many voted for the other guy, just in case.
Second. For the first time probably since JFK there really was a Democrat youth turnout. There’s a lot of noise from the Left always about college age voter enthusiasm and emotional response to the issues. Usually, come voting day, they have better things to do like hanging out or going to the mall. This time, they showed up and brought an agenda with them. “Our” America is not theirs. In myriad ways, theirs is less personal, less actually impactful, more appearance, acceptance, conformity and group oriented, pegged as it is to a land of electronic social media.
If our values have any hope of surviving, we will have to figure out who they are, what their world looks like, how it works and what matters to them. Then, we have to have a heart-to-heart, not to change them but to understand them. We cannot pass a baton to a cohort we don’t get. We have no choice; the future will happen and we can participate or not.
Abortion is part of their world. It is a freedom and a right they will never relinquish. This is a generation three times removed from Roe v Wade. Their grandparents remember when it was granted by the US Supreme Court. It defined their parents and young people have come to expect it. Done deal. But, do they even know what abortion is? Do we anymore? Do we mean the same things when we argue about it? Who knows what Roe v Wade even did.
Begin with language because more than anything else, it is what has steered and surrounded this most uncomfortable topic from the get-go. The Right preferred not to talk about it and the Left couldn’t stop. The first time I heard the word “fetus” I was confused. I thought it might be the first weeks of pregnancy because my experience had always been that a woman was “having a baby” as in, “with child”. No one I knew had ever been “with fetus” nor naming or decorating in preparation for it. Now the argument is whether it can or should even be called a baby or child.
Apparently, abortion also hinges on when “life” appears and when, or perhaps, if the entity becomes human. Then the sticky matter of “choice” comes into play. When we talk about abortion is it a medical or a health procedure? If it is for exigent medical reasons, why is there any debate unless the woman chooses to sacrifice her life for her baby? Logically, the arguments around abortion should certainly be confined to those that are by “choice” as their proponents say. Shouldn’t they? Surely no law can prohibit doctors from doing their job, with the woman’s permission, to save her life. How absurd to even argue over an ectopic pregnancy, for instance. We need to change the language to “elective abortion”. (Kind of like “illegal” immigration.)
Because pregnancy cannot be terminated if it means killing a person, our society has decided, cowardly in my opinion, to dehumanize the disposable entity. After all, since it is neither sentient (alive?) nor human, it can now be discarded by choice, and better still, cavalierly and without guilt. This right is even celebrated. “It” is, after all, merely part of a woman’s body and she must have total autonomy and privacy with regard to her bodily desires. No other considerations can be tolerated, including age, parental permission or knowledge, ability to pay or any outside adverse advice.
The US Supreme Court decided in 1972 that a woman must have the right to an elective termination of her pregnancy. No one seems to have come to a conclusion, or at least an expressed one, about life and humanity but dealt with it by setting limits. Roe v Wade essentially prohibited the banning of abortion up to viability. Whatever that was…, so legal abortion was now a guaranteed, limited, legal option up to what generally was put at somewhere between 20-24 weeks of gestation. Anything beyond that had to be decided at the state level. Pretty simple and straightforward, right? For maybe as long as it took the ink to dry.
Limits? Surely not cried the abortion crowd. Rather than work on state legislation for their wants, they expected a federal guarantee of safe, legal abortion on demand. That means what it says, on demand without limits, and implies paid for access. The anti-abortion side cried: this cannot pass. The right to life enshrined in the Constitution doesn’t require permission. The simple fact is that Roe v Wade was bad law that made a moral conundrum worse. The science over 50 years has made it even harder to find a balance between one’s right to life and one’s right to end it. Hinging as the decision does on what abortion really means: medically necessary or elective, removal of a sentient being or a disposable body part, for cause or not, with education about the procedures or gag rules, by pills or surgery? The answer, in my opinion is splitting the difference, ala King Solomon. What is the State’s interest?
An unwanted pregnancy is not a good thing. The woman’s (and yes, for now this is a pregnant woman) interest in the right to make a decision can be met with a guaranteed period of time. Time to become fully aware of what this situation means for her, which differs from woman to woman; time to figure out strategies if necessary, alternatives, from surrogacy to adoption and maybe others I haven’t thought of, physical health and abilities, or even time to accept the idea of an unexpected gift. And so forth. The State’s interest during this period is to protect and help the woman. Does that interest change? I believe so.
I believe that given what we know now about gestational development during pregnancy because of amazing ultrasound pictures, the availability of medical procedures that can save an in-utero life, surgical corrections and treatments that can also be delivered in-utero, the maintenance of life outside of the womb in early births, — in short the ability to offer the chance of life to the pre-born, the State’s interest must and should in the name of all that’s humane, shift to the child at some point. The woman has had her chance, maybe as long as six (6) months to make a choice for herself, now the child deserves the choice — life guaranteed by the State in its obligation to protect mute, vulnerable, innocent life.
There’s no way a civilization that claims humanity or humane-ity can dispose of life as if it were someone else’s choice with no other living being involved even after full development, nor is it humane to take control from a woman over herself and her life, without exercising due process. In truth, both parties deserve their time of due process. My druthers would be half and half, first half of the unborn’s life being up to the mother and the second half of the pre-born baby’s life protected by the State. In any case, we cannot let our civilization turn on either of these extremes.
Surely, fifty years ought to be sufficient to reach a fair and just adjudication of the fate of two beings, one capable of making a decision and the other, dependent on someone else’s for life. What I do know for sure is that politics should not make this choice. We are talking babies here. Either we save their lives in the womb or we remove them and end their lives. This is not a matter of semantics. It is literally competing needs of life and death. If we cannot find a sane and compassionate way through this, what right do any of us have to dare think we are fit to make decisions for anyone, ever?
I believe that until we come to grips with our changing/changed world and start a bridge building process to it, we cannot win hearts and minds. If we don’t then we will leave all the good from centuries behind. As the world deals with technology we cannot even imagine, let alone grasp, the dehumanizing forces are at work. We are too close already to women being erased, babies not mattering, individual life not worth the effort, euthanasia, drugs and media/game mind-numbing addiction to not keep fighting. The stakes are so high that to go down in defeat over any single issue at the margins is not only cultural suicide but perhaps human as well. Transhumanism awaits in the guise of science.
“Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.” — Max More (1990)
Let’s save every human we can.