Abortion sob story in “Mother Jones”
The September/October 2004 edition of Mother Jones has hit the shelves of Borders here in the UK (I don’t know how many other outlets stock it), and on page 50 there’s a story by Eleanor Cooney about how she had a back street abortion in the 1960s after carelessly getting pregnant. The article is basically a defence of Roe v Wade – the “if you ban abortion, women will just go to the back streets and get hideously injured like they did in the 1960s” argument, and it includes the account of how she was prepared to go to any lengths to get rid of her baby:
“From the moment I started looking for an abortion, not once did I even consider going through with the pregnancy. Not for one second. It simply was not going to happen. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was going to stop me, and it could have cost me my life.”
Now, yesterday (Thursday), I picked up in Foyle’s a book called What’s the Matter With America by Thomas Frank (Secker & Warburg, 2004) about why Americans in historically liberal, even radical, parts of the USA increasingly turn to pro-business Republicans whose policies threaten to destroy their way of life, and the answer, very often, is abortion. A lot of “liberals” fail to grasp that the methods used in abortion, if used on anyone outside the womb, would be considered most heinous. While they regularly allege that pro-lifers care only about unborn babies and forget about people once born, they themselves take the exact opposite stance, holding the dignity of grown women above the life-and-limb rights of babies. When the issue is not life-threatening injuries to the mother, but merely a stupid young woman like Cooney trying to get rid of the “consequences” of her stupidity, you can understand why people are unsympathetic!
Incidentally, it also stands out that the people who would oppose the death penalty for convicted murderers, on the grounds that the death penalty is itself murder (as opposed to the possibility of executing innocent people because of police or judicial malpractice), often agree with the death penalty for unwanted babies. This is an obviously morally inconsistent position! The fact that some religious people have some absurd positions of their own (like the Catholic church’s demand that people treat sex as merely a method for procreation, and that even married couples abstain from it otherwise) does not justify the absurdity and inconsistency of their own stance.
So the question has to be asked why American liberals are more concerned for the welfare of foolish women than for defenceless babies, and for America itself, which they see collapse around them because people are too disgusted by their stance on abortion to vote for people whose policies might be good for them.
