Choice Day

I wasn't going to blog this week. Too many unbloggable thoughts in my head. But it was Blog For Choice Day, a subject hard to ignore. So I got two basic thoughts on it right now, being as I’m all in favor of life AND liberty and the pursuit of happiness ‘n shit. (And I wrote this knowing that most readers would disagree with me, but oh well. Oh, and the next paragraph was almost an attempt at dark humor I should delete but never mind, it's past my bedtime.)

Is it a Choice, or is it a Child?

In other words, does the kid being got rid of have any rights, or is it really just something the mother can get rid of if she chooses, like, I don’t know, a finger. Well, why not. You have the right to chop off your finger if you want. It won’t grow back but the beauty of a fetus is, even if you do kill it, you can always grow another. Of course, if someone else kills it, say while killing you, they will be prosecuted for two murders, not just one, even in California, and that confuses me.

Anyway, point is, being pregnant when you don’t want to be is very damn inconvenient. Many women have had to dredge up truly heroic proportions of courage to bear a child they have no means to care for. Others have made the enormously difficult decision to terminate (let us not understate that difficulty!). Choices all round. But we don’t make choices in a vacuum. If we are moral people, we must take into account the consequences our choices have for other people. So the question remains, is the fetus someone with rights, or is it not? If you cannot answer that question immediately with unequivocal proof that it is not, then there is doubt, and in every just society I have ever heard of, the benefit of the doubt goes to the living.

Besides, a choice was made when a potentially fertile couple chose to have sex. The risk of pregnancy was known. Kind of like the risk of killing someone is known when you start your car while blind drunk. If there’s a predictable consequence, I’m not sure what makes the choice to ignore that consequence so sacred.

You Can Take My Right To Privacy When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Fingers

Self-determination is one thing we all agree is sacred. Not everyone believes in natural rights, and I’m not eddicated enough to argue for or against the concept, but I’m sure everyone within reading range agrees that each individual at least has the right to express themselves, to say what they want, to have some control over their own privacy. Roe v Wade established a woman’s right to an abortion as an extension of her right to privacy. That pretty much ends the discussion as far as a lot of people are concerned. They aren’t going to let the gummint decide something so important – though how much they object to gummint having authority over public smoking or gun ownership or marijuana use or “hate” speech or control of rents or the sale of sexual services etc. etc. is always to be seen. It appears we all have opinions as to where our privacy really ends and our responsibility to others begins – opinions that differ, because we all differ, because we all come from different backgrounds and have slightly different perspectives on what privacy really means.

In 1973 when Roe v Wade was established, this was in many ways a different country. Rights to privacy and free speech that we take for granted today were not yet established. But they were on the march. Recent years had seen massive movements in defense of free speech, of political opposition, etc. Meanwhile, there were still laws against many consensual sexual acts, against many types of speech we today consider protected, and the last laws against mixed-race marriages were only recently overturned. A momentum had built to relegate all those antiquated laws to history's dustbin. At the same time, the unsafe conditions created by the deadly combination of prejudice against unwed mothers and inadequate abortion facilities had enabled a horrible kind of back-alley slaughter. Scared young women who had exercised their natural rights to sexual activity and wound up pregnant were at risk of being killed by unprofessional abortionists taking advantage of their fear and desperation. Roe v Wade was a natural response to these converging trends. In one stroke, a major blow was made in defense of privacy, of sexual freedom, and of feminine emancipation. What of the child? Well, it was unfortunate, and not everyone agreed that the life was really a life, and in the end privacy concerns trumped the question. I wondered how that was possible, how privacy could be found more important than the question of life, until I remembered more about the early 1970s.

At that time, there was a thing called the Marital Rape Exemption. It was recognized as valid in every state. A man could not be prosecuted for forcing sex on his wife. A woman who was raped had no recourse if the rapist was also her husband. I remember when a wife-rape conviction made the news simply for being a conviction. I believe it was in the late 1970s. Prior to that, this brutal crime and its perpetrator were covered by the right to privacy.

Child abuse was also far more common than it is today. I have no data – just ask enough of your friends who were children then. Look at the wealth of resources available to both prevent and recover from child abuse that didn’t exist just ten or twenty years ago. This is a little more anecdotal, but I’m sure most people would agree that as we go back in time, the prevalence of child abuse is likely to increase. It did not appear as a result of 1960s permissiveness or some such nonsense. Child abuse is a generational issue that goes back and back and back. The past two or three decades have been the first time in human history that there have been effective trends to prevent it. But in 1973 if you saw a bruised face or a burned arm on a child or for that matter a mother slapping her child silly in the grocery store parking lot, chances are you shook your head and regretfully acknowledged a family’s right to privacy. And forget sexual abuse. You know it happened, a lot. You also know it was rarely reported, and reports rarely taken seriously.

Roe v Wade was passed in this atmosphere of respecting privacy. Society has evolved since then, but we still accept Roe v Wade. It’s a complex political issue and as such it is much more difficult to change our attitude towards it than to, say, pass a law requiring teachers to report evidence of abuse. But an entire generation has passed, and in my opinion it may be time, with rationality and compassion, to take another look. Not necessarily to write more restrictive laws, but certainly to reconsider, as we must always do periodically, our underlying assumptions.

UPDATE 1/23: More from a nice Catholic lesbian libertarian down in AZ.