It is worth considering the unintended consequences of abortion since abortion on demand has become the law of the land in1974. For most women, an unwanted pregnancy is a cause of serious distress, and the decision to terminate such a pregnancy is rarely made lightly. However, to borrow from Ms. Galt's article on Gay Marriage, for the marginal case, the situation is different. There are a growing number of women who regard abortion as merely another form of birth control. These women are usually young, rarely married, often abusing various substances and often supported by the state. They are the social outliers, if you will. The effect of such an attitude is to push the notion that the child is a choice, an object that exists to gratify the woman, or not, based on the desires of the woman alone. This devalues children. If we allow abortion on demand to be used as a form of birth control, we are saying that an 8 month fetus, who would be seen as a baby to anyone who wants the child, is not a real human being, simply by virtue of its geographical location. This is troubling and has consequences. Once we have established that life is contingent, then the logical next step, which is already being taken, is for some to decide when another person's life is not worth living.
Early in my career, I was called in to consult on a motorcyclist who had been hit by a car which blew through a stop sign. He was a high (C6-C7) quadriplegic, meaning he was only slightly better off than Christoper Reeves. My patient could breathe on his own, and could shrug his shoulders, but had little other movement. He was an unpleasant young man before the accident, and his physical status did nothing to improve his disposition. He was uncooperative with his Doctors, Nurses, OT's, and PT's. He was nasty and rude; he wanted to die and would have killed himself if he could have done so. Many of us have had the same thought: who would want to live after such a devastating accident? He had no family, no significant other, and lived to ride his motorcycle, smoke pot, and drink beer. Everything precious to him had been taken away in an instant. Who would not sympathize with his wish to be allowed to die. Yet over the course of the next month, meeting three times a week beside his hospital bed, I witnessed a remarkable transformation. He gradually came to accept his state, and the natural resiliency of the human spirit asserted itself. He found he could gain a great deal of pleasure by small advances. He enjoyed teasing and baiting his care givers. After a month, he was already making plans to buy a handicapped accessible house (there was an insurance settlement) and a van he could drive by himself. After a month, this man who had been deeply depressed, angry, sullen, nasty, and suicidal, thanked me for my attention and told me he didn't think he needed to talk about things anymore. I might add that what I did with him was in no way a Psychoanalytic treatment; it seemed to me at the time that I had primarily afforded him a setting in which to work out his despair and allow for his innate psychological resiliency to re-assert itself. I do not think he was remarkable in this way. Since that time, I have been very humble about assessing whether or not someone else's life is worth living.
I have written before about the Groningen Protocols in my post on Libido & Thanatos: Part IV. This is the true "slippery slope" and while it is impossible to quantify the damage done to a culture that casts its lot with Thanatos rather than Libido, it is worth wondering if the societies of Western Europe, so much more sophisticated about these things than we are (that was a touch of sarcasm) and with much closer, indeed intimate, knowledge of where the slippery slope can lead, are committing demographic suicide, in part, because of this toxic infection of their zeitgeist.
I hesitate to introduce the notion of a soul but whether or not the soul exists, it seems to me that the concept is highly valuable and protective. I am not looking for a discussion of whether or not souls are real or fictitious, or whether our personal identity is an attribute with its origin in the Divine versus an emergent property of our complicated brains (ultimately, the question is non-computable, in terms of information theory, and therefor a question of faith, not science). However, I would suggest that a society that sees humans as mere biological machines and denies the soul (even if they are literally correct and there is no such thing as a soul), is likely to more easily commit atrocities than a society that believes each individual is imbued with the divine.
In our social discussion of abortion, there are small groups on both extremes (no abortion in almost any case versus abortion on demand up until the moment of birth). The majority of the American people have become increasingly uncomfortable with the absolute right to an abortion up until birth. While I would reluctantly support the right of a woman and/or couple to have an abortion if she/they felt it was necessary (to define necessary is a complicated task, I know, but suffice to say that for someone to have a child they don't want and are unprepared for, is a potential disaster for parent and child) I suspect that if we could put in some reasonable controls (parental notification, no abortion after the point of viability, perhaps others) it would significantly defuse the intensity of the argument and help make abortion less of a social cancer and more of an individual and/or family issue. Abortion is serious and our current stance of unlimited abortion in demand trivializes the issue.
The balance between the presumption of death over the presumption of life has been unbalanced for some time and the efforts of those who wish to right the imbalance versus those who would maintain the imbalance, has lead to much of the current unpleasantness in our body politic.
Abortion on demand may make perfect sense for the individual, but for society, it introduces a cheapening of human life that has unfortunate repercussions.
To be continued...
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