The World After Roe v. Wade

The problem with abortion politics is that it's not really politics: it's religion. 

If you are an educated-class woman abortion is a kind of talisman that empowers you to fulfill yourself in a career, to confirm that the age-old rule of the patriarchy is well and truly over. If you are a commoner woman then abortion-on-demand is a demonic insult to families and to the sacred trust that women hold to bear and raise the next generation in the miracle of life. 

Only in the lower class is abortion less than religious, for if you are a subordinate woman then abortion is a necessary and practical tool to survive and carve out a life in the disorganized and storm-tossed seas of underclass life.

I was in Washington DC earlier this week during the Supreme Court peaceful protests, and I heard various women in the hotel breakfast room holding forth on abortion: some of them were agreeing with each other on their Christian religious views.  One group of three was actually debating, trading Bible verses against "my spirits;" they agreed to disagree: imagine that.

Of course, the problem with Roe v. Wade is that its original proponents really did not understand what they were doing. Law is not really a thing that divine educated gods impose from on high. In the Anglo-American common law tradition the judge-made law moves from one sticky problem to another, and in the legal decisions tries to disentangle the knots that dumb humans get into in their stumbling walk through life.

It is, of course, the staggering folly of our lefty friends to imagine that they can craft political doctrines from on high that will magically bend the arc of history towards justice, for all humanity, and especially for their particular charge, the helpless victims of which you've heard tell.

As if it is their vision of justice that will make the world anew and make injustice vanish from our midst.

Only, as I say: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." And when you legislate your vision of justice on the world you are visiting injustice on the people at the receiving end of your glorious justice. Sorry about that.

That is the problem with Roe v. Wade. It was decided on Mount Olympus by the liberal gods, imagining that the divine ones could decide the question of abortion once for all. Because they knew. 

Deciding the future of the world from Mount Olympus is all very well when you are deciding the tos and fros at Troy in the all-important Trojan War. But reality is more complicated.

Reality, as we know from our day-to-day life, is one damned thing after another. And abortion is no different.

Back in the day, I'd imagine, aborting a baby almost always meant the death of the mother. Just guessing. So it would make sense that humans would develop the idea that abortion was evil and inhuman and anything else horrible and demonic.

But today, abortion is "safe." Hey, you can even abort a baby at full term and today's health-care professionals are real proficients in the procedure of collapsing the baby's head so it comes out of the birth canal real easy.

But then there is the moral dimension. My morality says that all abortion is shameful, going back to having sex with a woman whose baby you are not already committed to raise. My morality says that terminating a pregnancy at any point is the taking of a human life.

But morality is not everything. There is the criminal dimension. At what point in the progress of a pregnancy does society regard the aborter of a zygote / foetus / unborn baby as a criminal and an enemy of society, and subject to criminal rather than moral penalty?

In France, they tell me, you can abort a baby up to 12 weeks (or 14 weeks after the last period). But after that fuggedaboudit. That baby is going to term or the gendarmes will want to know about it.

But in our country we have the pro-life moral community preaching that life begins at conception, and the pro-lifers are right. And we have the pro-choice community preaching that a woman owns her own body, and the pro-choicers are right.

So, shall we decide the issue by one side annihilating the other in a complete victory and imposing its religion and its values on the rest of America?

I have to admit that I would rather enjoy seeing our liberal friends humiliated and routed from the field, and I sympathize with the commoner women for whom childbearing is a sacred trust. To me, careers for women is something of an educated-class conceit, an activity that insulates well-born women from the seamy side of life. And I think that almost all women should be engaged in their communities, helping each other, raising their children, engaging together to educate their children and the children of their kin and of neighbors and friends, and doing all the myriad of community work that lubricates and elevates human society.

But I accept that for liberal women, the shape of a fulfilling, and creative, and advocating-for-justice life is different. And I am happy that they should pursue their own visions of the good life.

So I think that the women on both sides need to compromise on abortion.

And yes, I believe that the decision on the abortion question is the responsibility of the women of America.

Since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 our liberal women friends have had the whip hand, partly because they are the educated class and the educated class gets to set the moral and cultural agenda, and partly because of the power of the Supreme Court to issue dicta from its judicial Mount Olympus.

But, I would say, it is the duty of the ruling class, the noble elves, to have compassion and understanding for the ordinary lives of the hobbits, and allow them space to live their cramped and limited lives according to their lights, provided of course that the the hobbits do not interfere with the glorious destiny of the noble elves of the educated and ruling class.

For, if the educated and ruling class does not allow the subordinate commoners a certain amount of space to live their lives according to their lights, then, eventually, the commoners will rebel.

Really, the answer is not that hard. Almost all the other countries in the world have abortion laws that allow abortion up to about 12 weeks, and disallow it after that. Right now, the insistence by our liberal lady friends on abortion up to -- and even, in some cases, after -- birth is, in my opinion, a foolish and proud conceit that issues at least in part from the natural tendency in any ruling class that "we make the rules around here, peasants."

Alas, I fear that our liberal friends are too proud and too foolish and too invested in their moral superiority to do the sensible thing.

But, I tell you, dear liberals, if you don't do the sensible thing you will regret it. Or your children will regret it. And sooner than you think.