At regular intervals the extremists of the pro-choice movement show the intellectual and moral vapidity of their cause. A few months ago it was the article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (!), where two bioethicists argued for after-birth abortion, a practice also referred to as infanticide and practiced by various regimes throughout history. As Will Saletan at Slate pointed out at the time, apart from being an appalling idea, the notion is entirely consistent with the moral practice of abortion. The most recent example of appalling morality is this completely unhinged column by Lynn Beisner (pseudonym), a college professor and mother of two who argues that her mother should have had an abortion. Here is the link and a quote:
"I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. Somehow they confuse the well-considered and rational: "The best choice for both my mother and me would have been abortion" with the infamous expression of depression and angst: "I wish I had never been born." The two are really very different things, and we must draw that distinction clearly.
The narrative that anti-choice crusaders are telling is powerful, moving, and best of all it has a happy ending. It makes the woman who carries to term a hero, and for narrative purposes it hides her maternal failing. We cannot argue against heroic, redemptive, happy-ending fairytales using cold statistics. If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, "I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me."
There is a lot to pick at here. First of all, the idea that her own mother would have definitely had a better life had she not given birth to the author is completely unproveable, an impossible calculus. Her mother clearly had multiple issues apart from missing out on the liberation she certainly would have experienced from Feminism and Psychology and the other leftist gods had she aborted and gone skipping off to college: brain trauma, history of abuse, and parent suicide tends to mess someone up, unintended child or not.
I mentioned recently, while excerpting the article on how capitalism wants us to be single, that our current culture tends towards the commodification of all things and this article is further evidence of this tendency, particularly applied to human life. Modern culture treats human life like elementary accounting: line up your assets and your liabilities and if at first blush the liabilities seem to weigh more, terminate. Resources were wasted on the author! She took away from the perfection of the machine! And here she is, a measly college professor. It clearly was not worth the effort and expense. This reduction in the value of the human life to economic terms is a function of both the right and left so I don't mean to put all of the emphasis on this example, but this is a particularly frightening example of the practice. If people will be a burden to society, better to eliminate them before they get the chance. No doubt the author finds herself very brave for staking out such a controversial and startling position, but she is merely showing how in the throes to economic absolutism she happens to be. She is also denying, in league with the Pentecostals I have been around this summer, that pain has any purpose in life. Under the right circumstances, socioeconomic for Beisner and strength of faith for the Pentecostals, they seem to imagine that pain itself could be eliminated. But suffering is part of what makes us human and no amount of money and privilege, or faith, can remove that.
When I first read this I almost laughed it struck me as so ridiculous. But as I have read back through it my emotion has shifted to sadness. How sad it is that someone has to see their life in this way. She castigates "anti-choice" (should pro-life people start calling pro-choicers "anti-life") supporters for their emotional manipulation and unwillingness to budge, but she does exactly the same thing, refusing even to admit that she is grateful for her life. The nihilism her philosophy has bred is very sad. But she is in a bind at the same time. Her mother is the poster-child for the types of pregnancies the pro-choice crowd is trying to limit. And if she wants to go all the way in for that ideology, she must believe that the world would truly be better if people like her birthed to mothers like her's did not exist. It is social and economic Darwinism, the same arguments of eugenicists and early abortion advocates: breed out the lazy, the dumb, the black, and the impoverished. Create a race of the Ubermensch. And the world will then be perfect. For the survivors, that is.
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