The Great Abortion Debate

There are folks who come to my blog and do a search on abortion and I've never written about it since I prefer to restrict myself to writing on positive topics. However, the abortion debate triggered by Mr Trump's comments has been raging through the blogosphere and I came to the conclusion that I actually sometimes dislike both sides for their insincerity, their pigheadedness  and their inability to actually talk with each other without flying off the handle.

The whole abortion debate has been framed in the term of rights, which is, frankly, retarded on the part of traditionalists because the whole idea of human rights isn't traditional at all, but something which was brought by Enlightenment, the very antithesis of the traditional Christianity. Pro-lifers are further dishonest when they claim that abortion had been universally forbidden before Roe vs Wade since under English common law abortion, even a late-term one, wasn't a criminal offence until the 19th century. Salic law as far as I know, treated late-term abortion akin to murder, but not the early abortion.

What is certainly true, is that Christian Church universally viewed both early and late term abortion as a sin, with the punishment of accordingly 3 or 10 year penance and that abortionists were prosecuted if the abortion resulted in the death of the woman.

And here we come to the main problem with the modern pro-life position: while they keep claiming that abortion is murder and holocaust they also state that women who procure abortions are just as much victims as the aborted fetuses and should never be as much as spoken harshly to, otherwise it would be "unloving." Strange enough, they aren't ready to extent the same "love" to the doctor who performs abortion.

While it's undoubtedly ridiculous to portray those women as totally ignorant of what they are actually doing, the other side in this whole debate (should the women be punished, that is)  rather comes across as a bunch of vindictive guys with a grudge against women in general who are more interested in punishing the would-be mothers (preferably by death)  than in really stopping abortion.

Actually prosecuting the doctors but not the women seeking abortions makes a good deal more sense and I'll try to explain why. When someone dies, in most countries you'll need some type of a medical report stating that the death was due to natural reasons, otherwise police will get involved. To prosecute a woman for terminating her pregnancy would mean that she'd have first to register this pregnancy officially or to make it publicly known which is rather complicated when she isn't showing. Some women learn that they are pregnant earlier than others.

Many many pregnancies end in miscarriage, sometimes after as little as 3 weeks. Will the police create a special department to investigate whether all these miscarriages were entirely natural? Do we really want it? Will every fertile woman have to undergo a pregnancy test if she is 3 days late and report the results to the government?  From the practical point of view, if abortion is to be restricted, it's much easier to punish the abortion clinic than its clients. 

The real reason most pro-lifers don't want women to be punished is probably due to the fact that despite the rhetoric that they use they don't really believe that abortion is murder, though they undoubtedly and in my opinion, correctly believe that it's a type of killing and something very unnatural which wouldn't be touted as "a right" in any healthy society.

Any healthy society further on would frown upon extramarital sex, extoll chastity in women, encourage traditional family roles and view motherhood as something deeper than a hobby. We don't live in a healthy society, so I don't expect abortion to be forbidden any time soon. Pro-lifers in America expend a lot of energy fighting for the cause but so far haven't achieved anything. May be, they should rethink their strategy?