Blogs For Victory

Linda Hirshman gives is a shot – first noting that the Democrats have come out for federally funded abortion on demand:

The Democratic Party platform of 2008 finally dropped its old abortion language (“safe, legal and rare”), which had asked that women not have abortions unless they absolutely must. The 2008 platform, just announced, says instead, “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.” Should a woman desire to bear her child, the Dems advocate prenatal care, income support, and adoption programs to help her there, too. But in the world of the new Democratic platform, it’s the woman’s decision to make.

She then winds up her argument by figuring that the reason abortion is viewed with distaste is the unwillingness of pro-abortion people to argue in favor of abortion, as an act, in relation to the conception that a woman’s happiness is dependent upon her ability to killl her unborn child at will:

In the absence of a robust description of the value of women’s lives—their ability to develop their capacities through education, to use them to achieve economic independence and political citizenship, to take on only the relationships they can manage—there is no moral argument for their “choice” to have an abortion. Set against the sound of nothing, the smallest moral claim of the potential human life looms large. Such an immoral act, moral thinkers conclude, must always be a mistake, the product of incomplete information or logic, and, in time, must produce regret, depression, and loss of self-esteem.

The wrong question will always lead to the wrong answer. Not coincidentally, the founding text of the Post-Abortion Syndrome movement is called “Making Abortion Rare.” The Democratic platform of 2008 offers an opportunity to put an end to this self-destructive cycle of Safe, Legal, and Rare, otherwise known as regret, depression, and self-denigration. In its place, it can finally argue for the value of women’s lives.

I guess as we argue for the value of women’s lives we will conveniently ignore the women we abort – their lives having no value unless, I presume, they are capable of having an abortion. There is something exceptionally nauseating in all this – the final plunge into the depths of the Culture of Death, the Orwellian transformation of a right to life into a right to kill. Hirshman, elsewhere in the article, stands aghast at the thought that a majority of people would ban abortions except in cases of rape, incest and life of the mother – and entirely fails to draw the conclusion that if a majority are so disposed, then there must be some substantial number of women (who, under Hirshman’s definition, cannot be free unless they are also free to kill their children) who believe that abortion is wrong in all or most cases (few pregnancies are the result of rape or incest, and the number of women who risk their lives by giving birth grows vanishingly small these days). There is no understanding on the pro-abortion side – just a bloody-minded determination to keep the practice legal and enshrined in law as a human right. This probably stems from a very large number of very guilty consciences on the pro-abortion side.

Hirshman, like all the secular liberals, fails in her worldview because she doesn’t understand what life is for. For people like Hirshman, life is for personal gratification. That which is irksome or difficult is to be shoved aside and the individual is to enjoy maximum resources to alllow for a maximum of self-gratification and anything which stands in the way of this is inherently a violation of the rights of the individual. But that is not what its for – our purpose here, on this world in the here and now, is to live.

Yes, I know, seems pretty simple – but living means living life as it is, not as one might wish it to be. One might wish that in life it rained beer, but the facts of life are that you’ll either have to make beer or go buy it, and the very fact that you have to do one of these two things in order to obtain your beer means that you’re life has a limitation – and this would be only one of ten thousand we each have. Some woman might not have wanted a pregnancy to result from that tawdry affair, but if one results then that is part of the life she is to live – and a wonderous, glorious thing it is, if taken with the right perspective. Once, you see, you decide to have a tawdry affair you also accept all that may result from that tawdry affair…death, jail, bankruptcy, lawsuits, venereal diseases, pregnancy, what have you. We’ve grown too fond of the notion that anything difficult is wrong – that what is right and good must be what is easiest and most pleasant…so fond of this notion have we grown that there are amongst us those like Hirshman, who advocate a permanent – dare we say, “final”? – solution to a temporary condition.

I feel sorry for Hirshman and those like her who have mired themselves in this mindset – there is not much I can do in the way of argument to reach them, all I can do is have pity and, of course, work to end abortion. This will be a great relief – not least to those who have locked themselves into advocating the practice.