Everyone is Wrong About Abortion but Me!!

by Jesse Milby


Rachel Maddow, titular host of a left leaning talk show on MSNBC, opened her September 16 broadcast with a segment on Christine O’Donnell. Maddow was hardly the first pundit to weigh in on the former —wait, has Christine O’Donnell ever had a real job? — in the wake of her Tea Party supported triumph over longtime Delaware congressman Mike Castle in the Republican senatorial primary. However, Maddow’s furor that night was aimed not at O’Donnell’s utter lack of qualifications or admissions she dabbled in witchcraft, but at what she referred to as “the great, unacknowledged, big honking political issue of this year’s election nationwide.” No, it wasn’t Bristol Palin (hopefully brief) staring turn on Dancing with the Stars. Her beef? That O’Donnell’s nomination meant there were now five congressional nominees who were in favor of complete prohibition of abortion, regardless of circumstance.

Maddow’s hyperbolic intonation aside (or perhaps contributory), this little instance presents both sides of the debate over abortion in allegorical terms with Maddow playing the neo-feminist liberal vehemently defending the sanctity of freedom of choice and O’Donnell as the paragon for the idealistic but painfully uninformed and self-defeatingly naïve pro-lifer. The debate over abortion is nothing new. Neither are the opportunists who prey open the whimsy of an enthralled public for votes, book sales and feigned legitimacy. Meanwhile, back in reality, two million abortions will be performed this year, just as they were last year and almost every year since a woman from Texas lied about being raped to challenge a state law proscribing abortion nearly forty years ago. The women who have them will be lauded by some, chastised by others, and ignored by all.

Let me be upfront about my personal beliefs on the subject. I am adamantly pro-life. I believe abortion is murder, that more often than not it is an act of desperation, and that the very term “pro-choice” is an assault on the sanctity and legitimacy of liberty and life itself. That being said, I look at abortion as much more than a hot button issue, capable of generating heated debate, arousing staunch opinions on both sides of the issue, and raising vast sums of cash for political combatants. It is an issue which hits at the heart of nearly every socio-economic concern today, with serious implications for civil liberties, race, gender, poverty and bioethics. It is not the kind of issue which should be dismissed outright once one has formulated an opinion.

That being said, Ms. O’Donnell’s complete unwillingness to address the issue in depth is characteristic of those who are adamantly pro-life. For all their talk about the sanctity of life, their polemics rarely touch on the environments which breed nihilism antithetical to such language. Very few woman obtaining abortions do so out of callousness. For most, it is a very difficult decision influenced by the world in which they inhabit. To a 17 year old girl facing the possibility of single teenage motherhood in a world offering little hope, the $400 procedure is not only a practical solution, but may even be viewed as an act of saving grace to spare the child a life of suffering

Conversely, Maddow and her cadre of neo-feminist libertines often soil their own water in defending the practice. The apologetics of abortion usually centers on the idea that a woman’s decision to abort is a sacrosanct and undeniable. It is not. Unlike the “self-evident” rights of life, liberty, etc, this one was “discovered” in the course of Roe v. Wade. Mere decriminalization of an act does not raise it to the sacred status of a right. Couching the debate in terms of a woman’s right to choose may actually be counterintuitive. Furthermore, this appeal is largely ineffective, as it further offends the opposition without presenting a reasoned and sustainable position to those apathetic of the issue.

My point is this: the battle over abortion as it is waged today has no victors, but millions of casualties. Those who justify abortion as a woman’s right often seem to lose themselves in their own self-righteousness. Since Roe’s inception in 1973, the number of black children aborted in America is more than 1/3 of the current black population. I find it difficult to reconcile that figure with anything resembling liberty. Conversely, those who seek its proscription typically take an oversimplified view of the issue, its true ramifications and its root causes. At its heart the debate is not one of women’s rights or sanctity of life, but over the very definition of what constitutes life itself. Unfortunately, this debate rarely sees the light of day, buried as it is beneath scientific corruption and political agendas. Abortion has been legalized in America for almost four decades. It has survived five Republican presidencies and almost its entire tenure under a conservative Supreme Court. It is even supported for certain circumstances by 78% of the population. It isn’t going anywhere. The Left won. It might behoove its supporters to simply shut the hell up and remember that. Even before Roe, estimates on the number of illegal abortions are in the range of a million per year. It is not some novel entity manifesting from an un-Godly sect of secularists and a liberal activist judiciary. It is largely a symptom of poverty, with more than 2/3 of abortion performed on women within one strata of the poverty line. I want to see the eradication of abortion, but that requires an assault on poverty itself. Those holier than thou Christians so bent on criminalizing abortion would do well to go back and read the Sermon on the Mount. A wise man once posed a question to me that continues to engage my views of the subject to this day: “How many abortions are performed every year because the good, loving, God-fearing people of the Church turned their backs on the pregnant, unwed, teenage mother?