It’s Blog for Choice Day.
Last week I was listening to NPR, and they had some leaders from the So-Called Pro-Life community discussing how they were going to have to change their tactics during the Obama presidency. I will continue to call them the So-Called Pro-Life community until such time as they denouce and expel the internal faction that thinks it is acceptable to enforce their opinion through intimidation, violence, vandalism, and murder. The first fellow they interviewed was mostly reasonable. But then the conversation turned to the idea of “If abortion can’t be prevented altogether, then how can it be reduced.”
This gentleman began to talk about policies such as childhood health care initiatives that could “encourage women to keep their babies.” What? Never heard of giving a child up for adoption? I’ll give this guy credit for at least caring about babies that are actually born. He might actually be “Pro-Life” for real.
Let’s get one thing perfectly straight: The best way, the only way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Sure, I support universal healthcare for children (grown-ups too, but that’s another issue). I support policies that make life easier for families to exist. What do such policies do to prevent unwanted pregnancies?
The policies we need to prevent abortions are age appropriate comprehensive sex education, wide availability of contraceptives, birth defect prevention, rape prevention, and moving the high school schedule so that teenagers don’t have as many unsupervised hours after school. These things will prevent unwanted pregnancies, the leading cause of abortions.
The next fellow was not so agreeable. He spoke graphically of things like forcing women to see ultrasound images of their “unborn babies” before “killing” them. Well, if guys like this get their way and abortion is outlawed, does he propose charging women who get illegal abortions with “murder”?And if not, why? Why do we never hear the So-Called Pro-Life movement go that far when they discuss the consequences of outlawing abortion?
It becomes more and more clear to me that the Pro-Choice and So-Called Pro-Life movements are speaking across one another. Nobody really wants abortion to be widespread. The Pro-Choice movement wants to stop abortion before there even is a pregnancy, but understands that sometimes abortion needs to be considered.
Somehow, the So-Called Pro-Life movement doesn’t want to deal with preventing the problem. They think they can just make women magically want to be mommies, that they can wish away the reasons a woman might say “I can’t have this baby”. It makes you wonder if maybe the real goal isn’t to punish women for having sex. Come to think of it, mighty curious that neither of the people interviewed by NPR are at risk of becoming pregnant.
In closing: H-t to Poligazette for this First Amendment Quiz; why the bailout will create inflation (giving the FOMC a good excuse to raise interest rates to a more normal level); somehow China can implement universal health care while becoming capitalists in the midst of a “retail consolidation“; and Myths and Truths about Japan and Fiscal Stimulus.