Some Insights on Birth Control and Abortions

For years, liberal acquaintances have informed me that the Repubican party has been captured ny the religious right. Apparently, all issues boil down to abortion, in the eyes of these liberals, especially for their arch-nemeses, the aforementioned rightist splinter group.

I'm not an active Republican by any means. I'd rather not register with either party, but, in order to vote in a primary, I am forced to do so. Thus, my identification as more conservative than partisan.

Recently, Kudlow & Company, Larry Kudlow's week nightly program on CNBC, featured the results of a Gallup poll which found nearly-identical percentages of Democratic and Republican voters would cast their vote for President on the single-issue of abortion. If memory serves, that percentage was roughly 18%. Thus, not only was the Republican party not 'captured' by these single-issue zealots, but the Democrats were hostage to the opposite sentiment, to the same degree.

Thus, a column in a recent Wall Street Journal caught my attention. Ms. Riley, the article's author, cast the piece through the eyes of Dr. Atul Gawande, who recently guest-wrote an op-ed piece in the People's Daily (a/k/a New York Times). It discussed the widely-available knowledge about birth-control methods, and their usage. How then, it asked, to accuont for the 1.3 million US abortions, over half of which were performed on women over the age of 25?

According to Ms. Riley, surveys record that 75% of American women,

"think abortion is morally wrong in at least some circumstances. The most common exceptions- rape, incest and life of the mother- are in fact the least common reasons women have abortions. So what gives?"

Riley quotes Kay Hymowitz, author of "Marriage and Caste in America," as writing,

"There isn't really a bright line between wanted and unwanted pregnancies."

Ultimately, Ms. Riley comes to a rather chilling conclusion,

"Whether they're suburban professionals with two sons who really want a daughter or poor inner-city women who hope their boyfriends will stay around if there is a child in the picture, women will often subvert their better judgment to fulfill a biological urge.

This is not the sort of sentiment that sits well with feminists- or with anyone, for that matter, who believes women are the ones thinking with their heads instead of their hormones."

It turns out that six in ten US women who have abortions are already mothers, and more than half intend to have more children. As Riley points out,

"These women know exactly how one gets pregnant, and how one does not."

Which leads Ms. Riley, and us, to the logical conclusion. Abortion has become an expensive, morally questionable form of birth control used by women who hope things will develop, over nine months, into a situation in which they feel comfortable bearing a child. But when circumstances do not comply with their hopes, they opt to terminate the pregnancy instead.

When you depart from the purely emotional arguments about "a woman's body," etc., and look at the facts, you rapidly realize that the issue is not about young, inner-city, uneducated women who have accidentally 'made a mistake.' Rather, it appears that our moral retreat on the question of how our society views the sanctity and right of each life to be protected has resulted in many women callously choosing to become pregnant, realizing that they can wait quite a few months and simply abort the child.

I'm not a single-issue voter, and I certainly don't intend to begin now, with this issue. However, I find the facts troubling. As part of a broader loosening of moral consistency in America, beginning in the late 1960s, our current dilemma vis a vis abortion, when electively used as birth control, seems to me to send entirely the wrong signal in a society which, in so many other areas, alleges to value life and protection of the weak. Of what value are so many governmentally-financed aid programs for surviving children, when our society actively supports the ability and means of women to abort other children before birth for no more reason than inconvenience?