the iconmaster

Since casting a relatively public vote for now-soon-to-be-President Obama, I’ve had to withstand a surprising degree of vitriol from my socially conservative friends. (And as a general rule, I consider myself socially conservative.) Not all of the comments are directed at me personally; often they just float through the ether of Twitter and Facebook: People are disgusted by voters like me. They’re ashamed. They wonder how anyone who believes as they do can vote for the pro-choice candidate.

Well, I can try to explain why; but be warned: you are unlikely to find the explanation satisfying and fairly likely to find it uncomfortable. In fact, if it doesn’t leave you uncomfortable, then something will have gone wrong with my explanation somewhere.

Abortion is not the issue.

By that of course I mean it’s not the primary issue. It’s symptomatic of a deeper dilemma that (in my view) is not getting enough attention, for reasons that are going to become very obvious. But I had to work my way there from the symptoms first.

When it comes to abortion, I find it helpful to look at social factors rather than at the legalities. For me the question is not, “Can it be outlawed, and how soon?” but “Why are there any abortions at all?” There are many many discussions we could have at this point — discussions about poverty and education and women in the workplace and industrialization. But let’s get down to the absolutely most basic, brain-dead obvious level we possibly can. Why are there any abortions at all?

Because people want sex without children.

That’s not very hard, is it? If people wanted sex and were okay with it leading to children, they would not be aborting pregnancies. If people weren’t interested in children but were also disinterested in sex, there wouldn’t be any pregnancies to abort. So it must be in the stepping from one to the other where the issue lies. People want sex without children. They don’t accept that the two must always or ordinarily ship as a set, so they make a way to decouple one from the other.

Abortion isn’t the only mechanism available to decouple childbearing from sex, however. Just today, homosexual couples in Connecticut began taking advantage of a new ruling with allows them to marry as if they were heterosexual pairs. Those unions are highly unlikely to be fruitful.

Isn’t it interesting how hard it is to come up with a good (secular) argument against homosexual marriage once you accept the premise that children need not follow from sex? Homosexual couples have sex and produce no children. Why should they? Heterosexual couples have sex all the time without producing children. Not only because they’re having abortions, of course. No, the far more frequent decoupling mechanism for the heterosexual couple — married, living together, whathaveyou — is contraception.

At this point, you may be getting uncomfortable. (Unless you’re a Roman Catholic who takes her church’s teachings seriously — aren’t you happy now?) Contraception. Where would we be without it? Struggling to provide more food, more clothing and more education for an ever-growing family in an economy that’s already unfriendly to single-income households. Hopelessly outnumbered by offspring while extended family can only worry from several hundred miles away, thanks to our constantly-mobile society. Left without free time, peace of mind or discretionary income. In short, miserable, beset upon and without any light at the end of the tunnel.

Well, I can’t bring myself to disagree. But the fact is, we are now finally staring down the barrel of the real issue.

Should sex lead to children? Or shouldn’t it?

Someone is going to object that contraception is merely the prevention of the formation of an embryo while abortion is its elimination, and therefore I am conflating two very different issues. To which I say, Congratulations on your scientific grasp of the situation. I’m not here interested in the morality of this or that particular reproductive act. I’m interested in the underlying philosophy that guides all of those observable acts. Is our philosophy on the whole pro-reproductive, or anti-reproductive? (And it’s worth pointing out that some contraceptives turn out to be abortificants too. The line here is probably much fuzzier than you think.)

If we claim our philosophy is pro-reproductive, as I suspect many of my socially conservative friends would do, then we are on the hook for that ethic in every area — not just the ones most convenient or least applicable to us. It is the most rank form of hypocrisy to condemn others for an anti-reproductive practice when we ourselves cherish anti-reproductive practices in our own lives and marriages.

That bears repeating: It is the most rank form of hypocrisy to condemn others for an anti-reproductive practice when we ourselves cherish anti-reproductive practices in our own lives and marriages.

Either sex is meant to produce children or it isn’t. When we try to split hairs on this point in order to get contraception in the door while leaving abortion outside, it’s no wonder others see through our pedantry. We will never be taken seriously on this point as long as we cling to our convenient inconsistencies.

Obviously the practical shift this would entail would be profound. It would require reorganizing our extended families and communities, and rethinking our careers and standards of living, in order to provide the kind of environment in which larger nuclear families can thrive. I’m not going to be the pioneer to get those arrows in his back, and you’re probably not going to be either.

But until somebody does take the lead on a truly pro-reproductive ethic and practice, we need to shut up about what everyone else is doing. They’re only following along with what they see in us.

Tags: ethics