Population Management Part II: Even If It Means Damnation…(Why Abortion must be legalized)

In my opinion, no government can justly illegalize abortion until it does two things: first, eradicate poverty completely; second, guarantee help to mothers unable to properly care for a pregnancy.

It seems to me that an abortion is not something that a pregnant woman does happily. An abortion has never been a cause for celebration; it cannot even be approached indifferently except perhaps by the most monstrously inhuman of women. Rather, an abortion is something done in despair after great consideration. In this country in choosing to have an abortion, a woman must not only mortify her every human instinct, but must risk injury or death in illegal and dangerous procedures. This is clearly not something one wants to do, but rather something one feels forced to do because not having an abortion is so much worse.

The circumstances surrounding a woman that might incline her towards an abortion are largely out of her control. Probably she is poor, lives in a violent neighborhood, possibly she herself is an alcoholic or a drug abuser; any attempt on her part to improve her life could be permanently derailed by an unwanted child. A child that is forced to grow up in such a neighborhood is also far more likely to become assimilated into it than to break out of it. If the woman has made a calculated decision that both she and the child are better off if she has an abortion, as cold and as hard as it seems, we are forced to agree.

Certainly it was her choice—in as much as freedom can be attributed to the actions of anyone in an oppressive, intoxicated environment—to engage in sex. Of course choosing to have sex is not the same as choosing to have a baby, she may have used a condom, for example, but while rare condom failure has been known to happen. However much we may say that she is responsible for her actions, it is cruel to have the rest of her life and a child’s defined by a single mistake.

Nevertheless that mistake would likely not have lead to an abortion in a society in which an abortion would not have been absolutely necessary. We all bear the guilt for every abortion performed, for every child murdered, for every woman who has been forced to terminate her baby. To simply illegalize abortions without eliminating the circumstances that give rise to them foists our own social guilt on a single individual who is least capable of doing anything about it, it arrogantly assumes that we who are complicit in our nations atrocious poverty have the right to force anyone one to rear a child in the filth that we have let accumulate, as if we who view it from so great a distance can really say that life is more sacred than a GOOD life.

There is only a single alternative: adoption. But that alternative is not as simple as it seems: if the woman does not have food enough to nourish her child, does not have income enough to stop working for the period in which her pregnancy makes work impossible, if she is an addict or an alcoholic, how can we demand that she carry the child to term?

Finally, abortion does not effect population growth, but allowing women who have made mistakes to have their children at a later date, it drastically reduces the number of single mothers, improves the likelihood that the children born will have a family that is capable of providing some form of care for it, and therefore changes which segments of the population see growth. Instead of the population growing in precisely those demographics that make improvement so difficult, abortion increases the likelihood that the population sees growth in areas that have a chance at being productive and useful.

If this prospect seems cold to you, if it seems like we are sacrificing babies to a future society that we cannot even be certain of: well that is exactly right. It is murder and a crime, but the society that we live in even now is also a crime. If this monstrous thesis of mine, that we owe it to our women and our nation to legalize abortion, seems wicked all I can tell you is that the alternative is worse. If it seems that people like Lito Atienza and Pro-life Philippines have the moral high ground with their absolutist cant about how every life is sacred, nonsense about chastity as if even their maniacal God had ever damned anyone for a single mistake, as if it is possible to love a fetus while doing nothing for the person that fetus will become, to protect the unborn while stealing from the living, to dictate morality to the poor while enjoying their obscene wealth, well it seems that way because their perspective is facile dogma.

There is a tremendous sin here, but unfortunately it is not the woman’s—not if she is only doing what she must. Until abortion is not a necessity for any woman, we have no right to the moral ascendancy to illegalize it—each and every one of us is complicit in that necessity, and there is the true crime.

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