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When is pollution not pollution?

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Intelligent discussion about the environment and pollution can be hard to find. I find the loudest voices on both sides of the “are we headed for ecological armageddon?” debate to be noisy and poorly read in basic statistics. There’s a lot to be said for maintaining the environment, especially in places like Canada, where open spaces are abundant and incredibly beautiful, but it takes a pretty hard heart to ask Indians and Chinese to do without heating and basic transportation for the sake of a theoretical reduction in world temperatures of .8 degrees several decades in the future.

Here is an issue of pollution and a threat to wildlife that’s worth more discussion than it’s getting.  The hormones in birth control pills (used also in the morning-after pill and some abortion inducing drugs, but because of sheer volume, it’s really about birth control pills) end up excreted into sewage, and make their way, despite all the treatments meant to neutralize human waste, into the water, well, everywhere.  This is devastating some fish populations.  If an oil refiner were releasing a substance into the water that had similar effects, we’d hear of nothing else, and be encouraged to boycott the producers, call for new oil taxes, lobby for new laws, and so on.

It’s no secret that the hard core environmental lobby are in favour of Zero Population Growth, where they don’t favour reducing the population.  The most common and reliable birth control method (in the developed world, anyway) pollutes the environment.  Will Greenpeace or similar have the intellectual honesty to call for a new look at birth control and our reliance on synthetic hormones to manipulate nature?  Many people have spoken out about hormonal manipulation of livestock and its effects both on humans and animals.  Why the silence here?

By all means, we (humanity) need some method of birth control that is safe and effective.  There is a lot about the pill that is politically attractive: it is, used properly, very effective, it is entirely within the purview of the woman involved, which meshes well with the reality of the hook-up culture, it’s marketed for all sorts of trivial things that make it even more appealing (want to have only four periods a year? want to clear up your acne? try the Pill!) and it makes drug companies a ton of money.  But there are increasing reasons to think that it’s not very safe.  If it’s not safe for wildlife to be exposed to these hormones indirectly, maybe we’ll finally start to look at how healthy it is for the women who ingest it daily.

“Even then, so-called ‘elective’ abortions after 16 weeks are rare…”

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We hear this a lot from defenders of elective abortion. It’s not true.  Abortions in the second half of pregnancy are less common than first trimester abortions, sure, but not by any means rare. From my days working at a women’s clinic (that did not do abortions but referred women to abortionists on request) I can confirm that arranging for a woman to travel to Alberta (at the time no Manitoba OB did elective abortions after 18 weeks) was not all that unusual. And the number of strings that were pulled to help women abort at 17 weeks and 6 days was most impressive. If only medical staff and administrators showed such zeal hastening waits for angioplasties and hip replacements.

On the one hand, I think this argument is a bit of a red herring. Whether or not something should be permissible, legal or desirable has nothing to do with how often it happens. But I think a lot of people have no idea how common late abortions – well after viability – are in Canada.

And if it’s truly just fine to abort at any stage, for any reason, why do abortion rights activists assert that these are rare? The mantra Clinton made famous – that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” – contains within it a clue to the moral issues involved in abortion. Why do you wish, President or Senator Clinton, that abortion be rare if all that is lost is a clump of cells with no intrinsic value? Many people who consider themselves pro-choice are much less comfortable with abortion than they think they are, and they sometimes realize this when they’re asked, or forced, to ponder why exactly it ought to be rare.

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Andrea adds: “Safe, legal and rare.” So far, they’re legal. Safe and rare? Not really. (Someone else quipped that first, and as soon as I remember who, I’ll give them credit.)

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Tanya adds: Safe. As opposed to unsafe? The excuse so many use to keep abortion legal is infact to keep it safe. However, the year before Roe v Wade, the US reported 39 deaths in conjunction with illegal abortion. Compare that with the 40 or so annual deaths related to Christmas tree fires, and the same logic should outlaw this yuletide tradition.

“A woman’s right to choose”

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Hadley Arkes, one of the authors of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (stop and think about that for a second), starts off by discussing the Spitzer debacle, and then veers into very interesting territory:

Bernard Nathanson has told the story often that the mantra “her decision,” on abortion, came from the men who founded the National Abortion Rights Action League. It was to be “her decision” because it was “her problem.” It was a conception that put discreetly out of the picture the man who had his own, distinctive role to play in creating the problem in the first place, or the man whose refusal to take responsibility and stand by her now made the problem hers alone to manage.

This goes to something that we don’t discuss often enough. Men’s role in the discussion about abortion is an odd one, constrained in so many ways. We don’t talk enough, for instance, about what it’s like to be a man whose child is aborted without his consent, or sometimes even his knowledge until after the fact. And abortion-rights activists are very fond of implying that men who oppose abortion are implying patriarchal values upon women as part of a centuries old hegemony to keep women subjugated. But it is undeniable that a political discourse that insists on viewing abortion as a women’s issue, whether pro or con, removes men from the equation, and this severs the connection between the other participant in the creation of the pregnancy and its resolution. It takes two people to make a baby, and hyper-correct sex ed has inculcated in a whole generation that both people are responsible for safe sex. It’s time to extend that to include pregnancy. Insisting that abortion is entirely and solely a decision to be made by the mother (although of course subsidized by all of us) has the unintended effect of letting fathers off the hook.

Cultural change is what counts

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Mark Steyn reviews Amazing Grace (the book, not the movie, although he discusses both), about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who essentially laid the framework for ending slavery. (After a sudden and dramatic religious conversion, but of course we must all keep religion out of politics these days, right?) The quote all of us who hope for a more humane future should remember:

[T]he life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising.

But the theme of the book is that Wilberforce accomplished more than a change to British laws, he transformed the culture of the western world to the point that, albeit it after several painful convulsions, no civilized person found the idea of slave-owning acceptable, or even palatable. The parallel between slavery and abortion isn’t perfect, although heaven knows it’s been belaboured enough already. But it does illustrate how changing minds is more important than changing laws. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, slavery is nominally illegal but in practice common. In Canada, the US and western Europe, though, I would venture to say that even if there were no laws against slavery, common decency would prevent it from occurring; we are hardly, after all, nations of people who quietly wish we could own slaves and chafe at the laws that forbid us from doing so.

Would that we see the day when it isn’t a law against abortion that stops people from seeking one, but a deep-seated repugnance, and a profound recognition of the barbarism of the practice. Who, I wonder, will be the William Wilberforce of the pro-life movement?

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Andrea asks: Anyone got the focus group numbers for the pro-life cause in Canada?

Religion and motherhood

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Here is an interesting article on National Review Online about women and religiosity.  Of particular interest is this comment about why, contra today’s feminists, Judeo-Christian religion empowers and dignifies women:

Judaism’s view of women departed sharply from that ancient model. The practice of “holy prostitution” so common in the ancient world was renounced, as was the image of the pagan goddess as sexual ideal. The Hebrew Scriptures revealed a personal God who had created men and women in his image. Women now were connected to the realm of the spirit, not just the flesh, and motherhood was seen as a personal event in the life of the mother and a blessing from God, not merely a woman’s duty-bound contribution to the increase of the tribe.  The Gospels continued on this trajectory. They depicted God taking flesh in the womb of a woman, a woman who was free to accept or reject her role as the mother of Jesus. […] Although Christians themselves often have failed to live up to Jesus’ example regarding women, Gerl-Falkovitz said, feminism is an outgrowth of Christian ideas about women’s equal dignity: “Only in Judeo-Christian culture sprang up this humanization of women.”

Hmm, prostitution and pagan sexuality as the paradigm for women’s worth, that doesn’t have anything at all to do with today’s secular culture, does it?

So much of the abortion debate abortion rhetoric takes it for granted that pregnancy and motherhood is inherently a blight, a burden and a hardship that should only under very narrow circumstances be borne by a woman.  How inhuman this is compared to the “unenlightened” religious view of a child as a blessing and a gift, and of motherhood as sanctified, and especially in Christian thought, even miraculous.  I believe that the Woodstock generation sincerely thought they were creating a utopia, but the secular leftist world is becoming increasingly joyless and grim, as well as misogynistic.

How can it be right, if it feels so wrong? Part II

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I haven’t seen Juno, but I want to, especially after watching the Academy Awards. So this morning I was drawn to a Canadian mommy-blogger who posted on it here.   

Juno resonated with the blogger (who calls herself, I hope ironically, Her Bad Mother) because of her decision years ago to abort an unwanted baby. The entry is inspired by her gratitude to her own mother, who supported her through the abortion despite her own obvious grief. It’s a moving and disturbing column, worth reading in its entirety, but here are some excerpts.

On the abortion itself:

Then, then, she made all arrangements and we made the long drive, together, to the place where I had to walk a terrible mile alone, but she was there, again, on the other side and that night we curled up together on a dusty bed in a motel together, somewhere some distance from home and cried and contemplated our ghosts…

On appreciating her mother for helping her to have an abortion:

I didn’t understand the depth or breadth or weight of my mother’s sacrifice until I became a mother myself, and the ghosts gathered ’round me, and whispered to me of love and loss and regret and unregret and gripped my heart in their tiny hands and squeezed until I cried. I didn’t understand until I’d suffered a loss not of my own devising, until I’d prayed for the life of this child, this oh-so-badly-wanted child. I didn’t understand until I became a mother, for real, for aching-heartfelt-feargripped-real, just how great a thing she had done.”

This blog entry speaks to me of three victims: The unwanted child, the heartbroken grandmother, and the blogger herself, whose grief years later shines through in her writing. What a culture we’ve created, in which a young woman suffers “a loss of her own devising” and is convinced she did the right thing. What a strange standard by which to judge motherhood, that helping your daughter abort your grandchild, while doing permanent damage to herself, is considered worthy of gratitude and praise.

Values voters and McCain

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2JoSo17Azk]

Barring something very strange between now and November, the next president of the USA will be Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Barack Obama. The Democrats are currently divided, along some very interesting lines, between Obama and Clinton.

By contrast, the Republicans fall into a number of different camps, most of which are lukewarm-to-actively-hostile to McCain. Fortunately, save for Ann Coulter (see YouTube clip) the petulant calls to sit out the election or cast a protest vote for Hillary have subsided. Still,  there remains a lack of enthusiasm for McCain among social and fiscal conservatives.

Arguments that conservatives and Republicans will or ought to stay home on election day generally rest on one of three postulations. 

The first is that McCain is not a “real” conservative, and hasn’t earned their votes. 

The second is that McCain is so eager to reach across the aisle and be moderate that electing him is tantamount to electing Hillary or Obama. 

Finally, some analysts suggest that the long-term health of the Republican Party requires a crushing defeat this year, so that the (perceived) heresies of compassionate conservatism, neoconservatism and big-government conservatism can be rooted out. 

Each of these ideas is badly flawed. I’ll address each of them in turn.

On fiscal and social conservatism, McCain has repeatedly asserted he did not “manage for profit,” as did Mitt Romney, but rather “led for patriotism.” Fine. But if he is truly a patriot he must be able to see the connection between the nation’s economic and social health and its ability to carry out the ambitious foreign policy missions he has outlined. That means fiscal issues are intertwined with social ones.

America spends a staggering amount of money on its military. Such budgets are only sustainable by an ever-growing and thriving economy; to advocate keeping the military strong, or using it worldwide, without recognizing the crucial nature of a solid economy to back it up, is folly. An effective and muscular foreign policy requires both strong families and a strong economy. 

As to the second argument, that McCain is such a moderate that he’s not much better than Hillary or Obama, values voters should know better.  McCain is staunchly pro-life, and would prefer to permit abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or life-threatening risk to the mother’s health.  He is also in favour of traditional marriage.  (He has not expressed an interest in settling these issues as President, but this is not because he opposes the idea, but rather that he considers that an inappropriate use of federal power in a federal system of government.)  And for better or for worse, abortion law is made these days by the Supreme Court, so McCain’s thoughts on what federal abortion law should be are less significant than the judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court (and it is likely that up to three justices will be appointed between 2009 and 2012).  Not only has McCain committed to originalist judges, but he even voted in favour of Bork at his confirmation hearings. 

On the last point- that a stunning defeat would be a bracing and overall rejuvenating experience for the Republicans–there is some truth to this idea.  The question we must ask is, what would the cost be?  In the next four years, and possibly eight, what would happen as the Republicans rebuilt?  The significance of a Supreme Court with three or more new hard-line liberal justices should be clear; major decisions that have a profound influence on life today, such as Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona, were decided in the 1960s and 1970s.  And radical social change is always harder to reverse than to initiate.  How much harder to reduce the number of abortions after two more terms of rulings striking down any laws about notification, parental consent, and third trimester abortions?

Exasperation and frustration with McCain are understandable. A moderate and a maverick he might be, but he is closer to mainstream Republicans and conservatives than any Democrat candidate, and Obama and Hillary in particular, could possibly be. 

John McCain is perhaps not a values voter’s first choice, but he is certainly not a bad choice, and infinitely preferable to the other name on the ballot in nine months’ time.

Why I’m “ProWomanProLife”

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In the letters page of the National Post this morning is a summary of letters received after the Morgentaler retrospective last week.  There is an excerpt containing the old chestnut that most anti-abortion activists are men, that it’s about controlling women, that if men got pregnant this wouldn’t be an issue.  It’s to put this to rest that I think PWPL is so timely and necessary.

While noting that I don’t think the taxpayer should fund medically unnecessary surgery in general, and that Canada’s lack of abortion law puts us well to the left of all of Europe in terms of access to abortion at any stage in pregnancy, for any reason, I’m not in favour of trying to legislate abortion out of existence.  For one thing, the problem isn’t just that abortions are readily available; if we somehow shut down all abortion providers in Canada, there would still be demand, which could be satisfied by clinics in the USA, among others.  On the other hand, if we can reduce demand by changing how people think about abortion, the number of abortions will fall whether or not willing doctors are easy to find.  For another, the strenuous efforts of abolitionists have yielded very little in terms of measurable progress in reducing abortion, so it’s time to try a more fruitful strategy.

I have my own beliefs about the sanctity and rights of an unborn baby, but I don’t think we’ll change many minds by arguing about that.  The proliferation of 3D ultrasound machines, new research about fetal awareness and pain, and the increasing viability of extremely premature babies will continue to make an impression on some people,  but for those who are heavily invested in the moral neutrality of abortion on demand, and who see the concession of any status to the fetus as in direct conflict with the rights of the mother, this won’t make a lot of difference.

We need more discussion, then, of abortion as a women’s issue.  Abortion damages women.  It does them physical and psychological harm, which is multiplied by the fact that very few women seeking abortions give their informed consent (meaning consent even after being advised of the risks.)  Those of us who take such things seriously tend to agree that it does them spiritual harm.  More broadly, a culture in which abortion is seen as essentially harmless wreaks profound changes to our collective understanding of motherhood, sexuality, the obligations of mothers and fathers to each other and their children, and adulthood.  These changes aren’t good for anyone, but they’re especially pernicious to young women.

An obstetrician I met several years ago told me that in his experience, “women want an abortion like an animal in a trap wants to chew its leg off.”  Making it easier and less painful to chew off a leg isn’t how I want to make a difference.  We need to talk about why women choose abortion, how that choice affects them and those close to them in the short- and long-term, and what we can do to help women, after they’ve had an abortion and especially before they make that choice.

Is it primary season already?

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If I were in an endorsing kind of mood, I wouldn’t pick Mike Huckabee.  Nonetheless, his sudden uptick in Iowa is fascinating.  In a contest that has so far dealt largely with the economy, immigration and national security, rather than social and cultural issues, David Broder makes the argument that there is something going on under the surface (free registration req’d.):

Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. […] [R]eal middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

Social and human capital are what enable individuals and groups to thrive.  When communities can’t generate this capital for whatever reason, governments step in, and their solutions are usually ham-handed, expensive, and inefficient.  Fiscal conservatism, small governments and shrinking budgets are only viable when most people are functional, stable, and autonomous, and there has yet to be a more effective way to develop such people than in a family.  I’m a bit puzzled that this theme has been lacking so far in the primary season, but perhaps it’s there, in the subtext.  It will be interesting to see if it emerges more clearly in the debates ahead.

When is Hollywood pro-life?

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Last night I watched Law and Order, which reminded me why I rarely watch TV these days. The episode opened with a bombing at a medical clinic that did genetic testing of fetuses. An early suspect was a couple whose pregnancy was terminated after mistakenly being diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome. Implicit in the show was that the only problem here was the mistaken diagnosis; of course the abortion was appropriate if the baby had actually had a chromosomal disorder.

Then, in the second act, the plot twists: the lab that was bombed was linked to a scientist trying to find a “gay gene.” (The usual gratuitous swipe at religious Christians was then inserted.) A few convolutions later, and we learn that the pregnant woman in a coma, after being injured by the bomb, is carrying a boy with, yes, the “gay gene.” The father chooses to abort the baby, arguing that being gay is like a disease. The repugnance of all the other characters is loud and clear – suddenly, an abortion would be part of a “gay holocaust.” (Yes, they actually used that phrase.)

Now, straw men and implausible plotting aside, how can any sensible person reconcile this logic? The argument that abortion must be an option all the time, to anyone, for any reason, is at least internally consistent. The argument that an unborn child is a person regardless of what his genes may contain is also pretty straightforward. But to maintain that a fetus is a lump of cells with no intrinsic value or rights, unless it carries a gene for homosexuality, in which case aborting it is a grave sin, is morally and logically incoherent.

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