Wow, where to start?
I can't tell if I agree or not with Brother John, but it prompts me to
write.
On Jul 29, 2006, at 7:30 PM, Brother John wrote:
jdiebremse wrote:
Harder than the decision to carry the child to birth? Harder than
the decision to give up the child for adoption? Harder than the
decision to raise the child?
I don't like the way "Brother John" attempts to villify those who
choose abortion. I think those that choose abortion are far, far,
far more often victims than villains. At the same time, however, I
am not comfortable with the characterization of choosing to have an
abortion as being "the hardest decision." The other possible
decisions are almost certainly equally hard, if not harder.
I'm sorry I come across as "vilifying" those who choose abortion. I
would much rather come across as someone who finds it lamentable that
so many pregnancies are unwanted. We move heaven and earth to
preserve and protect endangered species. Look how highly we value
such great art works as the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the
treasure in the Louvre and other museums around the world. Would all
these abortions take place if we valued children as highly? I don't
think so, and that says something about us as a people. Why do we
value children so little? There was a time, earlier in our history as
a nation, when a pregnancy was a cause for great rejoicing, not only
for the mother and father-to-be, but for all of the neighbors, and for
the community. There was a great stigma to having children out of
wedlock, and married women who were unable to conceive and have
children were objects of pity. Children were considered great
treasures. Women died in childbirth, and families had many children
because there was no assurance that more than half of them would live
to adulthood. Today we treat pregnancies as a great inconvenience in
many cases, and an utter disaster in others. Of all the children that
are actually born, how many are thought of as the great treasures that
they are? I don't mean to vilify those who get abortions. I feel
sorry for them because they didn't want the child. I don't think that
"murder" is taking place, but I consider it one of life's greatest
tragedies that so many children are unwanted even to the point of
putting an end to the pregnancies that do occur. A pregnancy should
almost always be a cause for great rejoicing by the mother, the
father, the grandparents, and the whole community.
The expectation of a child is certainly celebrated wherever I go. Of
course, nobody sends out termination announcements on embossed
letterhead, so this is hard to really measure. It's clear Americans
and most educated peoples of this planet do accept abortion as a needed
procedure for many reasons and most societies rarely consider a child
"real" until it's has survived gestation {what's the rate of natural
spontaneous abortion, some 30%?} and is gurgling and squirming in
someone's arms.
As I understand it those pioneering days of yore both valued and
dreaded having to birth so many off-spring because vast numbers died
before adulthood. Note that falling birth rates in safer "modern"
societies appears across the board as populations become more educated
- and the cost of each child goes up.
As for societal priorities, if we really valued children our military
budgets would be dramatically lower with currently squandered funds
able to advance medical technologies & make health care much more
available, we'd have vastly cheaper child care and educational options,
and I believe a proper space exploration development plan. Imagine how
much better we may live if decade-long black-budget boondoggles had
been funding human longevity instead of premature termination on
battlefields. But peace isn't admirable, not macho, it doesn't "sell,"
or our executive branch would have portfolio devoted to conflict
resolution.
I'll consider serious discussion of making abortion illegal only after
the last orphanage is closed due to a lack of interest as anti-abortion
zealots who protest clinics actually embrace the living: fat chance.
They are terminally distracted tilting at windmills & chasing abstract
arguments about when life began & "every sperm is sacred," in a manner
to remind one of arguments about how many angels can dance on the head
of a pin.
And it is a fact that there are many women who are emotionally unable
to abort their children. The maternal love they feel for the unborn
child is so great that they simply cannot do it. It is too bad that
all women are not like that. If they were, there would not be nearly
as many women who value their "right to choose" above the life of an
unborn child in any stage of its development. Even if abortion is not
murder, and I do not think it is, it is a terrible comment on the kind
of people we are and the kind of nation we have become.
There is more than the instinct of motherhood at work here.
Conditioning certainly plays a role in what a female may do and the
circle of her friends and family can bear enormous pressures as well.
Given that some third of all pregnancies self-terminate I'm not sure
just how pathetic/tragic we are to allow yet more to fail as well.
Childbirth seems fraught with natural enough threats at a biological
level even before human societies set up rules and options, wars and
famines, rape and incest.
I'd like to see a concerted effort to give conscious internal control
of reproductive systems so women might regulate their own physiology
without medical or legal intrusions. Something that is inherited,
self-contained, and implicitly a female choice... unless one would
argue male chemical signals should have more sway over her own biology?
I don't.
Finally, the enormous problem of illegal immigration that we are
having here in the USA is caused in part by the huge birthrate among
the Hispanic people who live in Mexico and other nations of Latin
America. We aren't having children, and they are. Even here in the
USA the birthrate among the Hispanic people is much higher than among
the Anglo-Americans who have been here much longer. We ourselves used
to be an enormously fertile and prolific people. Our ascendancy over
the Native Americans who were here before us is as much a factor of
the difference in our relative birthrates as anything else. We were
growing like crazy. We had huge families and we did a good job of
taking care of them in comparison with the Native Americans of the
same period. We literally populated a whole continent from "sea to
shining sea." Today we are just barely replacing ourselves and in
some places there would be no grown in our population whatever if it
were not for Hispanic immigrants and the large families they have
before and after coming here.
Here we go, we-e-e-e-e!
Actually birth rates are falling down south the last time I saw a
report on this. What you are confusing is an economic migration as
NAFTA is revealed for the complete train wreck it is. Mexican people
work for less money per day now than when it came into being and the
floodgates of big agribiz has driven the peasant farmers off their
lands and into the cities looking for work... and when that obviously
fails they head north where our flag-pin wearing Chamber of Commerce
gladly hires them. Your confusing issues. I'll leave you to explain
your reasons.
As for WASPness {for lack of better handle} spreading across this
country I'd remind you that festering European cities bred the
pestilences that wiped out local N. American populations {who lived on
this land & generally resisted invaders} before our grandpappy's
discovered Manifest Destiny. I am unsure about your statement that
native families were smaller than immigrant ones in this context, but
even if so wouldn't this describe a self-sustaining relationship with
our landscape that we lack - we do currently import the lions share of
goods across this planet.
My wife is hispanic from a family that saluted the Spanish King before
Texas "liberated" them from oppression by a wealthy aristocracy {oops,
has it really changed?}, and she has only one other sister... your full
of casual hearsay in your broad statements. How much have you really
travelled this country, let alone the world?
Well, if we don't reproduce, we will just be replaced. That is just a
biological fact. We can agonize and discuss endlessly the moral and
religious aspects, but simple biology dictates that there is a
relationship between nativity and mortality. And that if a species or
a subgroup of a species does not reproduce, it dies out. Biologically
the definition of a healthy and vigorous population is tied to the
food supply and the effect that has on reproduction. Populations grow
or they die out. If our culture has become as sterile and barren as
it seems to have, then the future is not good for us regardless of the
minor nits we like to endless discuss when the topic of abortion comes
up.
Wow, you sound like a real bummed out grump on this. I grew up in
white-bread Oregon and long held the view that place needed some salsa
in the worst way. Our culture would be terminally bland and insular if
we were only breeding as you seem to advocate. Our melting pot
strengths easily out-shadow the congenital weakness an isolated culture
fosters as it denies mutation and change. China did it for a long
time, but it only made them a push-over for a dynamic British military
empire. As I look for a silver lining in the Katrina disaster my
fervent hope is that somehow the truly remarkable, rich, vibrant &
amazingly creative society we call New Orleans can affect this nation
positively - let a thousand Mardi Gras parades flow!
- Jonathan -
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
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