The abortion "hand grenade" has been fizzing around on the "What is Evil?" thread for a while now - I think Alan W. threw it in originally, so let's cordon it off in its own thread, shall we? At the same time, I'll try to put it into a wider context here, in the hope that it might even exemplarily give rise to a wider discussion. Reluctantly - because I am a man and I feel that we men should take a very subordinate role in this discussion, as we don't get pregnant and - literally - don't get left holding the baby.
In an ideal world, abortion would hardly be necessary. Young people would be universally and adequately educated in sexual issues before reaching puberty, reliable means of contraception would be universally easily available, sexual violence (i.e. rape) would be non-existent, young people reaching fertility would develop in an environment where they could discover, experiment with, learn to deal with, cherish and enjoy their sexuality in the knowledge of the possible consequences and take responsible reproductive decisions in this context. Children would be born into a society which really cherished them and provided for circumstances in which they could develop and thrive as human beings, and their mothers (and fathers) would receive all the support neccessary to provide a loving and secure environment for their children. We do not live in such a world. Daily, thousands of women discover that they are pregnant, although they have not wished to be so and do not - for many different reasons - feel that they can take on the responsibility of caring for a child. Some carry through with the preganancy and do a magnificent job of rearing the unplanned child. Some carry through with the pregnancy and make a complete mess of rearing the child, damaging its life and their own enormously in the process. Some terminate the pregnancy. This is never an easy decision and none of the women I know who have terminated pregnancies have taken it lightly. They all pay a high price for it, for a few, a price with which they have great problems dealing, even years later. The last things any woman faced with this fateful decision needs (whichever way the decision goes) are attitudes of condemnation, legal barriers, people who claim to know better taking over their lives, etc. And emotionally loaded slogans like "baby murder" are completely inappropriate - as are attacks on those who choose to aid them, should they decide to terminate the pregnancy. Legally prohibiting abortion solves nothing. I can cite as a particularly apt example my own homeland, Ireland. Abortion is illegal in Ireland - the country is, in the view of those who support this position, "pro-life." All it means is that many women with sufficient social competence and financial means who have an unwanted pregnancy travel to the UK and obtain an abortion there (the estimates are thousands yearly). Those without these advantages - as a rule, the ones least equipped to provide an adequate environment for a new member of the human race - carry the pregnancy to term with the frequent result that conditions of social misery are continued for another generation. The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of this situation has always sickened me (even during the period when I was a member of a Catholic religious order in Ireland many years ago). In the area of thinking about morality, the abortion question underlines for me the insight that moral decisions are inevitably situational (which does not mean relativist). Moral decisions are always made in a particular complex context, by individual people. The role of societies and laws in such situations is to help and support people to make responsible decisions. Commandments, fiats and anathemas don't help. The most we can ever perhaps hope to achieve are moral norms, i.e. guidelines which state that, in general, one direction of decision is usually morally preferable to another - without giving absolute guidance for any particular situation. I realise that this position is not acceptable for those who purport to be able to derive particular moral absolutes from natural law - even more so for those who appeal to divine law. But I find attempts to follow this way to be extremely questionable and often unacceptably arrogant. It takes a hell of a lot of chutzpah to be so confident about the infallibility of every step of one's own process of reasoning, especially in such complex processes as the derivation of particular moral principles. But then, as I've stated here more than once, I find the Kantian approach to morality much more helpful. Francis --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Minds-Eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
