It’s Not about Killing
Abortion has been a political issue too long. It is emblematic of how we have gotten stuck in our society. This is not a matter of taking a life, as opponents of choice insist. What dies in the procedure hasn’t yet developed a mind. It is not a person, it is a thing. Which doesn’t make the abortion any less tragic. It is a terrible event, as anyone who has gone through one will tell you. It is not a blithely-used form of birth control, as some would suggest.
Indeed, most who scream against choice, while wrapped in weepy piety over the killing, are usually also people who support capital punishment. And the vast majority of them are also remarkably uptight about human sexuality. Truth be told, if they didn’t believe that the need for most abortions was created by rampant sex, they would be much less concerned. The proof is in the fact that most abortion protestors also oppose teaching human sexuality in the schools. And you can bet dollars to diaphragms that they’re not going to discuss this kind of thing in their home.
The fact is that almost two-thirds of pregnancies in this country are unwanted and/or unplanned. More than 60% of American women are getting pregnant unintentionally. And ya gotta guess that most of them would have preferred not to have to make the choice about having a(nother) child. Although virtually every parent of an unplanned child would say they were glad to have it, most had to grow into the decision.
We need to inform every person who is approaching the age of procreative ability how the process works. It’s not fair to those who have been denied the information, who have heard from their parents that sex is bad, while the rest of the world is lascivious in trumpeting it. We are in such denial about sex that we hide it from the children, we think, and they wind up getting a partial albeit seductive picture from their friends and various "entertainment" sources.
This isn’t fair to the children. My father’s sex lecture to me consisted of, "I know you’re going to be screwing around literally as well as figuratively..." And that’s where I cut him off. There was such pain in his voice at having to discuss a subject that had likely never been discussed with him. My father, who built his life on giving advice to others — he was a Freudian psychoanalyst — was relieved that I told him that at age sixteen, and still mostly a virgin, I knew everything about sex.
It is a sin to fail to provide our children with information about their own bodies. Concomitantly we must inform them of the various pitfalls and pratfalls of sex, share the humor, and discuss the values of virtue. It is immoral in our advanced society that women should get pregnant when they aren’t trying to have a baby. Until the anti-choicers start supporting full disclosure about the very core of our being human, they forfeit their right to participate in the discussion.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.