The moral logic as it exists today, it seems to me, is an artifact of a period before birth control, before legal protection for many women’s rights, and before the viability of women raising children on their own.
It seems a certainty that the overwhelming majority of the some 90,000 black babies–I just happen to know this statistic–aborted every year were not the result of rape or incest. They were not the result of an abusive, controlling husband who insisted she had to get pregnant. It seems likely most of them are the result of the heat of passion, and an indifference to pregnancy, which is to say an indifference to the life of a prospective child, combined with easy and cheap access to abortion.
We have been conditioned not to view fetuses as human, but at what cost? We had a miscarriage with my wife’s first pregnancy, and she was an emotional wreck. She cried all day after she went in for a D and C, as they call it. I myself dreamed I met that child once: it was another girl, and she was quite wonderful.
All of the beautiful things in life come from sensitivity, from caring, from connection, from openness and receptivity. All of the bad things, from closing down, shutting down, detaching, disengaging.
Is it not worth asking an open question as to whether or not babies are such a wonderful possibility that MAYBE, just maybe, their lives should be treated with some measure of kindness and respect? Maybe not by force of law. Maybe not by banning abortion. But by pointing out that a great evil is being committed, and no one wants to admit it or even talk about it outside of the people who have been in shock since 1973.
Is that insanity to suggest that, that maybe we have been coarsened by all this, rendered less feeling, less open, less beautiful? Or is it insanity pretending that treating them like meat is perfectly acceptable? Why NOT eat them? It is the next logical step, considering that they are not human and that we are supposed to treat all our impulses towards compassion and protection as inherently ideologically flawed.