The New Line of Choice: "Saying it's wrong makes it right."

"The last temptation is the greatest treason.
To do the right thing, for the wrong reason."
--Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

The execrable Salon outs the pro-choice movement's latest gambit to make aborton eternal, the "Admit it is wrong but do it anyway" defense.

Rebecca Traister, writing just about as badly as she can states it as:Salon.com Life | Morality play

After years of intermittent jostling from the inside, a December essay by Catholics for a Free Choice president Frances Kissling on the value of the fetus seems to have cracked the hard ideological shell of the pro-choice community, exposing its messy theological, moral and emotional innards. The resulting scramble may not be the end of a movement, but rather a chance at rebirth before what could be the fight of its life.

We'll leave the immediate firing of the editor that allowed "jostling from the inside," "cracked the... shell," "messy... innards," "chance at rebirth," and "fight of its life" to the last remaining sane individual at Salon with any power over the amateurs it pays to scribble a scramble like that. Suffice it to say that, after you sit through an ad displaying a dewy rose, the rest of the article is even less pretty.

What you have is the picture of a "movement" constructed around something that no longer lends itself to what is thought of as a 'movement to improve the world,' but as something that is seen, ever more clearly, as a movement that cheapens the world in moral terms and even, taken to extremes, threatens the survival of nations, as Europe is beginning to learn to its regret.

Like other once clear causes now sunk in what Austin Bey has termed 'bitter decadence,' the Choiceites now inhabit a dark and fitful realm where the fragments of their movement alarm more than edify.

Exhibit A: "Now many in the pro-choice community are looking to reclaim that language, to warm up what has come to be regarded as an absolutist, clinical, chilly movement with language that is emotional, conciliatory, moralistic and even religious. In short, what the wildly different pro-choice projects launched in recent months have in common is a risky mission to put the heart back into the fight for abortion rights."

How one "warms up" this position to a more humane and morally attractive one is beyond me. Dropping in mystical and "religious" tones doesn't see like it will fly. People, in general, just aren't that stupid.

It is much more likely they will see in the movement the kind of mind-set that creates:

Exhibit B: "Some have been trying to preach a new gospel of abortion pride: Planned Parenthood sold T-shirts that proclaimed "I had an abortion"; one activist started a Web site called I'm Not Sorry."

I'm thinking "spots" and "leopards" here.

The core of the article notes: "In December, Frances Kissling, a beloved figure in the women's movement whose 30 years as a pro-choice advocate and Catholic leader lends her both moral and ideological credibility, swung back with an essay titled "Is There Life After Roe? How to Think About the Fetus." In it, she made the radical argument that the pro-choice movement must acknowledge the moral value of a fetus -- and the potentially painful reality of its loss -- in order to strengthen its claim that a woman's right to choose is ultimately worth more."

To which the predictable response was:

Exhibit C: "It's not the kind of thing that translates smoothly to the political stage, especially in a glib, "Need some wood?" political era. If ethicists and theologians find it challenging to absorb a philosophy in which we accept a fetus's value as well as the value of a woman's choice to abort it, how can we reasonably expect an electorate intolerant of dependent clauses to take the time to hash it out? "

This is the writer of the article taking refuge inside the failed "Americans are stupid" argument of last November. That Americans might, just might, be able to deduce the essence of this argument is evidently not something the writer or the presumed readers of Salon can comprehend. A stupid position, but popular enough these days.

Still it prepares the ground for the "reporter's" own message:

Exhibit D: "It's a reasonable desire to expand the discussion to recognize loss and conflict, but it should also be remembered that abortion is not always tragic or even complicated. Many women terminate pregnancies with joy and relief. Abortions, in addition to easing medical or economic problems, can mark the cessation of emotional and spiritual turmoil -- just as easily as they can provoke it. Many women feel no guilt at all."

Which leads us back to the "majority VS minority" argument with no reference to morality whatsoever. It is then just a matter of determining who is the majority and going with them. Now, I might agree with the proposition that "many" women feel no guilt if I knew some facts about that. I might even go with feeling "relief" if I had some facts about that subjective feeling as well. But it will be a long hard sell to get me to line up with the concept of many feeling "joy" after an abortion. That just doesn't square with my life experience and the experience of others as told to me. But then who said this author was capable of studied reflection?

Finally, as if to underline the subtext of the entire discussion as "the more pro-choice changes the more it will remain the same," one of the author's quote machines is:

Exhibit E: "Amy Richards, co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, an organization of younger feminist activists, wrote in an e-mail, "Sadly ... the reaction to Clinton's remarks and Kissling's proposal seems to be resistance to understanding the current state of things, which is an evolution of abortion rights, not backpedaling." "

Ms. Richards is, you might recall, the woman who made herself infamous last year by revealing in the New York Times that she terminated 2 of her three triplets so that they would not become inconvenient for her New York "lifestyle."

All in all, it is good to remember as Senator Clinton and others try to paint their Pro-Choice propaganda with warm earth tones, members like Amy Richards aren't going anywhere. Then again, with the Amy Richards method, of eliminating 2 out of three babies, they aren't exactly growing in numbers either.

Changes down at the foundations of nations are, in essence, generational. To make them and hold onto them you actually have to have generations.

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Posted by Vanderleun at February 11, 2005 9:34 AM | TrackBack
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