How Choice Can Stop Abortions

For some time, scholars and partisans have been fighting over two ways to reduce the abortion rate. One side favors contraception; the other favors abstinence. Each side has its logic. If you adequately design and deploy technology to block conception, it’ll work. And if you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. But the devil is in the “ifs.” If you fall off the abstinence wagon, and if you don’t take your pill or properly use your condom, you’re not just screwed. You’re knocked up.

So the debate boils down to this: Which approach can overcome the weakness of human nature? Can the abstinence crowd find a way to keep people chaste? Can the contraception crowd find a way to make people stick to their birth control? Can either side deliver the bottom line: fewer abortions?

FK – ‘Christians’ cannot separate their ideology from their reality, at least not the ‘real’ christians, those who actually ‘live’ their faith, which most nowadays don’t. If the ‘rapture’ really happens so few will get beamed up they’ll probably just be added to the missing persons list and existence as we know it will continue on.

I prefer my version: Give every 14 year-old male a locker at the sperm bank then a free or reduced rate vasectomy. Every male who refuses and has more than one kid he refuses to provide for gets a forced vasectomy with no sperm bank locker.

Somehow this seems connected to this:

 Why do so many liberals despise Christianity?

Liberals should be pleased and express gratitude when people do good deeds, whether or not those deeds are motivated by faith. They should also be content to give voluntary associations (like religious colleges) wide latitude to orient themselves to visions of the human good rooted in traditions and experiences that transcend liberal modernity — provided they don’t clash in a fundamental way with liberal ideals and institutions.

In the end, what we’re seeing is an effort to greatly expand the list of beliefs, traditions, and ways of life that fundamentally clash with liberalism. That is an effort that no genuine liberal should want to succeed.

What happened to a liberalism of skepticism, modesty, humility, and openness to conflicting notions of the highest good? What happened to a liberalism of pluralism that recognizes that when people are allowed to search for truth in freedom, they are liable to seek and find it in a multitude of values, beliefs, and traditions? What happened to a liberalism that sees this diversity as one of the finest flowers of a free society rather than a threat to the liberal democratic order?

FK – The author of this last piece is of course, maybe intentionally, confusing the propaganda of communism with the reality of communism: The commies started calling themselves “Liberals” and ‘progressives’ to hide their evil and paint on a thick lacquer of do-goodedness that still deceives the young and simple-minded.

Even if the commies aren’t shooting their enemies into ditches or starving them out or sending them to gulags they’re still evil because their ultimate goal is complete and utter control of every aspect of existence in this world.