On a blog owned by the New York Times recently, they hosted a discussion about a woman contemplating an abortion. Many have felt the need to offer advice to the woman. Many have felt the need to comment upon it. Rather than abortion being a regrettable expedient that is tolerated so we don’t as a community have to address the consequences of the sexual revolution, abortion is treated as if it were the evaluation of competing moral claims. Once more we as a society have moved from tolerance to embracing.
People are prone to laugh at it now, but a couple of years ago a couple television syndicates wouldn’t run a condom ad, because the condom ad implied or stated that its use should be for situations outside marriage. The most common argument was that condom ads should be run for AIDS and STD prevention. Of course, the fact that we as a society had been openly advocating condom use through the schools for disease prevention for two decades (roughly coinciding with the AIDS epidemic) didn’t help the argument that TV needed to avoid advocating the use of condoms except within marriage so as not to offend the sensibilities of viewers. The message attached was that if we didn’t offer general education people wouldn’t know. Of course, STDs and AIDS were never a general threat. Chlamydia is the most widespread STD in this county, adding 1 to 3 million people annually to its roles. (Those annoying commercials showing mothers saying they want to save their daughters from getting cervical cancer is actually advertising a vaccine to this virus.) The thing is that STDs are not a generalized risk. The easiest factor for predicting STD incidence is number of lifetime partners. Not even regularity of condom use is as predictive. And the truth is that people most at risk AIDS and other lethal STDs weren’t all that ignorant of it. Prostitutes for example have campaigns targeted to them. Gay clubs had information targeted to them. Youth establishments had campaigns targeted to them.
This sensibility of what is normal is so fleeting. If a guy wrote a blog post wondering whether he should give his mistress an extra $5000 so she would go through with an abortion, keeping the knowledge of his infidelity from his wife, people wouldn’t searching for empathy. They would be attempting to quell their outrage. A woman however debates ending her baby’s life so she can pursue a degree and a career, and we are supposed to extend our comfort. We are now expected to entertain this as reasonable public debate. Yesterday, I didn’t really care what this woman did. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t know what she was contemplating. I was blissful in my ignorance. Now she has the gall to ask society and by extension me to enter into her mellow drama because she knocked herself up with a guy she had no intention of ever marrying. When you commit stupid behaviors, there is little wonder that future alternatives aren’t always which bouquet of flowers do I choose? Welcome to adulthood. Don’t act like some ignorant child that doesn’t know the consequences of his/her actions. Sure, it is likely you are going to abort the child, continuuing your pattern of narcissistic, self-indulgent behavior. Rather than holding your hand wringing up as an example of virtuous contemplation, people should really re-evaluate what childishness they are willing to tolerate from someone they don’t know, haven’t known, and have no interest in knowing.
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