Lots of talk on the ‘right’ to have sex. To that end, I do not disagree.
But with rights come responsibilities. No one is telling a woman she can’t have sex - that is a ludicrous straw man. So why does a man that decides to have sex not entitled to get off the hook from taking care of a child that his partner refused to abort, even though he wanted her to?
Here we stand at the point ushered in by the 1960’s - the attempts to create a consequence-free environment of hedonism. And it doesn’t extend just to sex.
Want to be a glutton, eat as much garbage as you can force down your face, and get fat and destroy your health? No problem - you should be entitled to have society bail you out of your personal choices with risk underwriting and cost absorption.
Want to spend all your money, max out your credit cards enjoying cosmic levels of consumer enjoyment, only to break your household finances? No problem - you should be entitled to have society bail you out of these bad choices with easy bankruptcy.
Want to have all the sex you want, with whomever you want, and ultimately get pregnant? No problem - you are entitled to enjoy yourself, and it is up to society to allow you to erase your mistakes with abortion.
And the last thing we would want is to rain down scorn upon these choices and possibly hurt someone’s feelings in the post-60s environment of pervasive non-judgmentalism.
We’ve replaced self-reliance, self-discipline, and self-mastery with self-expression, self-indulgence, and self-destruction. Our grandparents fought in World Wars and toughed out the Great Depression. We march around, well-fed and interested only in instant self-gratification, demanding ever more entitlement and freedom from responsibility. We want abortion availability, diet pills, stomach stapling, handouts, and free ‘everything’. What a bunch of sissies we have become in the name of ‘fulfilling our desires’.
Plenty of talk about ‘rights’ these days - but I am more interested in the talk about responsibility.
The mantra is this: “If it feels good, I want to do it, but if the results blow up in my face, I want everyone else to bail me out”. I can’t get on board with that. Ever.
Further, abortion has nothing - repeat, nothing - to do with women’s rights. It has everything to do with the very complicated question of when to start extending human rights to the child in the womb. I don’t think that is an easy question, and I think reasonable people can disagree as to the answer. But, that is the only question - and ‘women’s rights’ are smokescreen and completely irrelevant.
As Justice Holmes remarked:
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
Likewise, the right for a woman to have whatever sex she wants gets compromised the moment another life gets entered into the mix. You can’t do anything you want when another being’s interests and rights are suddenly on the table.
Abortion is a complicated issue, but cannot be decided through a prism of ‘abortion is part of my right to have fun’.
