Abortion, the “Me” Generation, and the Left

The self-centered depravity that is all too common among the members of the “Me” generation (a.k.a. Baby Boomers) — and among leftists — is perhaps most clearly seen through the lens of abortion.

I’ll begin by dispensing with slogans: Pro-life means anti-abortion; pro-choice means pro-abortion. Person who claim to be pro-choice will dispute my assertion that pro-choice means pro-abortion. They will say that they simply want women to have the choice between aborting and not aborting a fetus, which is a child in the making.

But pro-choicers want that choice because they believe that abortion is (a) moral and (b) should be at the discretion of the person who is carrying the child. Many pro-choicers probably would skip over (a), but that is the import of (b). That is to say, they oppose the propositions that abortion is (a) immoral (i.e., murder) and (b) should not therefore be at the sole discretion of the person who is carrying the child.

There are rare cases where the mother’s life or health is at grave risk if a fetus isn’t aborted. In those rare cases, it would be immoral to sacrifice life of a mother who may already have children to care for, whose death might cause the death of the fetus, and whose incapacity would probably mean a life of misery. In any event, these rare cases shouldn’t be invoked in defense of abortion as a procedure that any woman may elect for any reason.

There is a phony pro-abortion argument that a fetus (the pro-abortion camp’s preferred word) is fair game (so to speak) until it is viable. That is, until it could survive (as a newborn child) outside the mother’s womb. But that is a circular argument because a fetus that is aborted before it could have survived outside the mother’s womb would have attained viability had it not been aborted. The viability argument comes down to this: It is all right to kill a fetus before it becomes viable, so that it cannot become viable.

Even more specious is the belief, prevalent among some of the pro-abortion crowd, that late-term abortion is acceptable because the child hasn’t yet been born. Gone is any pretense that viability matters. Now it’s simply a question of whether the child has made its way entirely through the birth canal. But because it hasn’t yet done so (and in some cases, even if it has), the fetus can be killed. Why? Because of a fine line (sometimes ignored) between almost-born and born.

What about the child who comes into the world by caesarean section, sometimes prematurely? And what about premature babies who survive, as they more commonly do nowadays? Such babies are a living rebuke to the savage practice of late-term abortion, which can only be called murder.

Is abortion a woman’s inalienable right because the baby in her womb is really part of her and completely dependent on her? The fetus is a separate human being, no matter how dependent on its mother. Further, dependency doesn’t end with birth. In fact, these days it often continues until a child is a twenty-something. There are some advocates of post-natal infanticide, but only enthusiasts of euthanasia would extend abortion murder beyond that stage.

There are other arguments for abortion (see the posts here). But I have yet to encounter a valid one, except the necessity to save the life or health of a mother. Support for legalized abortion is of a piece with the “youth movement” that began in the 1960s, and which should have taken “It’s all about me” as its motto.

As Daniel J. Flynn points out in a piece at The American Spectator:

Students did not end the Vietnam War. They ended the draft. And once the draft ended, their protests, at least on a mass scale, ended, too.

Wikipedia, not normally my go-to source for history, lists more than 100 major events on its page documenting protests against the Vietnam War. The very last one occurred one week before Richard Nixon ended the draft. Small, scattered protests, of the like that do not appear Wikipedia’s radar—one in Central Park in 1975 involving Joan Baez and others comes to mind—continued. But even as the killing continued the big protests did not because the draft did not.

And it is true that U.S. combat operations continued after the end of the draft. So I must agree with Flynn’s astute observation.

What does it have to do with abortion? It’s mostly about the “Me” generation — the Boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Look at this:

The graph comes from this source, which addresses some of the causes of the decline in the abortion rate since 1980. There are others, such as easier access to contraceptives and the growing awareness (and fear of) HIV/AIDS.

But the most obvious cause of the decline is the aging of Boomers. A large fraction of the women who were born during the peak baby-boom years (1946-1960)  would have been “past it” by the mid-1990s*. And that’s when the abortion rate ended a period of relatively steep decline (see above graph). The abortion rate continued to decline at more gradual rate through the early 2000s, when it leveled off, then began to decline at a faster rate after 2008. (The most likely cause of the steeper decline since 2008 is the enactment by several States of stricter controls on abortion.)

This isn’t to absolve later generations of their sins. Most college graduates and college-goers** of the X, Millennial, and Z generations have drunk the kool-aid of political correctness and “liberal” fascism. But the Boomers were and are especially dangerous because so many of them became prominent in politics, the law, and the internet-media-academic complex.

The Boomers (or too many of them) epitomize the left’s arrested state of adolescent rebellion: “Daddy” doesn’t want me to smoke, so I’m going to smoke; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to drink, so I’m going to drink; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to have sex, so I’m going to have sex. But, regardless of my behavior, I expect “Daddy” to give me an allowance, and birthday presents, and cell phones, and so on.

“Daddy,” in the case of abortion, is government, which had banned abortion in many places. If it’s banned, the left wants it. But the left — like an adolescent — also expects government to cough up money (others’ money, of course) to quench its material desires.

Persons of the left simply are simply unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want, regardless of the consequences for others. The left’s stance on abortion should be viewed as just one more adolescent tantrum in a vast repertoire of tantrums.
__________
* The late Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) epitomized the Boomers. She was born in 1947 and began her eventually successful suit to legalize abortion when she was 21. McCorvey’s later conversion to Catholicism and anti-abortion activism do great credit to her memory.

** College-goers, as distinct from students who are striving to acquire knowledge rather than left-wing propaganda and to exercise their critical faculties instead of parroting left-wing slogans.

Related: See my page about leftism and posts tagged abortion.