Some thoughts after federal judge blocks Alabama abortion law

A federal court in Alabama just issued an injunction against a controversial abortion law passed in Alabama which among other things bans all abortions in the state with the sole exception if a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother-to-be. Doctors who perform an abortion can be sentenced to up to 99 years in prison. Other states have passed similar laws that have also been blocked by the courts; it is difficult to say if the Republican lawmakers and governors who are promulgating such draconian laws are doing so merely to advance their “cred” with a certain element of the electorate, or actually believe that the five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court will actually have the political stupidity to approve any of them in their entirety. Overturning Roe v. Wade won’t stop abortions from occurring any more than they did before that decision, and in this day and age to do so will likely have the same partisan political effect as the infamous Dred Scot decision. 

For many people, acceptance of Roe v. Wade merely means that they have to eat whatever their moral and ethical feelings that may trouble them, and recognize that people make “mistakes” and should not have children they don’t want or properly raise. With some women it is difficult to ascertain just what is in their minds. Take for example actress Shirley MacLaine; I am a fan of her films, but in real life she is no “Sweet Charity” by the definition of either word.  It pains me to say that it is disappointing to discover that as a person she is a “new age” oddball and a bit of a jerk; in interviews she turns nasty when her alternate fact universe is the least bit threatened. I mean, a lot of celebrities are jerks both at work and play; but some people, like MacLaine, Madonna, Cher and Cardi B are like Donald Trump: they seem to think that “normalizing” their personal failings in public makes it all “OK.” MacLaine has one child, a daughter of a very “open” marriage. She once claimed that she shipped her daughter to live with her father (who apparently was a stand-in for some spirit being inhabiting his human form, or something) because she didn’t want her “creativity” as a woman interfered with by even the pretense of being a mother. Her daughter, Sachi Parker, wrote a Mommie Dearest-type tome describing her childhood which naturally upset her mother, but equally naturally the daughter backtracked and insisted it was not her “intent” to upset, but to “educate”; Parker continues to pine for affection, maybe because she expects a deathbed apology asking for “forgiveness” and be left a lot of money in MacLaine’s will. The question is why people like MacLaine have a child in first place; are they merely satisfied that a part of them will survive after their death? Is a child like a dog that they expect unconditional love from, but don’t believe they have to give of themselves as long as it is fed?

I’m sure that MacLaine’s daughter is happy to be alive and to be connected—however tenuously—to a famous “parent.” But MacLaine is one of those fortunate well-off few who can afford to have a child that they are free to mostly ignore. For some less well-off people, their children are a vindication of their own existence, and they actually derive some satisfaction in the raising of children (although that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good parents).  Yet it is these very people that Planned Parenthood largely targets in their advertisements, in the assumption that they have the same “values” as “career” women who see children as an impediment. Planned Parenthood’s patron saint and “bible”—Margaret Sanger and The Pivot of Civilization—has this to say about such women in reality:

The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective…Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

Sanger espoused the scientific racism and eugenics of the time to justify abortion; to her, non-white people and those of “inferior” European “ethnicities” qualified as “feeble-minded” and “mentally-defective.” In fact, this belief was the principle driver behind the 1924 immigration law. Sanger even went so far as to concoct a scheme to convince black preachers to help her convince their congregations of the “positive” benefits of placing a “limit” on the number of children a family should have; it isn’t just the cynically racist underpinning that is not difficult to detect, but the fact that Sanger and her abortion lobby was trying to take away the right of choice from women they considered “inferior.” We can see that in the attitude of many on the paranoid right (like Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro) who whine about Hispanic women having “too many” children as part of some sinister “plan” for the “great replacement.”

But as much as one can be cynical about the moral hypocrisy of the pro-abortion movement, there is no escaping the fact that women who don’t want children—whether for purely self-serving reasons or the fact they admit that they are do not have the motivation to properly raise a child—should not have children, and should not be forced to by the happenstance of unwanted pregnancy, and men don’t necessarily want to pay child support for children they were not expecting to have, either. People make “mistakes” all the time, and the question of “responsibility” doesn’t enter into it, because the lack thereof occurred on both ends—especially in relationships where there is no expectation of permanence or stability. While I think it is a long-shot that the U.S. Supreme Court will gamble on a politically-suicidal reversal of Roe v. Wade and permit state laws that ban all abortions save for the life of the woman exception, even most Republican lawmakers (especially those in “swing” states) know that it would be suicidal to allow such a ruling to hold for long without passage of some sort of federal law restoring abortion rights—which of course should have been done long ago so that people wouldn’t be arguing about it now. The right has had its fun using the issue to pretend to support “superior” moral values; we’ve seen enough evidence of their hypocrisy in their support of a president completely devoid of moral and ethical values; they needn’t pretend to have any now.