Someone whose cultural cachet doesn’t depend on being a young feminist and provocateur would have turned this into a more thoughtful bit of commentary. She’s a loud and proud abortion warrior, she says, but she’s uncomfortable (or used to be uncomfortable) with people thinking that she might have had an abortion herself. How come? Had she unconsciously adopted an unjust social stigma against abortion, as she assumes, or was she experiencing a moral intuition about abortion writ large at the thought of killing her own child? If we’re going with the stigma theory, are there any stigmas within her own in-groups that might encourage a woman to champion abortion even if she’s reluctant to do so? If so, how does that square with “choice” as the supreme virtue? Lots of fodder here for a challenging meditation on this subject. Instead she reacted in the most grotesque (yet provocative, of course) way: She wishes she had killed a baby of her own so that she wouldn’t feel the tug of that damnable stigma. It’s a perfect expression of pro-choice politics, treating a defenseless life as an instrument to express the depth of your allegiance to the tribe.This is one of those cases in which conservatives understand the liberal position, but not vice-versa. We've all be challenged to consider whether what we take to be a moral intuition is merely a social convention (or "stigma," as Allah puts it). Isn't it possible we're being irrational? If we've been to college, we've probably had formal philosophical defenses of abortion put in front of us to consider at length. What makes a human being? What makes a person? Is it the ability to experience pain and pleasure? Is it a capacity for reason? Why consider this 'lump of cells' as worthy of rights?
The alternative meditation is not suggested. What if it is a deep moral intuition, this uneasiness with killing an innocent human life? Does that mean anything? Should it?
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More than that, for women at least: what if the deep moral intuition is not only uneasiness at taking an innocent human life, but uneasiness at killing your own child sleeping within your body?
Years ago—back when this sort of thing could still be said in small lefty journals—I read a piece in a small lefty journal, a meditation on abortion by a woman who'd had one, and said something that stuck with me: "I had brought death into the house of life."
Warriors need the War Dance and some even use drugs to drop into the berserk state of mind, in order to make it easier to form the intent to kill on physical and melee contact. The Japanese have done great 'Works' of this nature, to include ritual self disemboweling, which even the European medievals would have loved to get for the Pope and the Dominican torturers.
Abortion needs a similar moral and intellectual justification, for what they are doing may be indirectly farmed out to doctors, but the contact is far far closer.
The Left's age old creed to justify their war was "women barefoot and pregnant". Now women are working till old age, alone, until the corporation sucks out all the value and the government sucks out all the taxes. But that's not so catchy a phrase. A suit and life time employment.
Shadowrun, however, has an interesting term for it. Wage Slave. The Japanese do as well.
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