IS ABORTION PRO-WOMAN ? :

Several people whose opinions I generally respect seem to have been seduced by one line in the story below about Christian conservatives making common cause with representatives of Islamic countries on moral issues that come before international fora :

"This alliance shows the depths of perversity of the [U.S.] position," said Adrienne Germaine, president of the International Women's Health Coalition. "On the one hand we're presumably blaming these countries for unspeakable acts of terrorism, and at the same time we are allying ourselves with them in the oppression of women."

The particular issue here, as seemingly always, is abortion, which makes Ms Germaine's analogy especially appalling. I'd never seek to minimize the events of 9-11 but the killing of roughly 3,000 Americans on that day is spoken of endlessly. The unspeakable acts that occurred on that day were the roughly 3,800 abortion that took place as they do every day, totalling some 30 million since Roe v. Wade was decided. Even after eight years of Bill Clinton making abortion "legal, safe, and rare" there are over one million performed in the United States every year. Of course, we don't see film of these acts, the way we do of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, so we are able to maintain a substantial emotional distance from what is the equivalent of a daily 9-11.

This is not to say that all abortion is immoral or that it should be illegal in all cases. There's really no point in making the moral argument anymore. But there's a major geopolitical argument against our current abortion regime, one which directly implicates women and their righhs and which, paradoxically, finds "Women's Groups" essentially opposing women. This argument is that abortion is having a disproportionate impact on female fetuses because of the use of abortion for gender selection purposes. We are, in effect, using abortion to create a world in which women will be an ever decreasing minority. This must eventually result in a corresponding decline in their political power.

So as for Ms Germaine's analogy, of Christain and Islamic conservatives to the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks, I believe it's unfair and inappropriate. A comparison to the Taliban, which was trying to impose a religious moral code would be closer to the truth, though maybe still a bit hyperbolic. If we seek to compare al Qaeda to one side in the abortion debate, it seems more accurate, though needlessly provocative, to choose the side that supports killing. And if we're going to discuss abortion in the context of the oppression of women, it seems only fair to judge more harshly the side that is actually specifically targeting females for death and thereby making their future oppression a near certainty.

I don't particularly mind being called Talibanish, so long as the caller recognizes their own kinship to Osama bin Laden.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2002 12:55 PM