Opinions

Laura Kelsey

drsexysex @ yahoo.ca

 

 

 

War of Words

This Week's Topic- Abortion

A new feature in The Other Press, “War of Words” will seek to provide
readers with passionate arguments from both sides of some of the most
controversial issues of the day. This week, as Canada commemorates
20 years since the Supreme Court’s historic R v. Morgentaler decision
that legalized abortion, our writers debate whether or not the court did

 

 

the right thing.

Choice is freedom

Pro

By Laura Kelsey

J ennifer was 13 years old when she
was raped and beaten—by her uncle. She
was so ashamed of what had happened
she couldn’t tell anyone. She hid from
the world, crying and screaming into her
pillow to hide her despair.

It was six weeks later when
Jennifer found out, in the seclusion of
her bathroom, that she was pregnant
with her uncle’s baby; not only that, but
Jennifer was only a baby herself: How
could she raise a new life?

Sex is the simultaneous bane
and blessing of human existence; it
brings pleasure, and ultimate pain.
Although children aren’t always planned
and many people are conceived by lust

alone, fear and harm should never be a
part of reproduction.

Women Against Violence
Against Women (WAVAW) reports one
in four Canadian women will be sexually
assaulted in their lifetime, which is a lot
of possibility for forced conception.

There are limits in Canada as
to how far-along a fetus can be before
an abortion can no longer be performed;
abortions after 12 weeks are generally
frowned upon, although some states in
the U.S. allow them later in pregnancy.
Abortions for medical reasons are a
unclear: How old and what illness are
the subject of harsh debate between
pro-life and pro-choice advocates, and
medical professionals. When does life

really begin: Conception or birth? All
heavy issues, but not the real concern.

If a woman aborts because of
rape, health, or accidental pregnancy,
it shouldn’t matter. Society risk their
basic freedoms when people allow
governments to have a say over their
own bodies—that’s something even a
conservative could agree with.

Conservative values are
based on freedom. The 2004 U.S.
Republican Party Platform even states
the following:

“We choose strength.

We choose results.

We choose optimism.

We choose opportunity.

 

We choose freedom.”

Isn’t an individual’s body his or
her ultimate personal sanctuary, therefore
granting the freedom to make the choices
necessary to ensure its best interests? If a
child is born into a world with restricted
rights then it is not really living.

Letting heads of state decide
whether or not 13-year-old Jennifer
has to keep her incest baby—causing a
lifetime of torment for her as a mother
and a questionable future for her child—
is unimaginable. Asking government for
the consent to prevent a child a woman
cannot look after from spending his or
her life in foster care, or to stop the birth

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Abortions the byproduct of a failing society

Against

By J.J. McCullough

Tego are lots of different ways to
confront a contentious political issue,
but in most circumstances the emotional
approach is usually the wrong one. When
one attempts to win an argument simply
being more weepy, aghast, or enraged
than your opponent, it’s very easy to
assume that you don’t have a whole lot
of rational logic to back up your side.

The problem with the pro-
life movement, in general, is that its
proponents have tended to rely far too
much on emotion to make their case.
Indeed, when a person not particularly
invested in the abortion debate is asked
to mentally conjure up an image of the
typical pro-lifer, he’ll probably envision
some sort of ridiculous placard-waving
Christian zealot, trying vainly to win
supporters by brandishing bible verses
and photos of mangled fetuses. I’ve never

met a person in my life who is won over
by such tactics, which makes one wonder
why they are so popular. I mean, it’s not
as if the case against abortion is that
terribly difficult to make in the first place.

Of “1 cotrse! ase far. as
emotionalism goes, the pro-choice set
is hardly much better. Indeed, over the
last few decades, abortionists have been
remarkably effective at shutting down
debate of the issue by continuously
evoking the twin evils of rape and
incest at every opportunity, using the
powerful emotional appeal of these
crimes to portray abortion as some sort
of mild prescription used solely for the
most horrendous forms of misogyny.
It’s an effective tactic nonetheless,
because it so deftly hides reality. As
Pro-choicers know all too well, it’s only
in a small minority of circumstances
that abortion is used in the aftermath

of some form of sexual assault. The
vast—and _ ever-increasing — majority
of abortions are performed for reasons
of personal convenience. Women, in
short, get knocked up and cannot be
bothered to deal with the consequences.

This is the main reason I have
always opposed abortion. Not because
it’s vicious infanticide— which it is— but
because it represents the most gruesome
and gory manifestation of our society’s
collective abandonment of the doctrine
of personal responsibility. The abortion
movement’s greatest success has been
convincing young women that their
immediate sexual desires take precedence
over everything else, even the creation
of another human being. In eroding the
abortion taboo they have thus helped
turn sex into an even more actively
commodified and meaningless event
than it already was, and living, writhing

human fetuses into ugly inconveniencies
to be promptly discarded, all in the name
of a quick fix to a regrettable roll in the
hay.

The belief that one’s own
procreative offspring carries no more
inherent worth than a boil or scab is the
byproduct of a very specific kind of social
value system, one that enshrines the
value of selfishness above all else, and
holds that no mistake cannot be undone.
The fact that our political parties now
encourage women to think of an abortion
as something that is somehow owed to
them— a fundamental “right,” in fact—
marks a complete capitulation to the idea
that the state exists primarily to provide
loser citizens from the consequences of
their own incompetence. It’s the same
line of thinking from a society that now

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