There’s no just way to relieve a woman of her right to choose abortion at any time and for any reason she wishes. Only persons have rights, and other species, embryos or the brain-dead aren’t persons. Personhood is manifest only when the individual is conscious of him- or herself as just that─ unique and finite in the natural world. If an adult doesn’t have unconditional rights to her own body, she then becomes property, an evil not tolerated since Appomattox. However abortion is usually an elective procedure (the rape and incest exceptions, though heart rending, are medically specious). Whether a tax payer is prochoice or prolife has nothing to do with it. In the U.S. rights are guaranteed by laws, passed by Congress and enforced by the president, who took an oath to do so without prejudice. For now at least, the Supreme Court has yet to find a way to repeal the right to abortion despite a prolife majority. But one citizen’s rights can’t be paid for with those of another. Medicaid paying for Botox treatments would be risible, and there’s no meaningful difference with abortion. All dollars are the same in a free America. A “morning after” pill that is cheap, safe and effective is certainly within the realm of medical probability. Only an aberrant culture impedes it.
Monday, March 15, 2010
War on Terror
The true blame for the 11 September 2001 attack doesn’t lie with Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda or Wahhabis. While their villainy is beyond dispute, the fault lies far closer. If you drive around town in a shiny new sports car every day, and park in a garage you leave open every night, it’s not really the thief’s fault when it isn’t there one morning. The one thing the feddle gummint is supposed to do, prevent attack, came up short. But none of that was on America’s mind in the hours and days that followed. All we saw was brown people waving the Qur’an.
Now we’re back where we started before the Berlin Wall fell. Nation building; democratization; killing poor people for their own good; declaring war on fuzzy ideas in the name of the Great White Father. Plus ça change. Saddam is out of Baghdad, the Taliban are out of Kabul, and tough guy Uncle Sam has slaughtered üntermenschen by the freight load. Whatever point the GWOT was trying to make, we get it.
