…or one of them, anyway: Lileks has something up on abortion today. He usually avoids this subject, so it’s interesting to see him addressing it:
It has to do with something I heard Kerry say on the radio last Friday, a snippet from a speech made a few months ago. He said something that seemed to conflate two different issues:
‘Abortion should be rare, but it should be safe and legal — and the government should stay out of the bedrooms of America,’ he said to cheers and applause.
Abortion takes place in the bedroom?
No; conception takes place in the bedroom. (Usually.)
In his original post, Bill wrote, “It’s not possible that the mind of a Lileks has not pondered the genesis of his beloved Gnat, that he has not asked, ‘When did she begin?’ — and less possible yet that he has not found an answer.” Looks like he was right on the money with that one.
Next maybe Lileks can ponder all the abortions that result from “contraceptive failure” rather than failure to use contraceptives.
I guess the “safe, legal, and rare” people would say that more abortions should be the result of the contraceptive failure rate than of negligence, or as they’d probably rather put it, lack of contraceptive education and easy access to contraceptives. Unfortunately I think he’s right that the “rare” line is part of the whole maddening “It’s a [potential] life but…” way of thinking. But sure, if I really thought it were just an unpleasant medical procedure, wouldn’t I want to encourage preventative medicine instead of surgery for so many people?
Thanks for the alert, Peony, but there is no evidence I was right on the money (about his finding an answer). He says “there are bright red lines. You see them too. We disagree about where they are,” which is another way of saying there aren’t any. Everyone’s got his own line, though Lileks never tells us where he draws his. I especially enjoyed his parallel between the two “extremes,” that life begins at conception or that infanticide is acceptable. For some reason I’m not flattered at finding my extreme parallel to the other. Further: “Ban the pill or legalize infanticide: where do you stand? It’s a moot point; it doesn’t come to that, it never does, it won’t.” Hogwash. It comes to that every damn day, every time a woman walks into one of those extermination chambers. He thinks laws against sodomy and contraception are “presposterous”, when it was the legalization of the latter that drove the last nail in the coffin of our deadened hearts, and whose relentless logic demanded the legalization of the former. His main purpose is to cleverly worry a phrase (“government should stay out of the bedroom”) – something I’ve already dealt with in “Sodomy Goes Straight” (and which is why you are so dear to me, being one of the few to have actually read it)- thinking this ought to apply only to consensual adult sexual activity, not to abortion, when in fact the acquisition of contraceptives also requires appeal to an outside party, usually the same doctor who would under different circumstances supply you with an abortion. And so I consider his treatment of it shallow and him still to be, on this issue at least, a coward. I am compelled to that judgement because I am an extremist.
I must have been carried away by my astonishment at his even addressing the issue. But I was thinking of his reference to little Gnat: Being the father of a premature baby colors my views. But on rereading, I’m seeing the rest of the sandwich: “Over the years I’ve come to err on the side of life… I am not an absolutist.” Err? Like there’s a doubt?
So Lileks does not yet see (or doesn’t want to see) the inevitable link between contraception and abortion (and legalized sodomy). But I do see him calling Kerry et al out on that silly “rare” doublespeak, pointing out that the pro-choice crowd’s real concern is for sexual license and not crisis pregnancies.
I wonder if he even knows any intelligent, serious Catholics who understand the evil of contraception, people who don’t roll their eyes at the words Humanae Vitae? People who would show him, by the wordless witness of their everyday lives, that people who would ban the Pill aren’t necessarily kooks?
Yeah, the “err” part got me too.