Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court opinion that finally freed women from responsible management of the life-creating capacity of their wombs, turned forty last week. The Pill, which had already pretty much obliterated the biological tie between sexual activity and procreation, was over a decade old by the time of Roe, so it’s always been kind of hard to see how Roe was necessary. If the only cost of sexual freedom young women faced was the simple expedient of taking a once-daily pill, did they really need a backup plan that allowed them to be so irresponsible with their wombs and sexuality that they needn’t even do any pre-foreplay planning?
Roe v. Wade supporters held a march on the steps of the Supreme Court building last week, holding signs and touting slogans like “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology” and “When you get pregnant, let us know, pro-life men have got to go”. How charming.
I don’t know when a collection of cells could be considered human or not. I do know that abortion, or infanticide, in an age when there exist multiple means of preventing pregnancy before the need arises, is a horrible abdication of the responsibility vested in women by dint of the procreative power of their wombs. It is the essence of brandishing power without responsibility, which is not all that surprising considering it is a trait exemplified by their Chief Executive, who assassinates American citizens without procedural recourse or any judicial or congressional oversight whatsoever. If that is not power without responsibility, it is hard to imagine what is.
I believe it is a sin to kill any living thing unnecessarily, and whatever it is that is aborted when a woman terminates her pregnancy, the thing being aborted is alive. To abort is to terminate development before its completion. That a human life happens to be the object of termination makes the abdication of responsibility it represents an abomination. (It is here that I should interject, except in the case of forcibly being made to bear the life, or if the life endangers the life of the mother). It is hard to imagine that “Abortion on Demand and without Apology” is a principle upon which a healthy society, or an individual life, might be viably founded.
But women in America could celebrate last week that they have had, for over forty years, the “right to choose” whether to terminate a pregnancy, not minding in the least that for some time longer than forty years they have had the right and means to choose not to get pregnant in the first place, and without impairing their freedom to be as cravenly sexual as they pleased.
Later in the week, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that women will now be afforded the opportunity to directly engage the enemy in combat. Now women not only have the power to kill the products of their unplanned sexual liaisons, they will also get the chance to kill people who they don’t know and had no part in creating. Make no mistake about the matter, as General Patton famously observed, the point of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his. American women seem quite the bloodthirsty bunch. And it sort of goes without saying, women in combat generally aren’t employing their wombs to provide troops for the future defense of the republic.
There was also a rally for gun control held on the Washington Mall last week. In overwhelming numbers, young urban women of reproductive age support measures to limit the amount and type of weaponry generally available to American citizens. The supporters of gun ownership rights are overwhelmingly male and mostly rural. Young urban women of reproductive age (the Sandy Hook killer’s mother notwithstanding, although she was likely past her reproductive years) generally don’t own guns (but apparently, those of them in the military believe guns and firepower are not inherently evil), and so would rather prefer others not be allowed to own them. It is well-settled biology that in sexually-reproducing species, the chromosomes designating a member of the species are in constant battle for supremacy. In humans, an expression of the genomic conflict is that girls would rather boys didn’t have individually owned guns, as guns might give boys an advantage over girls. Girls rather prefer that boys be individually banished from guns, preferring to seek the protection they might otherwise afford from the collective, i.e., the government, rather than individual ownership and control of guns. Which makes sense because females can exert control over the government through their superior numbers.
All three celebratory instances last week—abortion, women in combat and gun control—are just markers along the way of the gathering feminization of society. Men are rapidly becoming superfluous. Women only need the one man—Sugar Daddy Obama (or whomever occupies the Oval Office)—to protect their sexual freedoms; to allow them to rise through the ranks of the military due to their effectiveness at inflicting enemy casualties, or to make sure no gun-wielding guy is necessary to protect them from the mean streets of whatever urban utopia it is where they sit at their ergonomically sound chairs in air-conditioned offices climbing the corporate political ladder by the turn of their knee or the glint of their eye.
Women have been liberated. They no longer need men for anything (except for the big guy at the top, and a few other lower-level lieutenants in business and government). They can still leverage their sexuality for social gain, as rutting men have always been suckers for alluring, nubile females, but without the consequences that might have accrued in an earlier age. The society is not better for it. In the US, and across the developed world, the fertility rate is crashing. Even in the US, whose population is relatively young and comprised of a great many immigrants who have yet to adopt the native idea of womanhood, the fertility rate has sunk below 2.1—the level required to replace the population. The numbers are far worse elsewhere—Japan is below 1.5. Japan will soon enough cease to exist if its women don’t start having more babies.
So maybe women should hold off on celebrating their social victories. Many more like them, and there won’t be much of a society from which social victories might be gained.