I'LL LEAVE THE MORALITY OF IT UP TO YOU

Friday, 8:45 AM.  –12 degrees F, wind WSW, calm at present.  The barometr has risen to 30.30 in. and the humidity fallen to 73%.  A brave and determined sun rose valiantly into the frigid morning, dissipating any remaining fog and haze.  It is a bright, cheerful  day, cold and beautiful.  I put Lucky’s old coat on Buddy this morning and he ran about, mostly on three legs, but determined to sniff out the secret hidden in every  track in the fresh white snow.
    Yesterday I received in the mail a clipping from, it appears, a St. Paul newspaper, (the paper name and date were missing) entitled “Single parents: An antiabortion legacy.” Handwritten notations by the person who sent the article to me included her accounts of working in a St. Paul hospital before Roe v Wade and seeing the havoc wrought on women by self-induced abortions, and concluded with, “We don’t need to return to such a status for women.”  The writer did not sign her name and there was no return address on the envelope.  I would have, of course, welcomed a comment right on my blog.
    As regards the article itself, it was, I thought despite the title, an apologia for the concept of abortion as a legitimate means of stabilizing the family and limiting the number of unwanted children in society. It was written by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, who are co-authors of “Red Families v. Blue Families and Family Classes,” soon to be published by the Oxford University Press.  If you are interested in their point of view please check out the article and the book.
    I (as well as Joan) grew up in the days before Roe v Wade and there were in our middle to lower-middle class lives abortions as well as children born out of wedlock and girls going away to have a child and giving it up for adoption.  In our own home town there was even a case of murder involving an unwanted pregnancy and a teenage love triangle. 
Abortion is a complicated issue and deserves to be treated as such.  It is also tragic, and takes the life of an unborn human being to satisfy the wants and needs of people who are in almost all cases adults older than the age of reason and should have a concept of right and wrong, as well as some common sense. 
People often act as though they are completely clueless as to what causes pregnancy.  With all the explicit sex education in the public schools today (to say nothing of free condoms) I can’t accept ignorance of the facts of life as an excuse for pregnancy and a consequent abortion. And I can assure anyone who is not familiar with teenagers that, then as well as now,  they are keenly interested in the subject and really don’t need additional excuses and titillating instructions.  What they need to be taught is that life is a serious matter, and that the actions people take in life have consequences.
As far as my own opinion is concerned, it is simply that abortion takes a human life, and at this point in history that life can be taken without any legal recourse what- so-ever.  Abortion is the root cause of many human demographic problems, such as suppressed economic growth and the need for immigration in advanced economies, and where abortions terminate mostly female babies, such as is the case in China and India, it results in an unnatural imbalance between males and females in the adult population. It amazes me that women who are adamant about the unrestricted right of women to have an abortion don’t seem to realize that worldwide, abortion kills mostly females.   
Lastly, abortion is a stupid and mostly unnecessary method of birth control, which I do not  believe the federal government should be involved in, or that I should have to pay for. 
I’ll leave the morality of it all up to you.