Social Dysfunction

Last updated on: April 14, 2009 at 11:14 am by M.Z.

Social Dysfunction 2009-04-14T11:14:50-05:00 M.Z.

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One hesitates to write this post. I could generalize it so as not to refer to anyone specifically and thus be accused of erecting a straw-man. Lord knows I’ll be accused of persisting in animosity that never existed in the first place. If we are to change the culture however, we must address the real problems and people’s willful blindness to them. And before I get much further, let me offer a sympathetic voice by saying that the worst thing about having children is they remind you of every fault you have and yet still manage to find ways of having their own faults. One doesn’t comment on the raising of the next generation because the task is easy and readily accessible. One comments because the costs of failure are so terrible.

For those unaware, the daughter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has given birth to her child. The engagement with the child’s father is broken, and the couple is having a public airing of dirty laundry. All of this is rather sad. Speaking for myself, I had hopes that the child of this union would be able to grow up never having known that he was anything but the culmination of the love of two people brought together to pass on their faith, history, and ideals to the next generation. Of course, rationally I shouldn’t have held such expectations. An engagement without a date is not an engagement but a promise. When obligations are manifest and people sue for more time, they are making clear their hesitancy at assuming said obligations. Still, the quaint saying, “All babies are born after nine months except for the first,” has a history, and its veracity has held over time.

At base in this is that we as a society have lost the concept of what good actually is. During the campaign, those that demurred from proclaiming the pregnancy was good were castigated. Out of wedlock teen pregnancy was better than teen abortion, so out of wedlock teen pregnancy became good. The more gregarious wondered why liberals all the sudden started caring about family values. I guess it is a dirty secret that most any liberal or progressive book on community calls abortion – yes abortion – a social harm even as the author typically falls all over themselves claiming that they aren’t proposing and don’t believe there should be legal restrictions on abortion. (A conservative parallel would be Rod Dreher’s book Crunchy Cons that lamented the industrial food complex but vociferously denied that State intervention would be desirable.) Liberals, at least of the communitarian-side of the equation, recognize that removing the bonds of family and the bonds of community empowers the State, because the needs of the individual, being a communal creature, extend beyond the self and those needs are going to be filled by the State, often poorly and in a grossly inefficient manner, if there is no family or community to fill them. (Yes, I know it sounds pretty conservative to me too, but I’m not in the Vox Nova taxonomy department.)

The common objection to calling evil by its name is that a worse evil will follow. In this case, if we claim that having children with people we have no intention of raising those children with is bad, then abortion will increase. This argument rests on the premise that if we discourage having children out-of-wedlock, more people in that circumstance will choose abortion. As stated the proposition is reasonable enough and appears intuitively sound. Our analysis shouldn’t end there though. We next need to evaluate the null case. Is it true that if we encourage and are supportive of mothers with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the number of women that choose not to have an abortion will be higher. Again, this proposition seems sound. The problem arises when we ask if our question affects the premise. Specifically, will the social attitude toward out-of-wedlock birth affect the number of women having out of wedlock births? Intuitively we know the answer is yes, but we are tempted to argue that stigma can’t make a woman unpregnant. If however we are to concede the power of stigma, could we not stigmatize abortion?

The surprising answer is that there is quite an aversion to stigmatizing abortion. The logic of the Menendez Brothers’ jury holds forth in declaring the mothers committing abortion are victims. While lamented as being a dirty trick, the Newsweek columnist that asked how long we pro-lifers would propose jailing mothers for having an abortion did point out a basic incoherence of the movement. At present, it is in vogue to celebrate mothers that have had abortions and even doctors that have performed them. They are given speaking engagements and prominent roles. Yes, they now renounce their past actions (although some of the renouncements can be quite mild) but there seems to be no sense of shame. Shame is not just sadness over past events but embarrassment over them. (This parallels nicely with the convert phenomenon where all of the sudden people are seen to be oracles of wisdom for discovering and holding what nearly all have held to be true their whole life. Sadly I went through the phase too.) The temptation is to point to the prodigal son parable, but I don’t see the verse where the son takes every opportunity to tell his brother, father, and their servants how riotously he had lived it up and what a wise man he was. Instead he comes in humility and asks to be treated as a lowly servant. Such isn’t to claim there isn’t a role for forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean denying evil though.

We face real social problems in this country. Those problems won’t be addressed until we recognize that there are real social harms. The myth of the autonomous individual is a myth. Our actions have personal and social consequences. Abortion is not merely evil because it takes life, although that is certainly sufficient to make it evil; it is evil because it vitiates the obligations one generation has to the next. The scourge of out-of-wedlock birth also does harm to this obligation. The next generation has the right to be raised by his mother and father. Those that take it upon themselves to deny the child these rights commit evil. Through the course of life there are enough things that keep children from being raised by their parents through no fault of the parents (like the death of a mother or a father) that we don’t need to add to society’s burden by intentionally bringing this situation into being.

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