Wednesday, July 06, 2005

unhappy ending?

Mark at Ozconservative takes the high ground on abortion, after reading Anna Neylan's personal story about having an abortion in the weekend paper.
Well, I read the same article, and my feeling is that it all it showed was that abortion is never an easy choice--it's not a day at the beauty salon for a woman. It's obviously traumatic and a cause of a lot of stress and guilt for a woman. The extreme ambivalence that this woman felt is most likely something all women who have an abortion feel.
I want to ask Mark (whose blog does not have a comments facility) if he has really thought through what the consequences might've been for this woman if she had unwillingly kept the baby. Her boyfriend most likely would have still left her--after all, he most definitely didn't want the baby. Forcing him to begin a family (and/or "do the right thing" and marry because of the baby, as people used to do), wouldn't have neatly fixed everything to the satisfaction of the Conservatives. If he'd still left her, she might well have ended up a single mother on the pension--in which case a Conservative probably would've had a go at her for being a dole bludger and for not playing happy nuclear families. If Neylan and her boyfriend had stayed together-- incompatible, clearly unhappy about being parents and being forced into sharing their lives--they would've been prime candidates for an early divorce/relationship breakdown.
You can't win, can you.
It also rankles when Mark writes:

"For conservatives...there is an inherent right or wrong in different behaviours, and a moral code, reflecting the wisdom, the moral strength and the moral ideals of generations..."

Oh, for god's sake. Morals are not the exclusive province of the Right, just as a sense of wonder and joy about the miracle of life is not an experience confined to the self-proclaimed "religious" among us.
Mark decides, "An ethics of consent did not serve Anna Neylan well." A forced choice probably wouldn't have served her well either.