Is Abortion The 21st Century Equivalent Of Slavery - Road to the Middle Class

IN THE ANCIENT world, we know, slavery was ubiquitous. In They Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger write about people in England going to their lord and placing themselves in slavery when starvation threatened. And they write about the Vikings sailing up the rivers in the autumn, plundering the harvest, killing the men, and selling the women and children into slavery at the main slave market in northwest Europe: Dublin. That was in the year 1000 AD, or CE if that’s your preference.

The remarkable thing is not that slavery existed in 1800. The remarkable thing is that it seems to have died out in NW Europe. The remarkable thing is that there were people like William Wilberforce who had organized to stamp it out in the rest of the world.

And stamp it out they did, by ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade and ultimately provoking the great Civil War in the United States that ended slavery on these fruited plains.

The fierce opposition to VP candidate Sarah Palin raises the question as to whether abotion is the new slavery.

Because it is clear that the fact of Sarah Palin’s life, with its unrestained fecundity and its celebration of “special-needs” children, is an offense to our pro-choice liberal friends.

Sarah Palin’s life raises again the issue of abortion. And the fact is that the question of abortion must be decided by the people. It is not the job of the elite Supreme Court to issue a ukase, as it did in 1973. It is up to the people to determine, by political action in its largest sense, when the fetus carried by a woman becomes a life protected by the law.

When women emerged, in the 20th century, from lives completely circumscribed by child-rearing and domestic management, to lives lived more in the public square, a new era began.

This new era opened the question of What Women Want. What does a woman liberated from constant child-bearing want? Feminists like Simone de Beauvoir said that they wanted careers and creative originality and liberation from the domestic sphere. It was natural for upper-class women like her to think that way.

But Beauvoir’s feminism only appealed to an upper-class elite.

Women do want to work, usually with people, outside the home. But few women want male-type careers. And most women want lives fully integrated with children, marriage, family, and the community of women.

Modern western society has just begun to address this question.

If children are important then the issue of abortion is important as well. And it is not exhuasted by the notion that a woman should have absolute control of her body. Nobody in society has absolute control of their body, just as nobody in society has absolute control of their children.

Somehow, some way, in the coming decades, we will come to a resolution of the abortion question. But it won’t be pretty.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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