Moral Imperatives and Social Need

Just a quick hit to follow on a comment someone (supergoober) made to a previous blog. He used the term "moral imperative" for certain social spending, and jocularly, I shot back with a comment about of "I thought we couldn't legislate morality" obviously referring to the whole abortion argument in general. But of course, there was a little truth told in jest.

Supergoober's line did actually describe the feeling out there of how we should be kind and generous and giving to our neighbors - but that is, at heart, a religious/moral sentiment, and therefore a matter of personal choice. I deeply believe in the necessity of social justice, and in the religious tenet of "love thy neighbor", and neighbor is to be interpreted very broadly, but most of the social programs do not consist of me personally being generous, they consist of me insisting that people who have more than me be generous as well. I have taken my moral choice and evaded it by forcing someone with "more" to be generous instead.

Obviously, the government has some role in "promoting the general welfare", but as the government usurps this role more and more, it becomes easier and easier for all of us to neglect this aspect of our responsibility to each other. We succumb to an "I gave at the office" mentality - that is it is easier to evade our own personal duties if some mythical, mystical government entity can do it for me (perhaps very badly) and obviate me of any feeling that I might have of helping my fellow human beings. It is this fact that I find destructive to the soul of humanity, and while others might flinch at the use of the word, use it in any connotation you like, this attitude destroys any bit of the transcendent nature of our selves, whether that transcendence is divine or human doesn't matter.

Either way, you precisely are legislating morality, and in doing so, you are ultimately destroying the desire to make any moral choice in all of us. That is not to say, then, that we should never legislate morality - every law should be an extension of good moral sense - that is the origin of law. People who object to the "legislation of morality" really object to legislating anything that would feel bad for them because either it makes them feel guilty, or because they don't agree with the legislation of morality.

For example, it is immoral to kill, thus there are laws against murder. Were we to not consider that killing was wrong, we would have never legislated against it in the first place. A gross oversimplification, yes, but you get the gist of my point. We cannot escape the fact that morality is all we legislate - all civil rights legislation, for example, is an attempt to instill a certain form of morality, that is one of eliminating gender bias, racial bias, etc, so that we can treat each other as equals - but that is a fundamentally moral issue!!! Again, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that - I think it is laudable and the way that laws need to be written. People start objecting when the "morality" in question makes them feel guilty about their own choices or those of their friends, and rather than process the guilt appropriately, they seek to externalize a moral standard that makes them feel better (a very typical, if dysfunctional, way of dealing with cognitive and emotional dissonance), or they object because the morality does not fit with their own moral sensibilities - I think you find the former more than the latter, however, especially with the abortion issue, and this is where the mantra of "choice" is ultimately detrimental and destructive.

Yep - I am about to write about that dread topic of abortion. I know that this is going to upset people, but I want you to realize exactly where this is coming from before I write it. It is coming ultimately from a place of care and concern, especially for children who have to go through this so-called "choice" (and believe me I have seen, on more than one occasion, the psychological and emotional trauma a 15 or 16 year old goes through when they have made this "choice" - and it is not because of some external standard of guilt imposed by a religion - they know that they had a child inside of them, whether fully developed or not, and as they are younger, they see the implications of what would have happened had their parents made a similar choice, but I digress, more on that later).

So, this is big-time a hot button issue, and rather than trivialize it, I will attempt to talk about some problems with our current standards. I am going to avoid the whole mess of legality or illegality; rather I am going to address the folly of saying that it is simply a choice (yep, I used folly, sorry if that is insulting, but my use of the word should become clearer as you read on) as well as the problem with allowing it without parental consent. And that part, the parental consent issue, is huge. I have had long discussions (and sometimes arguments) with my wife about this, and she makes some very valid points about how most children cannot approach their parents with a statement like "I am pregnant" or "I got my girlfriend pregnant". Very true, it is difficult to do, but I really hope that the majority of parent-child relationships in this world are not so strained and abusive that this conversation could never happen. That is my hope, but I know it is not necessarily a reality (but I believe that it is a reality more than not), however, allowing a child to make this kind of decision without her parents only serves to set up a government sponsored impediment to relationships between child and parent.

Let me explain; most of us (humans in general) avoid emotionally traumatic and difficult situations as frequently as we can. We try not to upset other people, and sometimes out of altruism or sometimes out of fear, we do not wish others to have to deal with our problems. This goes especially for teenagers, who are struggling through the tribulations of becoming adults. They have to deal with the fact that their parents treat them as children while they feel like adults; they struggle with impulses to simultaneously act childish and then engage in very adult behavior; and top all of that off with the fact that they have a feeling of invincibility that they do not want disturbed, and they do not want to admit that they were wrong about. That makes for a very messy, difficult space to approach a conversation with parents. If society gives them an out for this difficult situation, how are we going to expect them to ever develop the cognitive, social, or emotional skills for dealing with these situations? Yes, this would be an incredibly difficult conversation to have with your parents, but many teenagers might find that there parents were far more supportive of them than they had anticipated. Others might find that their parents are as flawed and human as they thought that they were. Either way, being able to struggle through this process is important, and while I cannot force this upon anyone, I bristle at legislation being used to give a "easy" out to this difficult situation. (GE)

Because it is not really an easy out. And this is the crux of the difficulty. When we say that this monumentally difficult decision is just a "choice" we do several things to the young woman involved. First, we make the decision, the blame, and the responsibility entirely hers. It implicitly states that it is her fault for getting pregnant - after all if she is the sole arbiter of choice, then she must be solely responsible. She is told that she has a choice, and that it shouldn't be difficult (again, this statement is implicit in the abortion rights movement, in my opinion), and when she struggles with the decision, and feels that there is a huge burden involved, she defaults to the fact that something is wrong with her. This conclusion is entirely wrong, but entirely common, and something young women must struggle with in silence. By telling a girl (and many are, unfortunately, just girls when they have to make this decision) that it is just a choice, when we use terms that make it seem like it is no different than choosing what breakfast cereal to eat, we set up a false expectation in them. When they struggle with the reality of the fact that they could give birth, in a short amount of time, to someone just like them, the decision becomes huge and traumatic. All our platitudes about choice serve only to undermine and separate the child involved. Because it was a "choice", her "choice", the implication is that she must make it without help. The trivial nature of the slogan is at odds with the traumatic reality, and, rather than realize that the slogan is wrong, she assumes that something is wrong with her - she doesn't feel comfortable seeking help, because she has always been told that she can make this decision by herself.

All of our banal platitudes that were put in place with the best of intentions, our sincere attempt to diminish a child's sense of culpability in this difficult situation, have only served to undermine her emotional and psychological stability and, even worse, have only served to traumatize and isolate her. She can only seek the help of her peers, and even then only in whispers, not because of the stigma attached to abortion, but because she feels weak at not being able to make such a simple choice, or because she feels guilty at having made such a choice. And that guilt is not something for which she was prepared because, while she understood some of the magnitude of the decision, again, it was always trivialized in discussions on choice, and again, she feels wrong for feeling guilty.

So all that this choice for children has done is put them in harmful situations and removed any sort of support structure from them, all in the attempt of minimizing the impact of this decision. One cannot argue the good intentions - I believe that virtually all (with some specific exceptions) of the major players in the pro-choice movement are well-intentioned. They don't want people to feel the trauma that they felt or that they assume might be felt at the proposition of an abortion. Either that or they have excessively intellectualized the debate, and removed the emotional aspect from it in an attempt to diffuse the tension surrounding the issue. All this has served to do is to alienate young women who are going through this and who have intensely powerful feelings about it - when they were always told that they shouldn't have those feelings. Now when they experience guilt over the choice, their guilt is de-legitimized and they are forced to struggle with it alone.

So what do we do? I don't know, but I will give you my response. If it wasn't obvious up til now, I am nominally pro-life, though the descriptor is rather silly (everyone is both pro-life, and pro-choice, I don't know anyone who hates life, or anyone who wants to take away all choice - the issue at had is abortion, the monikers merely take away from the argument, so I seldom use them). In terms of moral culpability, from Catholic moral teaching (and many others, but I will cite Catholicism as I was raised Catholic and am well-versed in the moral teachings (not just the dogma)) the less choice one has, the less moral culpability one has. This is a nod to the "can you be evil with a gun to your head" line of thinking, and was introduced into Catholic moral teaching in full-force (though it had precursors) around WWII. It was originally given as a moral "out" so Catholics could feel comfortable lying to hide Jews and others from the Nazis - Catholics were good at guilt, and right and wrong, so Catholics who would hide Jews would feel guilty for lying to state officials about it and confess to priests, I don't need to go through all of it now, you get the idea, right?

Anyway, the less capable you are of making a decision, the less wrong it is. I do believe that abortion is wrong (more on the science of that in another post, and yes, there is science and not just dogma or emotion, though the science still relies on valuing human life; if you don't believe in the value of human life, then the science won't persuade you either). But a girl who is in an incredibly difficult situation, whose parents or boyfriend pressure her into the decision cannot be truly said to have committed a "sin" or done something truly immoral. Was the act right - no, clearly not, but it is by all major moral thinking less wrong than an affluent woman in her late 20s using abortion as a birth-control technique (and I hope that doesn't happen, but I would guess that it might have, but I would argue not frequently). It is the moral imperative of the community around a girl to support her through the difficult process of recovering from such a life-altering decision, not trivializing it and telling her it was nothing. They should provide counseling and emotional support (and yes I do mean professional counseling). Many women end up counting birthdays of unborn children, or have pangs of guilt when they see a child that they know would be the same age as the child they aborted. Do we force women to dear this guilt in silence by denying its existence, or do we help support them as people of care, concern, and conscience would? Do we diminish people by saying that the choice is trivial when it isn't? Should we try to eliminate the emotion involved in the decision, again by trivializing the decision, or do we help people who have made this decision come to terms with it and grow as a result?

My answers to these questions are pretty obvious, as I have already stated. Notice in my argument above, I didn't even get to the social and financial pressures that make the decisions even harder, or the fact that easy availability of abortion makes it easier for boys to exert sexual pressure on girls (and no, this is never explicit, but it is becoming built in to the psyches of young people as a potential out - fear of pregnancy is less acceptable as an "excuse" for a girl who doesn't want to engage in sexual behavior), but all these serve only to bolster my point, and I could write books about all of them.

I know that some people deny the existence of the feelings that I have mentioned above, or they attribute them to the moral upbringing in a puritanical society, but I do not agree with those contentions. Even from a purely biological standpoint, our emotions must exist to preserve the species, so the "love of a mother for her child" is biologically selected, even if you don't buy any of the moral arguments. It is very likely that the moral construct of guilt in the situation is biologically inspired as much as it is morally inspired (and many contend that our morality may flow out of our biology - I do not agree with that entirely, there are major flaws in the logic, but there are reasonable points that can be made). My point is that the guilt associated with abortion is not entirely a social construct of religion that we can eliminate. Many in the "pro-choice" movement tacitly accept that it can be removed because they do not want anyone to have to deal with the guilt. Rather, we should be focusing on how to support kids through the trauma, not invalidating it. By saying that there is or should be no guilt, we try to shut off a part of ourselves, and we damn the children to struggle with it in silence, alone. Even if you look at it from purely a therapeutic mindset - therapy does not seek to eliminate guilt, pain, or other emotional responses, rather it tries to put them into perspective so that we can live our lives as whole human beings rather than flawed constructs consumed with guilt and self-loathing or shallow non-entities who have shut off any capacity for emotion in ourselves to stave off uncomfortable feelings. I guess that gives a little insight into what I believe and why, and I hope that whoever reads this knows that the decision to be "Pro-Life" or "Pro-Choice" shouldn't be undertaken lightly, and what we say and do has a tremendous impact on each other, especially on the young and vulnerable in our society.

Wow, I had originally intended to talk about legislating morality and construction of morality outside of belief in a deity of some sort (a near impossibility if you want to generate a non-Nietzschean, non-Machiavellian morality - try reading John Stuart Mill, for example - his utilitarian ideals are so flawed you could drive a Mac Truck through them, not that they had Mac Trucks in his day, insert the Victorian equivalent), but my progression of thoughts led me to the abortion issue. If you've made it this far, I hope I haven't upset too many apple carts, and I hope that you can still engage in conversation with me later...

I suppose this one might pop up on a number of search engines now, and I might get wanderers in that don't normally read this blog - if that is you, feel free to comment, but try to remain thoughtful in your comments, as I tried to in this lengthy discussion. Feel free to dispute what I have said, but don't just come down on my side or on the opposition side with irrational or argumentative garbage... if you have a counter argument, I would love to hear it; this does not capture all my reasoning, but I have given it a bit of thought...

Thanks for reading :)