Before I begin, I want to thank my friend Matt Lesser for his comments in response to my last column (“Why Ned Lamont is bad for the Democratic Party”–9/19). Like Lesser said, and like any sane person living in this country knows, the most important issue this November is wrenching control of Congress from Bush’s cronies and the Republican leadership. Our difference of opinion is not in the ends–our difference is in the means through which to achieve those ends.
Thomas Coen, on the other hand, completely missed the point when he went on a diatribe on my “twisted world.” In my “twisted world,” we would have a Democratic majority in Congress. In my “twisted world,” on Nov. 7 (election night), we would finally go to sleep knowing that there is a real check on the Bush administration. Coen would rather spend time, money and energy liberalizing the Democratic caucus through primaries–a noble pursuit indeed–but a pursuit that will only hinder our chances in such an important year. Coen’s idealism is commendable, but his mindlessly idealistic approach has been the downfall of the Democratic Party for over a decade. In the same sense, the Right-wing machine’s ability to place pragmatism ahead of idealism has been the key to its success. Although I proudly call myself a Democrat, this race is one of those times that we simply screwed up.
Another issue the Democrats seriously screwed up has far more long-term and serious consequences than a Senatorial primary–the abortion issue. Both sides of the debate, both the pro-choice and the anti-choice segments of the citizenry, have framed this as the great moral question of our time. The anti-choice arguments attacked abortion as immoral, and have lambasted it as nothing better than murder. The pro-choice arguments defended the practice as a moral necessity and individual right of a woman. All in all, both sides have framed abortion predominantly as a moral issue, with little exception or variation to that theme.
In our society, the abortion question supersedes morals. As a matter of fact, the moral argument on both sides is all but irrelevant when looking at the big picture. Honestly, we shouldn’t give a damn if a nutty right-wing Falwell-esque loon wants to phrase abortion as a murder. In the same respect, we shouldn’t give a damn if a crazy left-wing NARAL hippie moans about a woman’s right to privacy. Both of these groups try to use a moral argument to influence the debate, and us Wesleyan students ought to be able to see beyond such triteness.
Above and beyond anything else, the abortion question is a matter of crime and economics. I’m sure many of us may recall how, during the first few years of Clinton’s presidency, crime began to magically drop to new lows we haven’t seen in decades. We had reached a pinnacle of criminal activity in the 80s, and all of a sudden, for no reason, it fell to unpredictable lows. Clinton took credit for it by attributing the crime drop to an improved economy–this may be true to a very minimalist degree, but the slight decrease in unemployment during those years doesn’t correlate with the huge drop in crime, and it certainly doesn’t account for a drop in non-economic crimes such as rape. There are a variety of other explanations that we all examined and discussed, and although they were all nice theories, none of them really fit the facts.
The only theory that truly fit the facts was the idea of abortion. In 1973, the decision in Roe v. Wade was handed down, instantly rolling back restrictions or bans on abortion in almost every state. A whole generation of mothers who wanted an abortion was now able to actually have one. A whole generation of children who would have entered a world without a loving family, economic support, and educational opportunity was now aborted before it could enter this world. In the early 90s, this generation of people would have been entering the prime of its criminal career–however, thanks to the massive removal of abortion restrictions, these people were never even brought into the world to begin with.
This argument was never used in the 90s when political analysts and sociologists were trying to explain the drop in crime. The argument wasn’t first proposed until 1999, when economist Steven Levitt wrote a paper analyzing the true cause of the crime drop. He went on to write a book, aptly titled “Freakenomics,” which analyzed unconventional economic theories, including the correlation between abortion and crime.
The reason the abortion debate has become so polarized is because people look at it based on emotion and morals rather than simple logic. The biggest problem with American politics is the virtually unbreakable barrier between two polarized factions. This barrier has only been strengthened by the insistence from both the Right and the Left on stuffing mindless emotional pleas down our throat with regards to the abortion issue.
Leave a Reply