http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=2666
Why No-Fault Divorce is the Key to Abortion
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com
March 26, 2001
THE ABORTION ISSUE is usually debated in terms of the metaphysical
absolute of the sanctity of human life. Whatever may be the ultimate
truth on this question, there is another dimension that should to be
examined: abortion's deleterious social consequences. And to really
understand these, abortion must be linked to no-fault divorce. No-fault
divorce allows men to evade their responsibilities to their children
just like abortion allows women to do so. Although in theory divorce is
not sex-specific, in practice it is overwhelmingly a tool for men to
abandon their children. Linking it to abortion is also key to the
political struggle against abortion, because one ineradicably plausible
argument against banning it is that it burdens the female sex alone to
solve a problem created by both sexes. The key to basic fairness on the
issue is to take no-fault divorce away from men in the same breath as
taking abortion away from women. Whatever the metaphysical status of
the fetus, this would bring a number of social benefits. .
The fundamental social problem with abortion is that it permits, indeed
inexorably produces, what we can call the "get-laid society." If women
know they can get abortions, they have an easier time being of what
used to be called easy virtue, and if men know that women can get
abortions, then women have less of an excuse to withhold their favors,
even if they want to. Worse, since other women are in the same
position, they are forced to be "easy" or lose their man to a more
willing partner. Thus the availability of abortion affects not only
those who choose to avail themselves of it or rely on its availability.
It affects all women, because it forces them into a sexual competition
that would be vastly reduced if abortion were not available. Abortion
has loosed on this country an army of sluts and enabled men to demand
that women who are not sluts behave like them. This dynamic is
particularly cruel to older or simply less attractive women, because
they are worse off in sexual competition. It is also notably unequal
between the sexes, given that women are generally more willing to
accept older or uglier men than the reverse. This is all of course a
great irony given the egalitarian pretensions of the liberals who
started the sexual revolution.
This all gives the lie to the argument that abortion is solely an issue
of individual autonomy, because individual behavior is subject to
social pressures that people are not free to choose or avoid,
particularly when the behavior in question is of its essence social
because it requires the cooperation of another person.
It is only fair to note that some men, particularly but not exclusively
those with Christian (or just plain traditional) views on free love,
can also be oppressed by the expectation, enforced as noted above by
social competition, of a swinging lifestyle. Is there a man in America
who has not, in some bar or locker room, felt compelled to lie about
his lifestyle in order to conform to the social expectations of his
peers? Many American men go through life pretending to be someone they
are not because this warped ideal is presented as not just fashionable
but normal, something one could only dissent from because of personal
inadequacy and not on moral grounds. They also, in a society where
women have been similarly corrupted, must corrupt their own behavior to
find a woman simply because that is "where the girls are" today and
what they expect from a man.
Turning the social world into an arena of sexual competition has a
generally coarsening and brutalizing effect on social life: it makes
men and women view each other as prey and their own sex as competitors
to a degree that corrodes civility, undermines the possibility of
non-sexual friendship, and distracts workplaces, classrooms, and other
institutions dedicated to non-erotic pursuits. And it is certainly
worth slyly noting that ugly or shy people who are not destined to find
much satisfaction in this arena can, under a regime of traditional
values, congratulate themselves on their obedience to moral law rather
than spending their lives seething with the frustration of losers.
Meritocracy, to which we are uncritically committed in this as in other
areas, of necessity adds the sting of moral judgment to the fact of
inequality, and therefore does not necessarily make people happier. One
almost suspects that the sexual meat market appeals to the contemporary
zeal for the market economy: we have sexual free trade, with no
government regulation, no tariffs, and businesslike relationships that
have to pay off or be terminated.
The effect on people's emotional life of the repeated heartbreaks that
are the normal consequence of a succession of partners is something we
just accept as normal. Is there really no connection between this and
the phenomenon of half the country needing to be artificially pumped up
with anti-depressants simply to make it through the day? Were people
always this way, and might this be one of the things that changed? The
popular alternative is attaining the state of total emotional numbness
(called "ironic detachment" by the hip) that has come to be regarded as
the "sophisticated" attitude. This is in itself an incredible irony
given that the sexual revolution was launched in the name of
romanticism against what was thought to be the emotionally repressed
culture of the 1950's. There is a fundamental wisdom in the traditional
view that sex is a fierce and cruel power among people and that it is
therefore a passion that needs to be damped down, not inflamed. But we
are also discovering that if anything goes, people burn out and true
passion is undermined. If everything is permitted, then nothing
matters. The ultimate achievement of the sexual revolution, still over
the horizon but detectable in such films as Less Than Zero, may be to
make sex boring. Whether this itself will be a sentiment favorable to a
sexual counter-revolution remains to be seen.
If our sexual mores as a culture are hurting us so much, why do we
still believe in them? People get conned into this unsustainable
lifestyle because most of these hurtful dynamics are masked in the case
of teenagers, who are perhaps the only people for whom the chaotic
emotional life that the get-laid society implies is actually
attractive. There are millions of adults out there who are trying to
live like teenagers, and the establishment of teen sex life as the
tacit ideal is the reason they are doing it. The ideal doesn't have to
be explicitly teen: the fundamental social rules of easy abortion and
easy divorce incarnate attachmentless, consequenceless sexuality as the
only choice that society will support. The key concept here is that of
social support, because it is intrinsically difficult, as explained
above, for people to live a traditional life in this respect without a
traditional society around them. Modern sexual liberalism thus does not
just liberate: it coerces.
People denounce abortion as a restriction on female sexuality. But
given what most of us know perfectly well about the relative frequency
of the desires in question, it is far more of a restriction on male
sexuality.
No-fault divorce is the other bulwark of the get-laid society. It also
tends to promote economic liberalism because if women can't rely on
male financial support, they seek a surrogate husband in the state. The
famous "gender gap" is statistically only true for unmarried women;
married women vote almost as Republican as men do. Therefore,
Republicans are paying a real price at the polls for easy divorce, and
should systematically think about social policy measures designed to
reduce it. Naturally, there will not be one great silver bullet to
solve this problem, but every policy choice should be examined from the
point of view of its consequences for the divorce rate. We should enact
a ban on divorce in the presence of minor children, the restoration of
serious alimony payments, strict child-support enforcement, and a
repeal of the so-called marriage penalty of the tax code.
Easy abortion undermines marriage by increasing the temptations to
stray from it. But it also puts men in a position to say to women,
"since you chose not to have the abortion, that child of ours isn't my
responsibility," undermining fatherhood. The glamour of the swinging
lifestyle undermines the social prestige of the married condition.
Since families, not swinging singles, are the only possible foundation
of an enduring society, it is a mistake for any society that wishes to
endure to tolerate this.
Several favorable cultural consequences could be expected if easy
abortion and easy divorce were curtailed. For a start, if people know
that they will not be able to satisfy their sexual urges easily, they
will start to demand a culture not organized around inflaming them.
This would imply not just the obvious crackdown on pornography and
titillating advertising, but a shift in other things like music. It
will be psychologically uncomfortable to be constantly bombarded by
titillating messages, and people will demand an end to them, both by
not buying offending items and by political action to curtail the
extreme cases. If people know that they will have to seek happiness in
the form of a contented married life rather than in a swinger
lifestyle, then they will seek out a mellower and more tranquil culture
that expresses the satisfactions of contentment rather than excitement.
Therefore without easy abortion, people are necessarily motivated to
adopt a cultural attitude of self-restraint. In fact, in retrospect
this must have been a key factor in producing the more restrained
culture we used to have. And if people know that they are destined to
remain married, they will take the goods of this estate, like children,
more seriously. In a nation that will probably not allow censorship, it
may be that these are in fact the _only_ policy levers available to
bring these changes about.
What political strategy do these insights point to for pro-lifers? For
a start, they must get beyond arguing the absolute moral case to the
public and start presenting the social case. To some extent they have
intuitively grasped it for years, but have not made it sufficiently
baldly explicit, perhaps because some of the arguments needed to do so
are a little bit after bedtime.
There is enormous accumulated resentment in this country over the
sexual revolution, but no-one has clearly articulated a plan to roll it
back. The only exception has been the preposterous sexual Stalinism of
those leftists who have been promoting draconian sexual-harassment
codes coupled with the intellectual fantasy that sex is an arbitrary
construct in the first place, a pathetic attempt to wish the problem
out of existence on an abstract level. With half of generation X the
children of divorce, the time is ripe to capitalize on this resentment.
Pro-lifers must also cultivate the small but growing leftist and
feminist opposition to abortion. The early feminists were pro-life, and
at the very least, to split and sow discord in the camp of an enemy
that has become corrupted from this stand is a good thing. This must be
done without succumbing to the obvious temptation, which the left
exploits, to engage in useless politically-correct gestures to buy
their friendship.
The most viable strategy to actually ban abortion is to use various
policy levers to gradually reduce the annual abortion rate. At some
point in the long run, if the numbers get low enough, banning it
outright will be a trivial and thus politically feasible step. The key
is to quantify the issue, and evaluate policy choices from the
standpoint of their effect on the numbers. Quantifying the problem
would also provide a rational framework for the spectrum of pro-life
groups to coordinate their activities, a measure of success, and a way
to discourage the more excitable pro-lifers from extremist tactics
without asking them to abandon their beliefs. It also places the
opposition in the untenable position of defending a high abortion rate
as such, as they probably understand full well that abortion is only
politically viable because it is common. If there were, say, 10,000
abortions a year in this country, it would have no constituency and
would be banned in a minute. Even at a rate of 100,000 per year, there
would be a vastly better chance of banning it than there is now. (The
current level is about 1.4 million.)
Fundamentally, banning abortion will require civilizational change in
this country; it is a 30-year war that is not going to be won by a
single legislative assault, or any combination of short-term assaults.
Pro-lifers should cease short-term agitations that merely energize the
other side and focus on this pragmatic structural program of winning
the social debate plus cutting the annual numbers.
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