Buttons are being pressed. The liberal establishment is up in arms again about Roe versus Wade. I am included on a mailing list that fans the flames of fear about women losing the right to abortion. The right-to-lifers are unduly ecstatic, thinking things might change.
We have been through this a vast number of times in the 50 years since the Supreme Court made this decision. This issue has proven to be one of the most successful fundraisers for both liberals and conservatives. It is a litmus test. To me it is much ado about nothing.
Since not all of you in my readership are Americans, I need to provide a little background. The American Constitution establishes a federal structure in which all powers not expressly given to the federal government remain with the state and local governments and the people.
There were always inconsistencies. Federal legislation was adequate to prohibit various classes of drugs such as heroin, opium, cocaine and marijuana. Alcohol was a different story – it took a constitutional amendment to outlaw its consumption during the Prohibition period from 1920 to 1933.
State law governs gambling, tobacco and alcohol, bigamy, marriage and divorce and most other such social issues. State governments at various times passed laws forbidding miscegenation, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion. Lawyers argued, and judges agreed that these laws violated the Constitution. All relied on expansive interpretations of the powers left to the federal government by the Constitution such as the right to control interstate commerce.
There has always been a significant gulf between law and practice when it comes to moral issues. Alcohol was widely available during Prohibition. Underage children drink and smoke. Illegal drugs have been widely used since the 1960s. Laws governing sex and marriage – homosexuality, age of consent, age of marriage, conditions justifying a divorce, homosexual marriage, and much else have been inconsistent and flexible.
Abortion is a particularly difficult moral issue. The classes of questions include:
· When in the pregnancy to abort? Conception? Quickening? Birth?
· Mother's age and health
· Rape or consent
The law finds itself on many slippery slopes with these questions. Since it is a private matter, the law is generally quite easy to circumvent. Abortion is like drug abuse. Whatever the moral question, law is simply not the right tool to address it.
There are practices in the field of abortion that most people find reprehensible, such as full-term abortions and even postnatal abortions. There is a strong case to be made that these amount to murder.
On the other hand – and in the realm of abortion there is always another hand – a great many societies throughout the history of mankind have condoned the practice of leaving newborn babies to die. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in Mother Nature writes that evolution has prepared us for the death of a newborn. The mother and child spend their first week together bonding. The mother is not fully emotionally invested until then. Christenings were usually not scheduled until after the first week or so.
Abortion activists set the interests of the individual – the mother – above those of society. The conservative point of view seems to be that society benefits from children. Therefore, raising them is a tolerable burden on the reluctant mother. On the other hand, an unwanted baby is unlikely to be raised to be an asset to society in the first place. The utilitarian argument would be that the common good is served by allowing abortion.
Most important, at the end of the day this is a vast amount of moral posturing amounting to nothing. This is like Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign against drugs. Whatever the status of Roe versus Wade, abortions will remain legal in most states, and certainly remain available even where it is not legal. Law enforcement is simply not interested in pursuing abortionists. Just consider that at the moment, in the jurisdictions in which liberals live, police are not whatsoever interested in pursuing shoplifters and are increasingly indifferent even to catching murderers. Abortionists need not worry.
This nonissue is being allowed to deflect our attention from the more serious stuff that is afoot, such as Bill Gates' attempt to capture the world's medical establishments via the WHO and force a vaccine-oriented solution onto every problem associated with germs, and the World Economic Forum's campaign to catalog and dog-tag the entire world's population via biometric identifiers.
I do not think that these schemes have a great chance for adoption and implementation. Just as people have successfully skirted laws governing sex, drugs, marriage and so on, per the above, I think they will continue to avoid any universalist schemes involving social credit, forced medications and central bank digital currencies.. In the developed countries it may be a result of pushback by fed-up citizens. In less-developed countries it will simply be government ineptitude. Which, in my opinion, is even more reliable.
At any rate, this gives me some topics to write about over the next week.
Meanwhile, Eddie is taking the end of semester examinations given by the Sunflower School he used to attend. Without a proctor. Right off the top, it can't be serious. I have not heard back from the schools to which I have written about taking entrance exams. I need to get on top of that, but it may be that the schools are not even in operation. I would not be surprised if we had another year of homeschooling.
There are complicating factors in his homeschooling. I have not been able to maintain control of the whole program. We lost our Ukrainian tutor with the war. Oksana is having Eddie use the history and literature textbooks from the school. So I am left with English reading and writing, and mathematics. No man can serve two masters, and I am afraid that Eddie is doing a bang up job of serving neither of us.
The good news is that he is always busy doing something useful. Yesterday we disassembled, brought home and reassembled a lawn swing from the rental house of a neighbor who is in Germany and will not be returning to pay the rent. He is always active and interested, which pleases me. Even not hewing closely to a curriculum I don't think he's much worse off than other Ukrainian kids. Probably better than most.
Victory day is May 9 in Russia, whereas VE day in the United States is celebrated on the eighth. It is a question of time zones; the war stopped in the evening. Ukraine just this year switched our celebration from the ninth to the eighth, getting in sync with the west. Putin had indicated he wanted to have another victory celebration on the ninth, and we were on tenterhooks expecting some dramatic series of explosions today. Three quarters of the way through the day, thankfully nothing.
The bicycle has opened up new worlds for Zoriana. This morning she on her bicycle and Marianna on my shoulders made a four playground tour of Rainbow Lake, just over the railroad tracks. The wonderful playgrounds are a source of continual amazement. They have chess boards out in the open – with chess pieces standing loose on them! How in the world they don't get lost I could never imagine. Marianna runs enthusiastically into the swing in every new playground, and climbs the playground structures so she can go down the slides. Brave girl. The slides start about seven feet off the ground and are slippery and fast.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men and good looking women alike are delighted that the war news has become so boring these days. The kids are increasingly aware of their own mortality. When I caught up with Zoriana, who had sped ahead of me on her bike, she was contemplating the corpses of a crow and a rat that she found in a ditch. Dust to dust.
Find out what Eddie is interested in - and give him a few books in English on that topic. If, say, he's interested in mechanical things, get him a copy of "How Things Work" - https://www.amazon.com/How-Things-Work-2nd-Illustrated/dp/078583740X/ref=asc_df_078583740X Perhaps a Whole Earth Catalog, if you can find one - and a dictionary, English only. He'll pick up English on his own with a bit of effort once he has a good reason to do so.