Abortion

I saw a documentary today containing images of young women in France protesting in favor of their rights to legal abortion, or as the filmmaker put it, the "right to give birth." That phrase was a little unsettling to me, as I'd never heard it before. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the "right to give birth" is more or less a correct description-- I mean, since women have to carry the child to term , it's only fair that women have the right to give birth. This is all well and good as long as we operate on the assumption that people are just going to have sex whenever they want and not really think too hard about the consequences.

I'm starting to realize that the issue with abortion isn't about respecting a woman's right to do what she wants with her body or whatever. I think the issue is about how our culture treats sex. Yes, if people just take it as a given that they're going to have sex when they want (after a drunken night on the town, or in a more "controlled" environment with a longtime significant other), then the issue dissolves into the gender-tinged arguments everyone's too familiar with. But if we question the assumption that we have to have sex when we want, then it becomes another issue. Obviously, if abstinence worked, then we'd have a lot less problems with abortion.
Even though it doesn't, abstinence not working doesn't imply that we should assume that we should forget about telling kids not to have sex when they feel like it. Telling a teenager that he or she should make sure he or she loves someone before they have sex with them is basically like telling them they can have sex with whomever they want to, because obviously a teenager is only going to want to have sex with people that he or she thinks they like. If we as society start to take a different view of sex, i.e. one that realizes its significance and how deeply it brings individuals together, then maybe promiscuity would be a lot less common, and maybe abortion wouldn't be such a hot topic. I'm not advocating abstinence as a policy-- but I am saying we should rethink sex as an activity purely for our own enjoyment. It is intended to create children, after all.

but alas, this probably will never happen.