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Response to Seashell on Abortion & Civil Liberties
Yes I can name a nation state in which the disrespect for life has led to the erosion of civil freedoms less fundamental than life.
Russia:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
For many years, legal abortion was the mainstay for birth control in the USSR then RF. A quote from the brief:
"Contributing to the low fertility in Russia has been an abortion rate that is among the highest in the world. For decades, abortion was the main method in Russia for limiting births. In recent years, as the availability of effective contraceptives has increased, the number of abortions has declined.1"
Birth control was used to decrease per capita outlays by the employment state ... to relieve pressure on resources and prove itself progressive. Because the atheist state taught that human beings don't have souls, materialism (in the form of economic deterministic theory) justified the policy. For the Soviets, human lives were merely material units, the numbers of which could be manipulated to serve the material ends of the state.
Comments (4)
Not a convincing causation. The argument is that low population was wanted by the leadership, but any kind of contraception would have been useful for that (see China). Why is the use of abortion instead of contraception more important than the state's willingness to simply kill lots of people?
Wasn't the lack of civil freedoms a fact before the policy of population reduction was in place? I thought it was inherent in top-down Leninism.
If you want to limit abortions, encourage birth control.
August 23, 2008 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tom, the state was willing to kill lots of people. And the state had among the highest abortion rates. Both viewpoints shared the underpinning of abortion everywhere: that it is merely the destruction of a tissue of cells, as if the reductio descriptors removed their true and more multi-dimensional meaning.
The lack of civil freedoms flowed from the premise of both abortion and mass killings: the dehumanization of that which is considered an obstacle to mindless progress and ideological necessity.
Look, the eugenics movement was influential in many elite circles in East and West before Hitler made it a very unpopular position to publicly admit. Hence it headed for the subtextual realms after the 1940s.
August 23, 2008 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good call, Mike. As long as some lives are considered "inconvenient", eugenics will continue to play an increasing role in our society. Just look at what happened in New Orleans three years ago this week.
August 24, 2008 12:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for commenting on this. FEMA = Federal Eugenics Management Administration?
I've long distrusted the government "duty to all but a duty to no one".
August 25, 2008 1:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
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