Faramond:
Do the feelings that accompany the choice have anything really to do with this issue? ... People always think their feelings have something to do with the issue, and almost always they are wrong. ... Personal feelings have nothing to do with the legal issues of Roe v. Wade, and they have nothing to do with the philosophical issue of the morality of abortion.
I think that feelings are relevant in cases where so many very personal things are affected - health, family integrity, economic well-being, cultural upbringing.
The one comparable issue I can think of, where I was directly involved, had to do with adoption laws in the state of PA. For the longest time adoption records were sealed in perpetuity in all 50 states. Then the laws were challenged and five states ruled that records could not be withheld from an adult under their state constitutions. It then became possible for an adult adoptee to obtain their birth certificate in those five states. Pennsylvania was one of them.
It was kind of an open-record by default situation, because the Constitutions did not say adults have a right to their birth certificate but rather guaranteed civil right for all adults, and no legislation had ever made an exception for adoptees.
One state representative in PA decided that this was bad, bad, bad. He had no adopted children of his own, so I wonder why he cared at all, but the cynic in my has suspicions. He launched a campaign to introduce a law in PA that would prohibit adopted children from obtaining their birth certificates. He and his team hit the publicity circuit. They wanted their arguments to be convincing, so someone had to speak on behalf of the birth mothers and why
they would want the law changed, but are of course too ashamed of their sinfulness to appear in public and talk about it. So representing the birth mother's point of view on the publicity team was a male social worker and two nuns.
I was involved in this because I was an adoptee and had been born in Ohio, which was also a state with newly opened records. To repay the Adoptees Liberty Association for the help they had given me, I agreed to help adults who had been born in Pennsylvania. Naturally I followed with great interest the debate over changing the law. There was little debate actually, because such a small percentage of the population is affected by adoption laws.
But I have to tell you that the male social worker and the two nuns got the position of the birth mother so wrong it made me throw things the TV and set fire to the newspaper. There they sat, imagining 'her' shame and graciously speaking on 'her' behalf so 'she' would not have to appear in public; when what she was feeling was nothing close to shame, and multiple birth mothers had lobbied against this law and would have appeared on TV if anyone had let them. Birth mothers and adopted children overwhelmingly favor open records ... and the reasons all have to do with feelings. And those feelings impact mental health, sociopathy, and even abortion rates. (Believe it or not, there are some women who would adopt instead of abort if only they could be sure of having some contact with the child afterwards, eventually. This is not rationality - it's pure feeling.)
Well, the law passed, and it was not challenged by the State supreme court. So secret daddy got what he wanted.
But there was another little piece to this. I wrote to the state rep. who started this campaign and gave him accurate statistics showing the percentage of birth parents who favor open records and the fact that the four remaining states with open records had the lowest abortion rates in the country, not the highest. I also told him about my own experience of finding my birth parents, and that I did not think anyone would walk so carefully around the privacy and feelings of a birth parent as an adopted child would. Certainly no social worker was qualified to make this decision in the abstract.
He wrote back to me and told me I should feel lucky I hadn't been aborted myself and be content with that. He also told me that as a state rep. it was his duty to follow his conscience and his principle rather than the wishes of his constituents which are always at variance with one another. I would have written back and asked him what he thought the word 'representative' in 'state representative' meant, but I think I realized at that point that I was dealing with a barbarian and did not waste any more breath on him.
There is a morality to this issue, and also a purely legal angle. (Adoption and Slavery are the only two contracts in American history that are signed in childhood but extend into majority.) But this issue cannot be decided justly without a fair accounting for the emotional health of the people involved.
It also happens that in my opinion abortion law and adoption law are closely related in the hidden societal premises they contain. As they stand now, I view both of them as surreptitious property laws, and that has got to change.
Making this discussion about feelings is an attempt to freeze half the people out of this thread, in my opinion.
I respectfully disagree, Faramond. The feelings of men and women are both important but they are not symmetric; and I think that is what needs to be recognized, identified ... when we speak of our feelings about this issue we are not both speaking about the same experience.
... because they don't know what it's like to have the feelings of the man in the situation!
Yes, exactly. That is also correct. Men have to speak to that themselves, and we have to listen.
What I am trying to ... clarify? ... is that where feelings are concerned, this is one issue where men and women cannot speak
on behalf of each other. We each have to express our differing experience of the issue, and we each have to listen.
Jn
Ethel
