Roe vs. Wade vs. Prelutsky

July 20, 2003

Sometimes, I get the idea that I'm the only person in America who can clearly see both sides of the abortion issue. Or, to put it another way, I think the zealots on both sides of the controversy should be hosed down until they come to their senses.

Frankly, I wish that a woman's right to have an abortion had never become a national issue and that the Supreme Court had kept its nose out of it. But the justices of the Supreme Court long ago gave up even the pretense of merely interpreting the Constitution in favor of creating legislation. And who can blame them? In Hollywood, after all, everybody wants to direct. In Washington, everybody wants to make laws. In both cases, it's the natural human inclination to boss people around.

It has become such a major and divisive issue that I sometimes think that if liberals didn't have their pro-abortion platform to rally around, the Democrats would go the way of the Whigs and the Bull Moose.

I can understand why the right to legal abortions is so important to so many women. The nightmarish memories of backroom operations performed by butchers remain too vivid to be forgotten. As a man, I am convinced that abortions would be readily available in all 50 states if men were the ones who got pregnant.

However, I can also understand why some people regard abortions as immoral. Where the so-called pro-lifers go wrong is in equating abortion with cold-blooded murder. If that were truly the case, people who killed abortionists would be heroes, not lunatics, and people who did not kill abortionists would be cowards.

Here, then, is my own take on the subject: I think the voters in each
state should decide the law. I believe that no minor should have one performed without parental consent; it is bizarre to imagine that a teenager should require a parent's consent to have a tooth removed, but not a fetus. I think if an unmarried woman has the sole authority to abort or not to abort, she then has no right to demand child support of her sex partner. However, I would have a siring tax. Society should not do anything to encourage illegitimacy, either by providing the mother with an annuity or allowing the father a free ride.

As people once argued over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, they now argue over when a fetus becomes a human being. At one extreme, we have Norman Mailer, who regards masturbation as immoral because he holds his sperm in such high regard. Then we have those at the other end of the spectrum, who argue that so long as the fetus is in the womb, abortion is a viable option. So far as they're concerned, the difference between a perfectly legal medical procedure and murder can be a matter of minutes.

For my part, the pro-abortion crowd surrenders the moral high ground every time they insist that a woman has an inalienable right to do what she will with her own body, and that removing a fetus is the same as removing a wart. No wart, these feminists should be reminded, ever became a living, breathing child. Nobody ever celebrated the announcement that a wife, daughter, sister, niece or friend, had just discovered she had a wart. Nobody ever painted a room pink, bought out a toy store and threw a party, in anticipation of a wart.

And nobody ever named a wart "Junior."

Burt Prelutsky

©2003 Burt Prelutsky