To end abortion, fix sexuality: George Mason professor

lsn ^ | Ben Johnson

[Morgana]

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 1, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Before abortion will ever come to an end, people must have a more accurate understanding of healthy sexuality, according to a leader in the pro-life movement.

“Instead of reminding people what they are doing when they have an abortion, we need to have have people think about what they are doing when they are having sex,” Helen Alvaré, a law professor at George Mason University, said as a featured panelist at the National Press Club during a symposium held by Americans United for Life last Thursday. Helen Alvaré. Helen Alvaré.

The pro-life movement is appropriately squeezing the “supply-side of abortion” through legislation focusing on ultrasounds and informed consent, as well as an expanding network of crisis pregnancy centers, said Alvare.

But what is being overlooked is “the demand-side of abortion” – the hook-up culture that often leads to unintended pregnancies too often aborted.

“Young women talking about what it's like out there in the market for sex, marriage, and mating will tell you they are not happy” with what Alvaré calls “the Unbearable Lightness of Sex.”

Planned Parenthood's murky view of sex – that it is a pitfall that can potentially lead to unwanted children whose existence will dash women's dreams forever – has distorted the procreative function and “taken all the fun out of sex.”

“We need to reconnect” physical intimacy with having children in people's minds, so they know that what they're doing "has meaning,” she said. “We need to reform our marriage laws as to entrance and exit – so we put marriage and children together.”

Statistics suggest solving marriage will, to a large extent, solve the abortion crisis. Some 85 percent of women who seek abortion are unmarried. Infidelity causes some married women to abort.

The present environment of strings-free sex benefits men, who feel no sense of responsibility toward the mother or child, and leaves isolated women alone to deal with single parenthood or the lingering guilt brought on through abortion, said Alvare.

“I think women would like to get married a little younger and have their children a little younger – so sue me,” she quipped.

A series of polls and a growing body of women's literature would back her up. Women are increasingly skittish about marrying late after a generation that is dealing with the reality of plunging fertility, which begins in the late 30s.

Researchers at the University of California-San Francisco recently found “that women did not have a clear understanding of the age at which fertility begins to decline," as they wrote after a recent poll, which they publicized in Human Reproduction.

Women in such liberal publications as Slate and The New Republic – both decidedly outside the pro-life camp – have noted the disappointment of women who learned too late the error of the feminist slogan, “you can have it all.”

Men, too, must man up to their responsibilities as fathers. “Of couse, we have to defeat the porn industry alongside that,” said Alvaré.

The daunting task of restoring a sense of healthy sexuality is all the more necessary because of the sexual revolution. There has been a massive increase in non-marital sex, illegitimacy, and abortions "since the widespread introduction of contraception, and there is no reason to believe this is going to end,” she said.

Such data convinced author Mary Eberstadt to write in her book Adam and Eve After the Pill that Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated Catholic Church teaching against contraception, has been vindicated. In Humanae Vitae the pope had predicted an increase in abortions, as well as infidelity, the devaluing of women and a general lowering of moral standards, as a result of the embrace of contraception.

“If you were to ask which document of modern times was the most unwanted and reviled document it would have be Humanae Vitae,” Eberstadt told LifeSiteNews.com last year. “Yet this document contains more truth about the sexual revolution and the world it would usher in than any other document.”

While full conformity with the view of the Catholic Church on contraception is likely too far to go in one step, beginning a national discussion about the real meaning, and consequences, of sex plays an irreplaceable role in changing a culture that countenances a million abortions a year.

“This is a revolution I'm talking about, but a revolution is needed,” Alvaré said. “I think a lot of women are ready for it.”

[papertyger]

There’s no dependent to transfer responsibility for if there’s no pregnancy.

Women prize security. They have that now with their “choice” of abortion, or legally forcing their partner to finance their decision to give birth.

Take away that legally mandated security, and they will act in their own best interests. We have failed to eliminate the former, so the obvious choice is going after the latter.

[MWestMom]

Any woman who believes that a man who supports her “right to have an abortion” is interested in her human rights is really stupid.

[TropicanaRose]

Thanks for sharing your thought process. You haven’t sold me on the idea, but I think I have a better idea where you’re coming from.

I agree that abstinence before marriage & faithfulness within marriage is the foundation of the pro-life position, but not every pro-lifer has thought the issue through to that conclusion yet.

I still think allowing men to get a paper abortion to avoid supporting their babies = fewer resources for the baby, unless you’re offering to pay the abortive dads’ share, which leaves the advocate of such a law vulnerable to the charge that they do not care about babies once they’re born. Other than the e*trade baby, babies consume more resources than they generate, so if the dad does not contribute, the full burden falls on the mom, & in our society when the burden falls solely on the mom, Uncle Sugar (using resources confiscated from taxpayers) quite often picks up the slack. While it is not fair that dads have no say in whether or not the mother of their unborn children has an abortion or not, it’s also unfair that taxpayers who have never met either mom or dad, much less had sex with them, are on the hook for supporting their offspring.

IMO the only way women will ever be back in the same jeopardy they were before easy abortion would be if (1) the welfare state is dissolved & (2) chastity becomes a virtue that people value again. Although maybe if all these men who are would-be abortive dads would first ask every woman they are about to have sex with to sign a form waiving any rights to child support in case the sex results in a pregnancy, that might cut down on some of the promiscuity ~ for those men, anyway.