Abortion as a counterintuitive social virtue.

There has been talk of late about states with Republican majorities using that political power to ban abortions. I think this is a mistake. This is a partisan issue that will only seek to alienate people who might otherwise support them.

There are a good many people who are in favor of smaller government, lower taxes, and a society where busybodies from the state aren't sticking their nose in everyone's business. But when this is tied to a platform of outlawing abortion, you lose a whole lot of people who have nowhere to go but into the arms of the left. It doesn't have to be this way.

Abortion is an issue that most people feel very strongly about, one way or the other, and the only way to reach those whose beliefs are different is through communication. The desire to save the lives of the unborn is admirable, but attempting to hijack the state and use its monopoly on force to achieve that goal is not. People are not made more virtuous through tyranny. Abortion opponents should work on using the soap box to persuade, not the ballot box to coerce.

Abortion is also good for society. Let me explain why. The value of abortion comes from its long-term effect upon the quality of our gene pool.

Lets say you have two women. Woman A is a responsible and conscientious. She generally makes good choices in life, and learns from her mistakes so they are not repeated. She doesn't sleep around. If she does have sex, it is with someone she loves, and she always takes care to use effective contraceptives until such time as she chooses to start a family. If she does become pregnant unintentionally, she either finds a way to make motherhood part of the plan for her life, or at the very least works to ensure that her child is adopted by a loving family.

Woman B is irresponsible. She engages in self destructive and self-limiting behaviors. She does not understand how the choices she makes affects herself and others. She is incapable of learning from experience. She seeks to blame other people for her own mistakes, or at the very least throw the consequences of those mistakes onto others instead of shouldering them herself. If she becomes pregnant, she pushes the consequences of that choice onto her unborn child in the form of an abortion, or onto her family who then have to raise that child, or onto the taxpayers who now have to subsidize her dysfunction through the dole.

Which woman do YOU want to see passing her genes on to the next generation?

The left makes a great deal of noise about abortion in terms of a woman's right to choose. This is an interesting argument. It is dishonest in that it pretends a pregnancy is something that simply happens spontaneously. A pregnancy is not a cold. It isn't something you catch because someone standing in line behind you at Starbucks sneezed. Pregnancy is the result of a deliberate act that requires a deliberate choice: the choice to have sex. Abortion (as birth control) isn't about a woman's right to choose, but about a woman pushing the consequences for the choice she already made onto someone else, in this case her unborn child.

Freedom is power. With power comes responsibility. Women have the power to sleep with just about anyone they choose, any other consenting adult. Worthwhile women accept responsibility for the choices they make. Women who aren't so worthwhile attempt to avoid that responsibility. Which woman is going to make a good parent? Which woman is going to raise a child to be a productive and responsible member of society? Which woman is more likely to be a conservative or libertarian and produce a child who will be the same, both genetically and by virtue of upbringing?

In most cases something that allows people to shirk their responsibilities would be a bad thing, but in the case of abortion it helps keep losers from breeding, which makes it a net positive. Let conservative and libertarian women have kids. Let leftists and their victims among the underclass have none. Rinse and repeat until such time as the latter are rare and the former ubiquitous.