Abortion, Guilt, and Conscience - Not an Outdated Concept

I was reading Instapundit, and found a link to a First Things article about moral choices.

Now, I'm definitely NOT a philosophical person. In matters of deep thinking that involves complex and high-level thought, I'm the own in the audience, nodding off. Just not my normal turn of mind.

This article, The Revenge of Conscience, is squarely aimed at people like me. It addresses the issues, without getting bogged down in esoteric hair-splitting. Kind of a Philosophy for Dummies version.

Most of us in the Baby Boom Generation, I think, learned about morality in the context of religious frameworks. Abortion was a tough sell to my generation, as it directly contradicted what had been hard-wired into our moral codes.

That effort to bring about changes in the abortion laws was specificially pushed by the women's magazines - Redbook, Cosmopolitan - and the general news magazines, as well. I remember Redbook having a lengthy series of articles on various forms of contraception. Life Magazine published multiple stories about the thalidomide babies (there were only a few in the United States, although many in Europe). Once people had begun to accept the idea of aborting children with major birth defects (or, those that had a good chance of having those defects), the push moved on to targeting Down's Syndrome babies.

Several prominent women told their stories of getting a prenatal diagnosis of Down's, and their decision to terminate their pregnancies. As I remember, the wife of a state politician went public with her decision, as well as a newscaster. Once the barrier to public disclosure of a procedure that was largely illegal at the time was broken, many women joined in public confession of their abortions, including a long list of women in Ms. Magazine.

Ms. magazine was certainly the most prominent supporter of abortion by mother's decision alone. They spent a lot of money working to push the stories by Planned Parenthood. After a while, you began to believe that a woman choosing NOT to abort was a freak.

The initial Right to Life movement was small, and widely perceived of as a fringe movement. It took decades to build up their organizations, and begin to have an effect on public opinion. Legislation had little effect, at first. The courts solidly supported abortion, and were loath to restrict it in any way.

UPDATE: The Supreme Court released the Dobbs decision today. As expected, the protestors are livid.

What does this mean?

One of the BIGGEST changes is that, in states that take advantage of the decision,  a pregnant woman only has to hide her pregnancy from anyone until after the 15th week. At that point, she can no longer be coerced or pressured to abort.