Individual vs the family

 All the shouting on the latest SC kerfuffle on abortion ignores the real issues that have implications on law, government, and society.

both the abortion ruling and the EPA ruling that notes the bureaucracy overstopped it's mandate by expanding it's rules and power beyond what the law actually said, is about stopping rule by fiat, mainly by courts and bureaucrats which make it almost impossible to have popular input on the issue, let alone a public discussion of nuances.

Ann Althouse has a discussion of the EPA rollback from a legal point of view, discussing the problem of law by experts who know what is good for you and despise the hoi polloi:  quoting the Federalist papers and discovering that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot. Duh. 

and the rollback of the court's fiat in RoeVWade did overstop the court's authority,as even Judge Ginsburg noted. 

the dirty little secret is that, in view of an expected population crisis, many elites saw not just birth control, but abortion as a much needed policy to prevent a Malthusian crisis... and like Malthus they saw the problem not as too many babies but too many babies of poor people.

Indeed, the eugenics idea is strong in the planned parenthood movement from it's beginning: it is pushed with the idea that they would save women from dying from childbirth or illegal abortion and stop child abuse of unwanted kids. But Margaret Sanger and others also lived at a time when the Eugenics movement was strong, and there was a push to stop the unwashed ignorant folks from having babies (and in those days, this meant not just Blacks, but Jews, Italians, and Irish immigrants living in the slums).

we still see this today, at a time when the US and European governments and powerful NGOs push poor nations to legalize the sexual ethics of the west: sex education that encourages birth control for single high school girls, forcing hospitals to push birth control on women, and even do legal abortion over the religious objections of their employees (big issue here in the Philippines).

There is a subtle line between encouraging family planning (even Catholic law allows this) and pushing it on people (Indira Gandhi lost one election because of forced sterilization, and thousand in Peru were sterilized against their will).

So is limiting the number of children you have a way to help the poor get out of poverty, or about stopping the poor from overbreeding useless eaters?

Alas, both.

 The overpopulation myth of the west inspired China to implement their one child policy, and even the Iranian mullahs decided to push family planning to slow the growth of their population as a way to improve the economy.  China did this through monitoring women and forcing abortion, and the mullahs did this by pointing out that the prophet would approve of something that encouraged closeness of the spouses and the health of the wife and children who are harmed by excessive childbearing.

Reality check: What stops women from bearing eight kids is the knowledge that she will end up with eight kids to raise. (in the past, the childhood mortality was high, so you needed a lot of kids to insure a few would live to support you in your old age). 

With modern medicine, you can have two or three kids and stop, knowing they will probably all live. And with modern education and the modern economy, it's more expensive to raise kids (school fees etc.). Voila, even without coercion the number of children being born has dropped dramatically, so much that many countries are facing a population drop in the near future.

that is what Gates meant by saying that vaccines would lower the population: the paranoid say vaccines kill, but actually the vaccines, a clean water supply, basic medicine, etc. result in more children living, so parents decide they don't need to have eight kids to make sure two or three of them will live to adulthood.

But when I worked in Africa, every village had a "pill lady" to push birth control pills, but until we got grants to dig well, these same villages had to carry water from polluted streams, and until we got money for village health workers who could give out WHO rehydration fluid and simple medicines, the children often died of dehydration from simple diarrhea...

I'm not criticizing the pill ladies per se (they allowed us as a Catholic hospital to stay true to natural law). But it wasn't enough for the eugenics/population control types: which is why the same NGOs and western government pressuring poor countries to mandate abortion and also to allow gay rights in an area where male rape was used to terrorize the losing side in tribal wars and  where pedophilia of boys and girls by the powerful (both locals and colonial settlers) has a long history.

you can't just isolate women and say it's about control of her body: because the sexual revolution was more about normalizing promiscuity, something that mainly benefitted the alpha male ( ugly women and women over 40 are not the winners of the sexual revolution).

But the negative social effect of RvW and the Casey decision was the philosophy behind it: the idea of radical freedom that was blind to the reality that people do not live in isolation, but in families. 

Thousands of years of human experience on what makes a society livable is why every culture had rules about sex and marriage. True, they have different ideas, but essentially they protect women who are vulnerable and can get pregnant, and try to protect the child who is ever more vulnerable than the woman...

this often limited women in many ways, but what was the alternative? 

But modern medicine gave us an alternative, because it eliminated STDs and unwanted children and social welfare allowed women to get rid of putting up with those annoying men.

But no one outside of Catholic philosophers asked the vital questions: Cui Bono? Who benefits? And what happens when these rules are destroyed?

Roe and Casey decision essentially ignore this social ecology: they posit a reality that that it isolates the pregnant woman as a lone individual, ignroring the reality of relationships with lover and family. 

And only Catholic blogs seem to notice that this was being pushed at the same time that introduced no fault divorce, the sexual revolution that pushed women to be promiscuous, and a third wave feminism (that saw women as the same as men as someone who finds meaning only in her job, unlike earlier feminism that proposed women might want a job and want to be married.).

and only now are we seeing secular pushback as we see how the destruction of the idea of marriage and family has poisoned our children.

There is no way that abortion will be completely stopped: One hundred years ago illicit abortions did happen... my mother relates how, when a woman miscarried, my waspish grandmother would remark: I see she got rid of another one. And taking herbs to bring on a late period is not considered the same as taking a life in most societies. Psychologically there is a difference between a heavy period when you might or might not be pregnant, and dismembering a child that is part way out of the womb and who would live with proper care.

Sadly, society is not stronger if the baby is seen as the enemy and the woman seen as an isolated individual whose only goal in life is to mimic men and become workaholics and make money. 

So who cares for them when they are old? hint: The Canne Film festival just oohed and ahhed over a Japanese film where the elderly are killed off at age 75, justifying this because too many die alone and isolated in that country: here, ethicists like Callahan and Emmanuel posit doing this passively, by withholding care from the elderly.

and a dirty little secret about China and the covid epidemic is that, unlike here in the Philippines where we elders got the vaccine first, China did not make it a priority to vaccinate their elderly. (one reason they are having a big surge in covid right now)

Sigh.