Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews vocally pounded support for abortion reduction as a public policy goal and as a means of moving past the culture wars, agreeing with Slate columnist Wiliam Saletan and chastising conservative guest Ken Blackwell for not embracing this middle ground approach.
The abortion reduction movement continues to gain steam. Watch the segment below.
To be fair, Chris Matthews has an agenda, pretending everyone is in with him. He is not even going to engage the opposing argument, avoiding altogether any sense of “hardball” or dialogue. So the entire segment is rendered pointless.
To really meet in the middle, one has to own up to what one means: Matthews is really saying “I want abortion to stay an available option and I don’t want to even think about when life begins.” The issue of how many people choose this option becomes secondary. Why fight to reduce abortions if one isn’t thinking that it’s a human being at stake? Matthews is just sticking to preconceptions. The Obama administration likewise hopes to stop talk of when life begins.
Yet the issue has always been and will continue to be that on one side people are talking about when life begins, on the other side people are talking about how intimate they (do not) want their government. No one wants government intruding in their bodies, this is not a “liberal” issue. If human life begins at conception this would not be a “conservative” opinion, but simply facing up to reality. So both sides have emotional imperatives they can claim universal.
Both sides are faced with huge obstacles. Talk of “middle ground” is senseless until these are adequately addressed. For the pro-choice camp (which Matthews/Obama ought to own up to): if human life does not begin at conception, then when does it? For the pro-life camp, if human life does begins at conception, then what do we do with miscarriages, failed implantations, life-threatening pregnancies, and other cases when we clearly do not view the fetus as a full-fledged member of our species or society?
I would say that any hope of resolving this issue will have to be philosophically apt in defining what it means to be human, and not just pragmatically hoping to reduce (for no apparent reason?) a particular medical practice’s popularity.
I think it is rather presumptuous be be declaring what the “middle ground” is. What this really is is a thinly disguised attempt to redefine truth.
It’s nothing more than a Darwinian view of the human person. “While it’s a lofty goal – the “truth” is you can’t POSSIBLY control yourself so be “realistic” and use birth control”.
Well the truth is birth control leads to abortion – and I cite no less an authority than the Supreme Court of the United States:
“in some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception . . . . for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
~ Planned Parenthood v. Casey