Abortion-on-Demand Revisited

When I started in the early years of this century to apply a consistent analysis of the consumer revolution that had begun to assemble itself in the 1950s and some aspects of the sexual revolution that  had come in its wake (See Meditations on Post-Modernity at http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1576546-Meditations-on--Postmodern... )  it started to dawn on me that some of the rather blithe assumptions of my youth lacked sufficient substance to withstand rigorous critical inspection; particularly the ideology coming out from the now old New Left libertarian laissez-faire human rights crowd.  But change in my attitudes was slow in coming, for ‘progressivism’ had once been my ideological meat and drink.

In any event, it wasn’t until the last two years when I started to write a critical evaluation of the equalitarian/equivalence claims of the homosexual lobby and to analyze  the status of non-reproductive relationships, (‘Caligula’s Horse’ at:http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1660079-Caligulas-Horse  and then ‘Confessions of a Homophobe’, at: http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1893090-Confessions-of-a-Homophobe... that ‘questions’ started to arise in relation to the abortion ‘debate’ in the 1960s.

It started to become obvious to me just how poorly constructed the ideological fabrication of the sexual ‘revolution’ really was.  Although the abortion debate seemed important as a free standing  issue with large consequences in its own right, it was actually a fairly small tranche amongst much more powerful sets of ideas, technological changes and cultural moves.  And it was this that gave pro-abortion protagonists their credibility and persuasiveness.  Shifting attitudes towards the legalization of abortion practice didn’t just suddenly come out of the ether, swinging by their own bootstraps.  If that had been the case, they would have been a much more manageable force to be reckoned with.

Twenty years earlier, had our outstandingly successful local pro-abortion campaigner, Dr Bertram Wainer, tried to defy the abortion laws the way he did in 1969, he would have been unceremoniously thrown into jail, had his licence to practice as a Doctor cancelled and would have fallen into a deep social disgrace that only obscurity and collective forgetfulness would eventually erase.  And no one would have dared to defend him publicly, for fear that some measure of that fierce opprobrium would fall on them.


As I sifted through the history of the sexual revolution, I started noticing that while there was a political environment of conflict  between capitalist ‘progressivism’ and its ‘progressivist’ ideological critics, there were a peculiarly well aligned set of agendas between free trade deregulation and marketed freedom of consumer choice on the one hand, and on the other, sexual/social/moral deregulation and politically laissez-faire libertarian freedom of choice.  It seemed to me, that however noisy the disagreements were between these elements of indulgence capitalism and its mainly state employed critics, their underlying agendas were mutually legitimizing and synergistically reinforcing.

I also noticed an equally synchronous sub-axis between both the production and consumption side of industrial sexual politics and the emergence of  ‘sexistentialist’ and feminist ideologies.

On the one hand there was the migration of female labor into the production side of a peacetime civil version of an all out war production economy needing wartime levels of female labor input on a  permanent basis.  And on the other, there was the commodification of female sexuality and sexual pleasure within the goods and services economy, using marketing and media machines to run by far the biggest and most protracted propaganda bombardment campaign in the history of mass communications and consciousness management.  Advertising  and entertainment juggernauts flattened anything that got in the way of iconic consumer fantasies and whims that might slow down the burgeoning competitive  production ‘warfare’ of latter day capitalism.

This was ideologically matched on the one hand by the emerging notion that sexuality and sexual release formed the ground of our being and ‘identity’, and our profoundest sense of the sublime, and on the other, demands for major civil and private shifts in the gender status of women.  Both would give ideological expression to and legitimation for the underlying industrial shifts.

‘Liberation’ and ‘progress’ conflated the worlds of producer, consumer, sexual and political freedom of choice; just as the axis of wants, needs and rights conflated the worlds of fantasy, necessity and entitlement; just as the sexual commodification of women conflated with their increasingly sexploitatitive availability that conflated with gender political equality with men; just as the world of reproduction was conflated with the world of ‘sexuality’; just as the traditional intensification of exploitation of alienated labor and natural resources conflated with intensification of exploitation of alienated consumer behavior and consciousness,

The sexual revolution grew out of the advancement of consumer capitalism.  It became the prime embodiment of its economic values, as pleasure and giving in to its every blandishment  became the paramount leverage for mass consciousness.  Sex became the ultimate marketing tool and product idealtype that turned women into consumables and consumables into sexual icons to enhance their marketable promotability.

‘Liberating’ women from the constraints of the past was not liberation so much as setting them up to be exploited for their labor, sexuality and sexual availability.


I noticed that over time that the central agenda for getting women out of domestic productivity into its industrial equivalent was not just to use time made available by reduced fertility and the increased labor saving mechanization in the domestic environment, but to effectively strip labor resources out of it.  While all the right ideological noises were made, there was never a question of reducing the male industrial effort to plug the holes left in the domestic infrastructure by the migration of women towards industrial labor.

On the contrary, overtime, second jobs, shift work, self employed contracting and new business building increased hours of labor, as did the pressures on the continually ratchetting consumer standard-of-living bottom line.  The much anticipated work reduction dividend from new technology labor saving devices did not materialize.  Rather it intensified work processes, reduced costs and increased output at ever more attractive prices to suck in ever more intensive consumption, debt and finding more income to pay for it.  Whatever vague promises had been made by males  to increase their labor time at home beyond mowing the lawns, they were mostly honored in the breach.

Most women found the industrialization of their labor simply added to their original workload while degrading their traditional service levels in the domestic environment, leaving them stuck with relatively unhelpful partners and/or exhausting themselves in their efforts to compensate for the losses in their traditional workplace.

And to their chagrin, their original domestic workload continued to inhibit their opportunities to compete in the traditional economic world of men, except as mainly auxiliaries and assistants.  Their opportunities for promotion to the higher management  levels was systematically inhibited not just by a ‘glass ceiling’ put there by ‘the boys club’, but the inability to marshal the kind of domestic assistance that is necessary to anyone entering higher office of any sort; assistance that can only be gained from a partner prepared to put their own industrial career ambitions to one side; something that most males have been and are unwilling to do.

To make things even more difficult for women, libertarian indulgence did away with the usual firmness with testosteronal adolescent boys.  Women are disciplined by the demands of their reproductive machinery, the software that comes with it and the eventual looming menopausal doorway.  Boys are not so constrained, and the onset of testosterone flushes makes them think they are gods and the center of the universe, which means they need to be taught otherwise.  Failure to effect this means boys fail to grow up into disciplined men.  So they become overgrown children instead, for their future wives or partners to carry on top of their own brood.

Lots of women became embittered, as it gradually dawned on them that their theoretical ‘equality’ was an over demanding and exhausting  mongrel that had left them in the lurch.  Worse, as their attention was shifted to other work sites, their children were unobtrusively disappeared through a digital mirror into consumerland, and were no longer theirs, for they were now the property of the spades in suits, down at Wonderland Inc.

Just to add insult to the injury, at every turn, they saw themselves and their sexuality daubed and smeared across a production feast where they were the edible garnish and decoration.  Sex sells and females get to be stars in a show that stretches all the way from being vacuously smiling and pouty product and service queens, to pornographic priestesses.

Then, when they thought they they could escape the sexual straightjackets of the past, they found themselves ‘liberated’ into first date gimmes and no second chances if they didn’t deliver, minus  inconvenient and emotionally messy entanglements, while paying their own way as ‘equals’ to boot. 

If they didn’t feel like it, or wanted a bit more time to check out what was  trying to get into their pants, “Well what’s the matter bitch?  Are you a frigid dyke or something?”.  The boys don’t like being kept waiting.  Girls are supposed to ‘like it’, just like the boys do, because they are ‘equals’ now, as if their sexuality and sensibility hung off the outer casing of their bodies, in the same way it does with boys.

‘Friends-with-benefits’ meant female ‘friends’.  For boys, it went without saying.  They are always ‘friends-with-benefits’, or at least they think they are.  And the girls become good for a quick ‘friendly’, much in the same way that homosexuals have always been; you know, no hassles sex without the hang ups and gratuitous attachments that a traditional woman would almost always bring up, just because she had ‘done it’.

Being equal became synonymous with being available.  And that could so easily spill over into not just becoming a sexual servant, but a sexual consumable stripped of any humanity, in a milieu of alienated consciousness that commodifies women.


The economic drivers of Indulgence Capitalism gradually conflated with, then colonized and finally pulverized everything they touched, from ecosystems to social/political ones and the psycho-social software that made sense of them. And in the process, an economic system that had revolutionized the means of production and distribution, and deregulated and privatized its ecological, economic, social and ideological commons, now closed in on consciousness, to wrap it in a totalitarianism fully optioned with democratic features and ‘free’ choices, that would eventually blunt disciplined critical thought, bowdlerize key moral and philosophical terms, paralyze non market social governance and infrastructure and corrupt the social and economic elites who were supposed to be stewarding them.

Thus it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between 'empathy'/'compassion' and an uncritical soft touch, 'freedom' and license/disinhibition/life-without-boundaries, 'justice' and sectional interest, 'fairness' and special pleading, respect for rights and indulgence, 'discrimination' and critical discernment , 'judgementality' and exercising ordinary judgment, 'prejudice' and reasonable belief, 'compromise' and being compromised, 'authoritarianism' and firmness, 'flexibility' and weakness, concern for 'the value of human life' and cowardice/lack of resolve, 'dissent' and treason, 'repression' and discipline, 'abuse' and toughness, 'assault' and chastisement.

Distinguishing ‘disadvantage’ and irresponsible and dysfunctional moral inconsequentiality, ‘individualism’ and egoism, ‘plausibility’ and integrity, and excuse making and honest justification, became all but impossible.

Indulgent and fantasy driven desire became synonymous with wants, wants with ‘needs’, needs with ‘rights’, human rights with consumer entitlement, and ‘democracy’ with consumer satisfaction.

‘Love’ conflated with lust, eroticism and adolescent narcissism, sexuality/sexual fantasy with 'identity', gender with biological sex 'homophobia'/'transphobia' with reproductive consciousness and sexual ‘alternativism’ with sexual corruption, parody, infantilism and/or cruelty.

‘Equality’ turned into creative equivalencing that legitimized reward for the incompetent, promotion of the unqualified, penalizing the industrious and in the name of equality, exploiting the unequal in waters out of their depth.

Whatever truth values had been originally embedded in the human rights movement, as part of the post World War Two democratic response to traditional state sponsored totalitarianism, European imperialism and racism, their longer term effect was to dishonestly corrupt and obfuscate political discourse into a barrage of negative clichés and soggy indulgences.

As time went by, this was all too often ‘crying wolf’ in order intimidate and silence opposition by using devices suspiciously similar to prejudice, judgmentality and stereotyping, to create critical vacuums around increasingly questionable ideological ‘sacred sites’, in whose defense the aggression used was increasingly in direct proportion to their tendentiousness.

Not dissimilarly to the degradation of Marxism-Leninism into Soviet Cominternspeak during the 1930s, ideological discourse fudged and then hollowed out into name calling, sloganeering, oracular declamation, regime history rewriting, retrospective moral revisionism and the labeling language of heresy or political deviationism, as the sanctimonious petty bourgeois Humanist Ascendancy Regime Apparatchiks cleaned out the ideological leftovers of the pre-capitalist and ‘imperialist’ periods, sometimes using the classic techniques of discredit and delegitimation used in Soviet show trials to entrench their own power, regime privileges, ideological immunity and that of their children.......in the name of poor, marginalized and dispossessed minorities (mass constituencies no longer being within their reach)...but keeping their wretched clients mysteriously stuck/excused/justified exactly where they presently are, and will remain.....indefinitely.

In their wake, marketing, advertising and entertainment behemoths took control of mass social consciousness, freed not just from obsolete past constraints, but anything.  The wholesale removal of fuddy duddy old fashioned traditional values did not produce replacement autonomy controls, but a libertarian social management vacuum that available commercial inputs could easily fill, right under the collective nose, without anyone realizing the enormity of the substitution that had occurred.

The giveaway was the systematic unbundling and marginalization of the corresponding mirror obligations that underwrite every social entitlement or benefit.  It was a sign of the times when children were given human rights without first being trained to social obedience, respect and mature responsible judgment.  Instead they were trained to market obedience as consumer Peter Pans and Wendys living in an electronic Never Never Land, run by Wonderland Inc, where they didn't ever have to grow up.

The disappearance of powerful training mentoring within disciplined social management models meant traditional adulthood was traded in on the ever newer one of the adolescent consumer idealtype: The Consumerbabelet, who is now as fully under the control of ‘the proud sponsors’ and the Pied Pipers of Cool, as Mao’s young Red guards in China were in the 1960s, when adult society was set upon and brought to heel by its political master, using its children.

The Cultural revolution collapsed under the welter of its own violence. Mao died.  But in The West, the children’s revolution goes on, like some terrible infantile inter-generational disorder, that leaves mass populations stripped of all their social software, except the production drivers and consumer responders.

All the great totalitarians of the twentieth century tried to interpose themselves between parents and their children.  But none of them have had even remotely the protracted and profound success of indulgence capital and its libertarian acolytes in the twenty-first.


A writing project that started as a deconstruction of latter-day consumer capitalism gradually coalesced into a visionary set of perspectives that embraced precepts of sustainable use of ecological, economic, social, gender and existential assets; that we conserve and treasure not just our environment, but life itself as a supreme value (biophilia) so that our descendants inherit some sort of future worth having; that we rebuild our very damaged social commons and compass, so it can reshape a trashy, self indulgent and alienated form of  self absorbed egoism back into socially balanced consciousness; and that the social and ‘character’ software that grounds and secures individuals and their communities can deliver meaning,  respect and solid, disciplined values worth passing on as existential and social capital to future generations.

What started off as an analysis of how an economic system can ravage everything around it and in it, then cascaded into an analysis of a very new kind of totalitarian despotism that I called the Golden Gulag. (Gulag was a term for the slave camps dotted all over the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period, that was popularized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the 70s, in his ‘Gulag Archipelago’).  It is an unwalled prison for ‘the free’, full of inviting escapes that always return, for prisoners are held not by guards or barbed wire, but visions of paradise, proudly brought to them by the sponsors.  They are destroyed not by slave labor and the lash, but contractual arrangements and productivity demands, that turn them into ghosts, just as surely as the slave camps of old.  And the pace and intensity just keeps getting faster and harder to the point that the world becomes a charnel house, whether it is producing air freshener or poison gas.


The politics of principled feminism gelled with the recruitment requirements of all out production warfare and the ‘carpet bombing’ of civil society with consumer ‘ordinance’.  The latter overwhelmed the former from the beginning, asset stripping and smashing up domestic life in the process, making way for the biggest mass walkout on domestic relationships in history.

This catastrophe did not lead to any attempt to reconstruct and stabilize the infrastructure of intimate relationships so much as smoothe its disintegration and facilitate further serial devastation.  Domestic life took on the precarious existence of a city under attack .  Laissez-faire political consciousness normalized and legitimized this status quo as an inevitable part of life and rejected any concept that this was a systemic rather than personal failure of the parties involved.

Gender reconstruction and training regimes along feminist lines that would guarantee equitable and stable relationship bottom lines did not facilitate the kind of economic activity that household breakups and restarts brought in their wake.  And their ideological substance would at some point obstruct the totalitarian vacuuming of social labor and infrastructure that capital demanded of civil society.  So feminist political agenda and gender reconstruction, that might actually change something for the better, never got enough oxygen to be anything but a colorful academic sideshow.

The really difficult re-alignments of gender power necessary to rebalance post-traditional reproductive relationships would have required substantial root and branch shifts in the way economic value and productivity were measured and allocated.  It would have to change the way capitalist economies regarded wealth and accounted for it.  Rather like environmental ‘services’, the domestic economy simply wasn’t and isn’t recognized as part of the monetized wealth infrastructures, delivering critical ‘economic’ inputs and outputs, able to command substantial ‘economic sector’ status and regulatory protection, and prevent unaudited and covert looting of its ‘account lines’. Unmonetized and unaccounted for, such looting was made invisible and portrayable as ‘liberating’ women from the shackles of the past.

What consumer capitalism did was to put  the desperate temporary expedients of total war and national emergency on a permanent basis, by continuing to strip the domestic sector of its labor and relationship infrastructure.  ‘Society’ could withstand that kind of withdrawal of resources for the duration of the war, but to do it as standard practice on an indefinite basis simply caused civil society to gradually eviscerate itself.  And women in particular and the system of social reproduction in general became the victims of extremist economic violence.

‘Families’ where both parents ‘work’ full time and their children are parented by the sponsors, aren’t so much social units as a burnt out shells full of shop troops under constant fire from product and service ordinance, that turns them into consumer fodder.  And now a third generation of McWarfare veterans has arrived, that knows absolutely nothing else...


The emergence of the abortion ‘issue’ came with the turf almost as a ‘tidying up’ side issue.  It came as part of  a range of interlinked social and economic trends, and the final clinchers to make them co-ordinate smoothly were the delivery of reliable contraception and anti-biotic drugs, which removed most of the risks of pregnancy and/or venereal disease.  Multiple partner casual sex became ‘safe’, at least for a while.  Abortion on demand merely acted as a backstop if there were any ‘slip ups’ that might lead to embarrassing and/or unprepared for and/or financially inconvenient outcomes.

To make abortion a respectable option, it was reconstructed as a ‘victimless’ ‘procedure’, surrounded by anodyne medicalized terminology that magically deprived what was being removed of any separate existence from the body of his or her mother; i.e., a ‘thing’ with the same status as tonsils or an appendix.  Late term abortions might be a bit tough on the operating staff as they killed something that looked human, but antiseptically clean and technologically reassuring operating theatres, anesthetic and discreet aftercare, screened everybody else from the unpalatable fact that something obviously alive had just been turned into a corpse.

To make abortion a respectable option, its opponents had to be delegitimized with an avalanche of ridicule, ideological and moral assertion, ‘scientific’ justification, and best of all, pointing out the emergently obvious; that the traditionalist  ‘pro life’ bastions and their police enforcers were already so undermined and/or corrupted, they couldn’t be taken seriously by ‘rational and just’ people.

Twenty years of erosion of traditionalist thinking by emerging consumerist markets and later telecommunication media conditioning from the middle fifties had taken their toll.  Desperate attempts to hold back the tide by still extant traditional authorities only confirmed that they were out of step with the times and living on borrowed time. Increasingly they became targets of mockery and contempt.

Policemen may not be all that smart, but even they could see enough writing on the wall to turn a blind eye or accept a bribe.  A single campaigner like Doctor Wainer could (with a little help from his friends) destroy what was left of anti-abortion legislation and policing system almost ridiculously easily.

Quite small, but influential ‘grassroots’ front organization with promisingly liberating names boasting media savvy people behind them and fronted by earnestly outraged and attractive young mouthpieces, would bombard audiences with campaign slogans.  Celeb ‘experts’ would keep raising ‘controversial’  media opinion and ‘debate’, and strategically placed journalists would regularly produce ‘thoughtful’ and ‘articulate’ pieces on ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’.

Against this juggernaut were pitted ageing, humorless, thin lipped, balding and bespectacled defenders of the old order, who clearly had absolutely no idea what they were up against, or why the ideological carpet kept being pulled from under them.  They trotted out the old armamentarium of once persuasive ideological musketry, only to be overwhelmed by automatic breech loading publicrelationsmarketingspeak.  And what a bunch of losers they looked!

The Catholic Church position was also weakened not just by the advances of secularism, but also an inconsistent position that declared the life of the unborn as ‘innocent’ and ‘sacrosanct’, but failed to be quite so unequivocal once the the little beasty popped out of its mother’s tummy and became a social animal.  Executing people and sending them to war was not an insuperable theological problem.  The last auto da fe execution for heresy was conducted by church authorities in Mexico as late as 1850.  Life wasn’t that sacred.

The extraordinary irony was and is that the Church’s main opponents in this matter have a horror of executions and wars, but think that the unborn are ‘subhuman’ to be killed at will, for any reason at all, or none.

The Catholic notion of the creation of a soul at the very moment of conception was an idea made obsolescent by the advent of science, that did without philosophical dualisms and sought only demonstrable cause and effect in the single dimension of the observable world.  Biology doesn’t do souls.  So debunking the soul argument wasn’t that hard.

But paradoxically, this gave rise to notions in the secular imagination of ‘personhood functionalism’ that were every bit as dualistic as their defunct predecessors, because what they were saying was, if the new organism in the pregnant woman had not reached certain critical growth benchmarks, its ‘essence’ as a human being, its ‘personhood’, did not exist.  Ergo, it wasn’t ‘human’ and therefore could be considered as mere ‘unrealized’ biological ‘stuff’, and thus, without legal or human rights.

In a much more general way, we seculars carry in our intellectual baggage a dualistic conceptual landscape that is just a secular version of the traditional essence/substance models of reality.  When we talk about genetics, we continue to imagine that there is still a yawning difference between the idea and its actualization, between the software and the hardware, between the plan and the building, between the genetic instruction and the growth it triggers; as if these things were quite separate and discrete.

In our imagined reality, that is how things appear to us, but in genetics, self unfolding and inflating sequenced cell division growth comes straight out of the instruction template itself, fully armed and queued, the moment the organism goes live and is feeding and excreting wastes.  He or she seamlessly go on doing that until he/she is fully grown into adulthood, whether it be growing a heart or bringing sexual organs on line at adolescence.

The genetic code is a biological instruction set,  but on activation, it becomes the 3D printer and its product all rolled into one, on cell division one, in the first seconds of life.

A tree seed starts to germinate and bud into a tree the moment it is introduced to water, long before it emerges out of the soil with a proper root feeding system and starts to photosynthesize in sunlight.  So it is with humans.

To use a military analogy, in 1940, the Germans smashed their way into France on initially narrow fronts, but backed up by a mechanized and armored van going back as much as eighty kilometers from the front.  As the initial assault force broke through, the van shuffled forward in its wake, like the shaft of an arrow, in a continuous breakthrough maneuver which then broke out into sub forces to cut off the French front from its key communications and transport nodes to its rear.

At the moment of initial assault, 80-90% of the German force was militarily inactive and queued for action, but it was not some abstraction or theoretical entity.  It was ‘there’ and waiting to go, and started moving forward immediately as the initial assault force broke through.  Every one of the soldiers in that van had in their heads exactly what they needed to do in accordance with the detailed military plan produced by the military command.

In some measure, this is what happens when the first cells divide after the sperm breaks through into the egg.  All the genetic instructions queue in an orderly manner for their turn in the life break out.  All the genetic ‘troops’ that make up the van of an entire individual are ‘there’, like the military van, just as surely as they are at any other stage of the growth process, as it spreads out towards its strategically directed ‘territorial’ growth targets.

From the very second it comes into being, the emergent human is a separate living individual that is continuously meeting his or her own biological goals.  Almost immediately, he or she delivers them within his or her own self designing and self building containment system, after he or she has had a first meal out of the ovum egg leftovers and attached him or herself to the womb wall. 

And while being a mother is a very big job, she is ‘only’ providing the biological real estate, the services infrastructure to the placenta, and  providing raw materials, energy, water, hormone ‘telemetry’  and oxygen to it, and transporting wastes and fetal instructions on the way out.  These human organisms never share their mother’s blood supply.

The placenta and the planning, raw materials processing, manufacturing and assembly that goes on inside it, is the new organism’s own business and his or her relationship to the mother is that of client and service provider, as he or she  remains until the organism is ready to go his or her own way as a mature adult.

I challenge anyone to find a biological textbook that does not confirm that a quite separate, unique and self determining life begins at conception.  First cell division human organisms aren’t sacred objects with an absolute right to life anymore than the rest of us, but they do have human value because they are as human then as at any other stage of their lives.

The emerging human organism has a developmental growth taxonomy that enables us to provide well rationalized stages of development, but to use them to interpose some ideological view as to when a ‘valid’ human life begins is just pseudo scientific nonsense.  We are all going through ‘a life stage’ until we die and ‘a growth stage’ until we fully mature.  And all of them are a seamless part of a single life entity and history, from the very beginning, to the very end.

For purposes of justifying our killing 'it', we invent ‘biological’ criteria of ‘personhood’ to define away his or her ‘humanity’.  We invest particular biological growth markers that we use to rationalize the killing, with ‘scientific’ and humanitarian sounding  reassurance; no brain, lungs or blood supply.  ‘It’ can’t ‘think’ to fear ‘its’ own death or register pain or anguish.  ‘It’ hasn’t even got a heart.  ‘It’ is ‘just’ a  microscopic ‘pre-embryo’, so it’s OK to squash ‘it’, as if  ‘it’ were a cockroach or a mosquito.

Zygotes and embryos may in biological terms be ‘thinking’ very hard about what they are doing and managing a range of variables that would easily confound the best and biggest engineering, design and building teams on the planet, but they just aren’t going to be able to recognize and deal with an attack from ‘outer space’.  ‘Intelligence’ isn’t necessarily just neural consciousness.  An unlocking activated genetic code growth sequence involves colossal amounts of biological data flow.  At around 1.5 gigabytes per cell and a hundred trillion of them at maturity, even after a week, the operation is complex, large, well organized and very fast.

And if we don’t destroy this individual early enough to justify the too-small-to-matter-nothing status, we have a fallback position of ‘viability-outside-the-womb’.  That takes us towards the end of the second trimester.  You know, if 'it' can’t survive ex utero it can’t be a ‘person’, because it can’t live in the world of other persons.  We define being ‘a person’ as a social ‘someone’ who we can interact with on ‘the outside’.  Human rights only apply to the socially capable.  When they ‘terminate’ ‘it’, ‘it’ sure looks like a person, but no worries.  It doesn’t qualify for legal protection because the law says it isn’t a legal person.  Voila.  And as long as one doesn’t think too hard about what has to be done, that is pretty cool if one needs to get rid of ‘it’.

Don’t you sometimes wish that you could do that with babies that scream too much?  Perhaps the inability to speak and understand speech  is another ‘pre-person stage’, which could be sufficient grounds for ‘terminating’ ‘ it’.  We could kill ‘it’ nicely in the sanitized surroundings of an operating theatre, using satisfactorily established bureaucratic ‘scientific’ criteria, such as the mother’s ‘mental health’ and the infant’s pre-speech sub human status.  And why not?  We already know that there are too many people on the planet and this is used as a rationale for reducing female fertility.  So, why not have an extra stage of ‘terminability’, as part of a new ex utero fourth ‘quadrimester’ that gives women a try-before-you-buy option.  What could be a fairer consumer choice than that?

The myth of ‘personhood’ and ‘someoneness’ is an ideological construct that bears no relation at all to the biological process that goes on from scratch to maturity.  At best it is a statement of our emotional engagement with a character that was always there in his or her own biological space, but now is in our social space.  In the womb, he or she is unknown and anonymous in the way that any living entity is that is out of our ken, or lives in distant places.  He or she is an abstraction, who is just plain easier to get rid of than one we know and recognize as a co-socializer, with whom we can now form social attachment.

Any society that wasn’t running some very powerful economic, social and ideological agendas to the contrary, would instantly recognize the non person status of the early developing individual as both dishonest and set on ridiculously wobbly intellectual foundations.  And its protagonists were able to get away with using them because they were part of an economic tidal wave that carried with it a broad agenda of deregulatory and libertarian ideological shifts across all areas of life, that swept all before it, burying its opposition as it went.


“And what about the rights of women over what goes on in their bodies?”, I hear you ask.  She has the same right as anyone else to remove any foreign object or tissue from herself that is hers.  What she does not have is a right to kill someone else, who just happens to be residing inside her, in good health, as part of his or her usual first nine months of life, as a result of ordinary sex that she consented to.  As the still very fashionable Kahlil Gibran famously stated, “Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.  They come through you but not from you.  And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”

No human organisms at any stage of their lives belong to anyone except themselves.  And for parents to pretend that they can arbitrarily be the arbiter of the life and death of their progeny is no more legitimate than the old power of masters and mistresses to kill their slaves.

What she does have a right to do is defend her body against anything that will be reasonably foreseeably compromise her health.  And that does not include feeling upset or depressed because she doesn’t want a baby and doesn’t want to deal with a predictable consequence of her sexual behavior!  The ‘mental health issue’ was always a corrupt psychiatry crib really meant to deal with issues of say a mother with known and documented suicidal, self harming, or other serious psychopathic tendencies, that would likely compromise her or the child during the pregnancy.

And it goes without saying that she cannot be bound to carry a life that was forced on her by an act of sexual violence.

Choosing to terminate a pregnancy is not even vaguely the same as some sort of quasi consumer ‘choice’.  Having to kill anyone is never just an individual ‘choice’, but a very serious social necessity, which needs to be sanctioned by legal/social  process that puts firm parameters around that possibility.  And in this category would fall issues arising from discovering that the fetus is significantly defective or damaged.

If a man and woman really don’t want to reproduce, then the answer is plainly, don’t have sex.  If they do, then the partners should ensure against the outcome as carefully as possible, knowing that the possibility of  pregnancy is a major (though not necessarily likely) risk they are prepared to live with.  Pregnancy is never just ‘an accident’.  And in my view, for a couple to enter sexual congress without a willingness to accept the responsibility of a long term reproductive partnership in the event of pregnancy, are being inconsequential and willful in their thinking.


But of course when it comes to equal involvement in having to deal with pregnancy, women are ‘much more equal than others’. The reality is that her partner is a bystander.

Men who are not emotionally committed to a partner and parenting are likely to have far fewer inhibitions about ridding themselves of inconvenient trailing edges like a child in the making, because life sits as lightly on them as their genitalia do, outside the main casing of their bodies. Women who own virtually 100% of the life sustaining reproductive machinery, are regularly, uncomfortably and sometimes painfully reminded of it, and its hazards, and how pervasive biophilic feeling is in their consciousness.

Having the right to kill her child is a terrible price for acquiring some of the same sexual  inconsequentiality as men.  Most men have no idea just how tough abortion can be on a woman, however good the technology and service environment is for getting it done.

And this is why sexual equality is a distorted construct that is actually more about men, who when they find out they are prospective fathers, can have the problem removed without hassles, as a result of the power of yes; yes to the ease of  pressuring her to get rid of the unwanted when pregnancy does happen, yes to a more sexually willing female than otherwise, if convenient ‘termination’ weren't available, and yes to intimate relationships that don’t have to go anywhere because the politics of their intimacy is casual and irresponsible.  That is a mainly male fantasy.  Yes, women do go along with it, sometimes wholeheartedly, for a while.  But I think ‘going along’ is the operative word.  And in contemplating the politics of this, female equalitarian ‘empowerment’ is not the word that immediately springs to mind, because the equality on offer is inside a male paradigm.

The union of men and women is supposed to be about life, not death.  It is supposed to be about protracted and sustainable relationships, not casual ones.  It is supposed to be about values that will mentor the next generation, so that they can carry on not just the species, but the gender and sociophilic stability modeling that all human beings are supposed to get from their parents, i.e., all the virtues that we see falling to pieces around us as self-indulgent egoism takes front and center stage in everything we do.

What passes for 'love' has become just another cliché within an alienated consciousness detached from the consequential realities of protracted and extremely demanding relationships.  'Love', like the consumer paradigm itself, has become a form of sexual commodification that only attends to the pleasures and gratifications of sex, instead of the deep engagement and responsibility sharing of reproduction.  Love is hard work.  And desire and its gratification are but a small component of its larger reward, once it has been earned.  Nobody really 'falls' in love.  It is just a nice verbal package expressing sexual attraction for someone you barely know, and committed to nothing except fulsome sentiments and erotic fantasies.


Over the post war period, the consumer society assembled a set of licenses for individuals to indulge themselves in whatever whim or desire they wanted.  And anything that got in the way or might restrain that was systematically removed by a coalition of Libertarian laissez-faire economic, social and political forces.

Despite the fact that sexual congress would always risk a pregnancy, albeit a very reduced one amongst those who were careful and responsible, it was an ever present specter hanging over its pleasures.  Since nobody was able to morally question non reproductively intentioned sex anymore, the only question left was to ask how we could ‘reasonably’ get rid of unwanted reproductive product without ‘forcing’ people into the illegal ‘backyard’ abortion trade.

To put this into some sort of perspective, in the pre-consumerist period, only people regarded as totally unscrupulous would go for an abortion, because they knew that killing unborn children was wrong.  As to the rest, to avoid a discreditable blot on their personal reputation, they married if that were at all possible, or suffered the disgrace of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and virtually compulsory adoption out, to give the child a decent chance in a ‘proper’ home. (By brutally appalling contrast, Australia now offers baby bonuses to very young women who make ‘a career’ out of producing mostly socially and educationally disabled children, by serially shiftless young fathers, for the overburdened welfare system to cope with indefinitely, on an inter-generational basis.)

As consumerist values reconstructed moral consciousness, the unexpectedly pregnant woman became regarded as a ‘victim’ of her pregnancy and that ‘necessitated’ an abortion which ‘unreasonable’ forces of ‘obsolete’ social and moral conventions prevented her from having.  So, ‘helpless’ in the absence of a ‘reasonable’ solution, she would be ‘forced’ to go to a backyarder, or if affluent enough, to one of those very expensive doctors who ‘did it’.

Once the 'obsolete' social and moral forces were shunted out of the way, abortion was made invisible and became a consumable like anything else, securing non reproductively intentioned sex into the mainstream of human behavior, as unquestioned as air conditioning or a second car.

Notwithstanding that, the basic underlying fact of primate life is that the powerful hormones that sex causes to be released throughout the body is just biological candy to get us to reproduce.  Despite the fact that we no longer have as many children as we used to, it doesn’t mean the basic deal has changed.  And I think many women, whose relationship to sex and feeling is vastly more complex than it is for men, still want emotional engagement and commitment in their sexual relations, as if they were going to lead to long term secure reproductive relationships.

It really feels like the sexual revolution has been a mainly male sexual politic into which women have been co-opted, but they don’t say much because it is uncool not to be ‘liberated’ and ‘equal’.  And it is what they asked the gods for, and now they have got it, but not in the measure and spirit that was asked for.  The statue of Liberty is the closest we have to an image of one of the gods we currently worship.  The forces it represents are just as capricious and full of their own agendas as those on Mount Olympus and just as capable of delivering  perverse outcomes that still tick all the boxes on the supplicant request form.  They forgot to ask for a female paradigm that would give female perspective and sensibility real clout that could successfully contest the male one.

I think that women should be able to tell men to go and screw each other, if all they want is a quick ‘friendly’.  During the sixties, men were able to start playing them off each other to get sexual compliance and they had to give in or find themselves ‘on the shelf’, because, given penicillin and the pill, if they didn’t deliver, someone else would.  And by the early seventies, with abortion-on-demand, the girls were well and truly locked down in an ‘equalitarian’ and ‘liberating’ sexual free-for-all, whether they liked it or not.  The reality is that even if she has some combination of fame, social connection, money, beauty, or exceptional close quarters political nous, she is still fair game, as well as vulnerable, in a way men never will be.

Women on the whole can run rings around men in terms of the psychological smarts.  But the one thing they cannot do is undo the inequality of negotiating power that derives from the fact that they are saddled with the entire operating machinery of reproduction, and men aren’t.  It makes men more emotionally detached and more likely to wander in their attentions.  While women can emulate that sometimes not terribly admirable quality for a while, it eventually grates on them, because their sexuality emotionally grounds them in the end.  Women almost always end up investing more effort and intelligence in their intimate relationships to secure them, and keep them going.  And it means they have more to lose.  Men intuitively know this.

Sexual politics is tough like that, which is why we maybe need to make sexual continence ‘fashionable’ again and empowering not not so much sexual ‘equality’, as equal status and a powerful female say on how they want their intimate relationships to unfold.  It is very tough for individuals to stand against a powerful political imperative.  They can be so easily marginalized and worked against each other.  Only if enough girls join the movement, will the boys have to come to the party and learn to be considerate gentlemen once again, engage a woman on her own terms and give her the space she needs to gauge whether his many and egregious male faults are tolerable in the longer term, before she lets him so much as into her space.

And that is is going to mean the onerous business of  fully engaging with her and what she offers beyond obvious instant gratification, has to be with an eye to sharing the extremely hard and protracted work that sexual pleasure is supposed to lead to.

Anything less than that is an invitation to being parasited by males whose sexual agendas could just as easily be met by a good quality audio-animatronic doll.

And the fact is that venereal disease hasn’t gone away as it was once imagined it would.  Condoms are not 100% safe reproductive prophylactic, let alone a VD one.  And being the proud owners of pretty nearly 100% of the reproductive suite, girls have a lot to lose if they get hit with one of those infections that don’t go away.  Why should they feel they have to put their venereal health at risk for the sake of a casual sex paradigm that isn’t really in their longer term interests?


In a society that reconstructs itself around the fundamentals of genuinely reproductive relationships, abortion ‘rights’ are not going to get much truck, because aspiring lovers will be expected to engage fully and be completely prepared for the long term consequences of that engagement.  There will be far fewer ‘inconvenient’, ‘embarrassing’, or ‘unplanned’ pregnancies, anymore than there will be single parent families, unless someone has died.  And when they have had as many children as they feel is responsible in all the circumstances, snip, snip...for the boys, naturally, because the girls stop being fertile naturally anyway..

It will not tolerate shallow and exploitative relationships between men and women.  It will not indulge mythical fantasies about the very young; that they are somehow ‘not live’ or unworthy of the same regard and protection as any other human being.  And above all, it will go to considerable lengths to invest social resources in grooming and training its young in meeting their long term responsibilities towards each other, so that they, and especially young men, will deliver on all the bottom lines that make a long term relationships equitable, sustainable and dare I say it, comfortable.

Thus a bride will not be marrying an emotional child who she will have to carry as extra baggage on top of the ones she will bear.  She will not have to ask, chivvy or lose her temper to get her reasonable needs met.  He will know what to do, will have had that relentlessly drilled into him and he will know that if he consistently doesn’t step up to the mark, his family and community are going to want to know the reason why.  And if some fairly ‘rough’ treatment is necessary to get him to ‘see the light’, well that is what is going to happen, for the marriage vows and the terms of the contract that will have been tailor made for that couple, will be regularly audited and  socially enforceable, unless changed by the common consent of all the parties..

See ‘Post-Modern Heroes: Michael and Giordana’, for a vision of what a post-modern upbringing and relationship might look like, at: www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1810745-Post-Modern-Heroes-Michael-and-Giordana

Abortion-on-demand only makes sense in an environment that has casualized sex, disconnected it completely from its real purpose and alienated sex and sexuality from the politics of genuine long term reproductive intimacy.  And that in my view, is an anti-woman politic that doesn’t really shift the balance of power between men and women.


People are going to look back on the late consumer age in fascinated horror at its gross excesses and mangled values.  The libertarians who were its harbingers will be delegitimized and regarded as deviants not tolerable in decent society.  They might be permitted to squat in the crumbling remains of late modern cities and scrape a living as despised recyclers, living off old garbage, McMansion boneyards and the infamous values that once ruled the affluent consumer world.

Abortions will go on, because even in the best regulated societies, they are still an inevitable part of life. If they are to be done, they need to be safely done.  No one wants an illegal market in procuring one.  But that would not mean there wouldn’t be sub-judicial ‘consequences’ in a social milieu that really hated the values and behavior that gave rise to having to abuse and waste medical resources and goodwill to kill someone.

In a post-modern age, people are going to be much more careful about their sexual behavior, and be much clearer about what that behavior means and what it leads to.  And it will mean much tighter organization of social life, and less opportunity for ‘privacy’.  Poorly constructed, partial and laissez-faire arrangements would not be tolerated in a society with strongly delineated social goals and means for achieving them.

Alienated social norms that were a product of consumer capitalist relations of production and consumption will cease as we move into some version of capitalism ‘lite’, as it moves to embrace social and existential capital as part of the wealth portfolio of every citizen and the society as a whole.  It will no longer externalize non monetized capital, whether it be ecological, social or existential software assets.  And even though by the older measures of GDP, the economies of a cantonized capitalism ‘lite’ will be much smaller than those of late modern giga-economies, and less physically secure, their software will be more ‘affluent’ and secure  in ways that the old order could not have dreamed of.  And their denizens will begin to appreciate just how broken down the third world shanty towns of the old social consciousness used to be.


In the meantime, it’s 40 million disappeared little humans a year.  But as any German hausfrau would have told you in 1944, about the Jewish ‘disappeared’, “Sie sind Untermenschen Liebling, und eine Bedrohung für die arischen Reich”.  (They are subhuman darling, and a threat to the Aryan State).  And now, in a human rights loving and war averse Germany, the grand daughter, confronted with an unwanted addition to her life might say, with an eerie sense of deja vu, “Es ist untermenschen liebling, und eine Bedrohung für mein Lebensstil” (It is subhuman darling, and a threat to my lifestyle).

The extraordinary irony was that by 1943, providing an abortion to a German Aryan woman was a capital offence, whereas after 1991, it could be procured on demand.  And without even attempting to make a judgment on either of those examples, it demonstrates how very selective we are about the life we choose to kill as a matter of course and that which we choose to protect at all costs.  To say that this reflects an ideological luck of the draw seems to be putting it mildly.

Today we have lobbies for the intellectually and physically disabled objecting to the termination of fetuses with identified serious defects, because there is no such thing as a defective ‘anybody’.  They are still valid human beings who can become loved and loving social contributors like anyone else.  And then on the other hand there are others, who will casually have the unwanted killed, just because they can.

I haven’t the slightest hesitation adding to the ordinary rigors of natural selection to keep defective genes out of the species gene pool, or for that matter, unnecessarily adding to the long term liabilities of the already under siege welfare and medical care systems.  However, I cannot see why we should kill anyone because people adult enough to have children are not adult enough to plan around and take responsibility for the reproductive risk they took and  the life they subsequently created.  That is what planned parenthood really meant, before the ‘pro-choice’ moral supermarketarians got their clutches on it.  The plain fact of the matter always was and is, that any couple who had had a reproductive ‘accident’ had made ‘a choice’ in entering sexual congress in the first place!.

And if getting that understanding as a social norm means we need a more regulated, disciplined and less indulgent society, with much higher personal standards expected of its members, and particularly its more junior ones, then that is what needs to be done.

We are talking here about a society that takes responsibility for its young and the terms and conditions under which parents will be allowed to reproduce its social product, because it is the ultimate ‘customer’.  So it won’t tolerate the dysfunctional and sloppy libertarianism of the late consumer age, which left behind so much inter-generationally screwed up garbage, it would take the best part of a century to fix.

If the present ‘system’ of reproduction were to be treated like any other ‘industry’, the present one would be immediately shut down and reconstructed, for in all likelihood trading while insolvent, breaking every basic common sense regulatory bottom line if there were any, having no consistent social and existential education and social training templates or infrastructure for the reproductive labor force to mentor and shape its product with, no proper management and enforcement systems worth a crumpet, and delivering poorly designed, under-constructed and sloppily made product that is notoriously unreliable and infamous for not just breaking down under pressure, but behaving erratically under normal operating conditions.

Thus ‘the debate’ isn’t about the sacredness of life or ‘consumer choice’.  It is about consequential behavior and the quality control that the social commons should exercise in determining how its subjects conduct themselves to get that outcome, in everything they do.  We should be as purposefully disciplined and uncasual in the way we construct our social product  as we are when we have to kill someone, no matter how large or small the potential victim might be.

Murder is a social crime, for it not only involves taking a life, but violently disturbing the social order.  War is not a social crime because it is a violent instrument for the defense of the social order.  Abortion is taking a human life outside the context of a social order he or she never participated in.  It is not a social crime in the murder sense, but it is still a serious matter for which individuals should be held accountable in ways that reflect on and affect their reproductive and civil standing, if they cannot reasonably justify it.


Abortion is not a single stand alone issue without an economic, social, cultural and historical context.  The victory of the ‘pro choice’ forces in the late 1960s and early 70s was a product of general deregulatory shift that was removing all the mechanism of disciplined social and self governance, as part of a concerted move towards an aggressive and totalitarian consumer market hegemony.  The libertarian apparatchiks were the main ideological  force to clear the way for the bigger social changes happening inside consumer markets.  In return for their excellent work, they were given large slabs of the social welfare, education and legal system to run, and a significant slice of the legislative agenda in democratic parliaments.

But capital is just too powerful and corrosive in its workings to be able to resist for long the eating of its quarrelsome ideological siblings, or throwing its servants to the wolves when they have outlived their purpose.  ‘The Libertarchs’ can already feel the tide turning against them as capital completes and consolidates  its ‘Final Solution‘ to McHappiness, that turns life into a cradle to grave production and consumer product, where marketing and entertainment modeling is the only social mechanism left standing.  And then all that will be left to be done is the final march of the lemmings, as we consume the last of our ecological inheritance, for the beast has only one driver that matters, which is to keep growing, at any cost.

And after that has happened, ladies and gentlemen, you will be dealing with the likes of me.  Expect no quarter, for we will be dealing with crimes that will have easily dwarfed anything done in the last century,  Genocide will have morphed into postremicide (the killing of the future) as vast populations of creatures great and small are destroyed by the greed and aggression of our species, including great swathes of our own.  And the lavish ideological baloney that helped to make it possible and subsequently subsidized its operations will go down with it, and be buried by parties with a very different vision of the future.

As the consumer society comes to an end, this will all become increasingly obvious, as we start to join the dots on a reality continuum that appeared seamless and self evident as it unpackaged itself, but was of many parts and driven by powerful interests, that did not disclose themselves at the time.

For the bleary eyed somnambulist awakening from the alienated libertarian dreams of a consumer addiction, such a critique might seem shocking, because it challenges long held prejudices and assumptions that appeared so ‘settled’.  A really big consciousness shift is like that.  Sometimes it takes a long time, for the drivers of conventional thinking are as powerful on the surface as they are pervasive underneath.. And then, when it is all over, we will all be wondering why it took us so long to wake up.