Time Immortal

What an unsurprising thing is this!

How convenient it would have been for liberals if, as predicted by many in the 1980s, AIDS had spread like wildfire among Western heterosexuals. But it didn’t.

It would also have been very convenient if the introduction of condoms had significantly reduced infection in African countries, so the practice of self-indulgent sexual “grazing” could have escaped moral judgment.

But alas for all those non-judgmental AIDS do-gooders: What has worked best and most rapidly to reduce HIV infection among both homosexuals and promiscuous Africans is partner reduction.

…

Following sustained public information campaigns, [Helen Epstein] notes, gay sex with multiple sex partners declined by 60% between 1984 and 1988 in San Francisco. New cases of AIDS plummeted from a peak of 2,400 in 1984 to fewer than 600 in 2000.

And then there’s Uganda, where Epstein’s postdoctoral work at the Uganda Cancer Institute sparked her interest in HIV/AIDS. Even though condom use rose throughout the ’90s all over Africa, the HIV rate also kept climbing — everywhere but Uganda, which had actually begun the decade with the highest rates of new HIV infection. As Fumento noted in his column, the proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plummeted in the 1990s from 21% to 6%.

When the data was crunched by AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin (as noted in a review of Epstein’s book in the June 23 issue of The Weekly Standard), this startling decline was not found to correspond to the increase in the use of condoms, but rather to the decrease in the proportion of casual sex with numerous partners.

For as much as post-Christian sexual morality is touted as somehow superior to the prudish ways of the West’s Christian past, time and again it seems to be the case that applying some good, old fashioned Christian sensibility to one’s sex life is still the best insurance against contracting all manner of STDs. Few people indeed have gotten sick and died from having remained faithful to one sexual partner for the duration of their adult life, especially when that partner has remained faithful to them as well.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Just what it says — two condoms, a “whisper-quiet” vibrator (with batteries!), and lubricant. Not that they have an ulterior motive, or anything. Me, I fail to see what this sort of product has to do with parenthood (a subject one would mistakenly assume the organization selling this item is familiar with).

And if the Reader will permit me a moment of snark: what on God’s green Earth is up with that website background, eh? Seriously…pixelated and artifact-laden…I’ve seen better drawings emerge from MS Paint.

Related: interesting observations on just how unreliable and useless condoms are.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: The Curt Jester)

For twenty years, under five prime ministers, Parliament has failed to reinstate any restrictions, with the result that Canada continues to have the world’s most radical abortion regime. The unborn child has, in this country, to this day, no protection in law whatever. This child is ruled a “foetus” who may be disposed of at any point up to and including the moment of live birth — a moment that can be as vague as any that occurs after the precise moment of conception.

Under Canada’s system, it would be perfectly legal for a doctor to plunge a pair of scissors into the chest of the baby pictured above (notice how the child’s lower half is still within the mother’s body). Twenty years ago today, we made it legal for that event to transpire, in the Crown v. Henry Mogentaler decision, ruled on by the late Justice (I use the term loosely) Bertha Wilson.

In the reasoning of the late Justice Bertha Wilson, no man could respond to the abortion dilemma, “even imaginatively … because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche.”

But which women decide? For polls have fairly consistently shown, that women are more troubled by abortion than men; and few women are radical feminists.

The 1988 ruling was the most significant in a string of cases in which the same Puisne Justice and others wrote this principle — that a woman’s subjective judgement may trump objective facts — into the heart of Canadian law. In the Crown v. Angélique Lavallee, 1990, she extended this reasoning to hold that a woman who had been abused by a man could be excused for killing him, even if the man was defenceless and she came to the encounter armed. In such a case, the courts could employ the testimony of feminist experts on “battered wife syndrome” to discount witnesses whose view of the facts might be contaminated by “myths” and “stereotypes.”

I am speaking today in defiance of the 1988 ruling, being that I am in fact a man, and therefore should not be able to discuss the issue of abortion “even inaginatively.” Let me say, then, that as a man, I think Bertha Wilson — and all of feminism — has missed the point.

I am Catholic, and believe that abortion is the taking of a human life (and is therefore immoral). However, my view of the nature of the unborn is justifiable solely on the basis of biological fact. In my view, the abortion issue is really, honestly, only concerned with at what stage of development it is permissible to end the life of a genetically unique human being. As noted above, it is legal in Canada for the doctor to end the life of the infant human being pictured even further above. That’s the crux of the debate, right there.

But when Bertha Wilson wrote that a man can only relate to the issue by objectifying it (and, by extension, objectifying all women), she missed one important point: there has been no development of the sexual revolution or our progressive, secular society which has benefitted men more than the mainstreaming and/or legalization of abortion. In making abortion “safe and legal” (that sentence should normally be concluded with “rare”, but cannot be if one is speaking in truths), and in making abortion an issue of “choice” for women, feminists have stripped men of any and all responsibility for the outcomes of their sexuality. They have liberated men from any need to worry about the consequences of hooking up with one woman, or a series of women, for the express purpose of having sex.

Previously, a man was beholden to marry a woman whom he carelessly impregnated; men who abandoned such women were derided and looked down upon. Now, since the woman always has the choice to have an abortion open to her, it is not the errant man who will be looked down upon if he departs from the side of a woman who has proven just a tad too fertile for his tastes. After all, she has a choice; keep the child or keep the relationship. Why should men still be beholden to women who do not choose in such a manner as is conducive to sustaining the relationships on terms both partners regard as acceptable?

Nothing — not condoms, not the pill, nothing — has aided and abetted the continued and enhanced objectification of women by men as much as abortion has, because nothing has done more to eliminate any sense of responsibility from peoples’ understanding of the sexual act. Though condoms and the pill do much to chip away at the bedrock of maturity one would hope to find in a sexually active couple’s psyches, condoms and the pill are not 100% effective, and do sometimes fail to discharge (ahem) their proper interdictive role — one can, despite having used the pill and/or a condom, become pregnant (if female) or make one’s partner become pregnant (if male).

But abortion is the “final solution” to that uncertainty — it is (almost) always effective, and in a way that is both sudden and final. Depending on which research one chooses to believe, it may have some harmful physical, mental, or emotional side effects…or it may not. But that is rarely discussed anyhow; the important thing is that women have “choice”. And out of that regime of “choice” comes the final releasing of the human person from having to have any notion of consequence, any measure of responsibility, as far as the sexual act is concerned. Because even if all one’s other precautions fail, one can still sweep the mistakes under the rug with a simple outpatient procedure.

And unfortunately, a system like that benefits only men in the long run — after all, any man (or at least, the average post-modern man, more or less unmoored from any sense of personal responsibility or righteousness that Religion brings) is free to leave the side of any woman who does not make choices that are in line with his own lifestyle. And all this is to say nothing at all of how abortion has benefitted those who demand for themselves a male child first — abortion is used, in many places around the world, as a tool of gender selection, and even in Canada this practice is becoming common. That is eugenics, plain and simple.

But then, most of the early proponents of abortion — Margaret Sanger comes readily to mind — were racists and eugenecists, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that in the most permissive implementation of a system which they lobbied for, we see that eugenics is readily, and all too easily, practiced.

Twenty years ago, all of this was enabled in Canada by one careless court ruling. Perhaps in another twenty years, we will have begun to rebuild what was torn down so many years ago.