A while back I had a brief reunion with some close friends and the controversial topic of abortion came up. Sparing the details, it prompted me to find this amazing piece of writing (in my opinion) that flips some of the thinking on it’s head and gets us to at least start to try and consider things from different angles then we have in the past.
The article below is written by Katha Pollitt and this is my first introduction to her. It was written in 1995 but is relevant to today’s debates as well I think. My wife first read it in her Bio-medical Ethics class at Wheaton College in a great book of essays (I might post others). Anyways, it’s been titled a number of things, here it was called A Modest Proposal. Please read it below, or click the links to read it larger, but do come back and discuss.
What an interesting article. Thanks for sharing it with us. It is thought provoking – maybe because it seems Draconian. I’m not going to pay an extra tax just because I am a man – that’s sexist. But I think that is her point and it is well taken. It is interesting that the woman bares the burden and shame of out-of-wedlock births while the man has pretty much no responsibilities. I definitely agree with some of the thoughts about forcing the “deadbeat” to work and pay his fair share. I do know that since the article was written more and more states have increased the penalties for failing to pay child support. In Ohio it is now a felony and there are actually police officers dedicated to tracking down and finding the deadbeats who won’t pay.
It is true that it is easy for men to ditch their kids more easily than women. I agree that there should be greater government efforts to make men pay. Protection of the innocent, after all, is one thing we more conservative types believe that government should do. As the comment above says, there are greater government efforts that have come about in recent years to that end. In TN at least, I know that men can do jailtime for contempt of court for failing to pay (which unfortunately probably means they lose any job they have from which they were supposed to have been making money to pay support), and back child support can be a lien on property.
While it is also true that women get dumped on disproprtionately sometimes for having kids out of wedlock, in contrast to the men who may be unknown or can sort of slink away without notice, it is also true that a woman could, after all, keep her pants (or the garment of her preference) on in the first place.
As I have probably said here before, you have no right to complain that you were hit by a car if you wander in to the street willingly.
More on Katha Pollitt:
I enjoy reading intelligent, cutting writers with whom I disagree. Among them is Christopher Hitchens, for example. That dude hates Christianity, but he has some good points in criticizing some of the excesses and missteps of Christians, so I find his thinking useful though he is a bit mean sometimes. I think Katha Pollitt fits in there nicely as well. She is a devout, as it were, atheist and a pro-abortionist, and a bunch of other things that are antithetical to the things I believe in, but she is pretty good at what she does and how she does it. Like Hitchens, she is right about Christians (as opposed to being right about the truth of the Gospel) lots of times. Now, Camille Paglia, a liberal lesbian democrat type whom I also like, called her a “whiny troll”, but that is bit harsh.
I know yours was not really a post about her so much, but for what it is worth, here is a recent article that gives you more of her flavor:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080818/pollitt
Bonus! At the close of her article, there is an invitation to donate to help Chicago women pay for their abortions.