You will not fail to appreciate these few reflections from Camille Paglia, feminist author, left-wing liberal. She wrote a article on Sarah Palin, which is rather positive in content, where she shares, among other things, her own thoughts on the subject of abortion. She writes this
“But the 'pro-life' (anti-abortion) position, whether based on religious orthodoxy or not, is far more ethically advanced than my own doctrine of unrestricted, on-demand access to abortion. My argument (set forth in my first book, “Sexual Personae”) has always been that nature has a master plan to drive all species to procreate, and that we have the right, even the duty, as rational human beings to challenge nature's fascism. Nature herself carries out mass slaughter, conducts cruel and wanton experiments, and condemns 10,000 to death so that one healthy one may live and grow.
So I have always honestly recognized that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals, for the most part, have sought to evade the ethical consequences of their acceptance of abortion: the elimination of real individuals, not a mass of lifeless tissue. I believe that the state has no authority to intervene in the biological processes of a woman's body; these processes were created by nature before a woman's entry into society and her attainment of citizenship.
On the other hand, I am in favor of the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape and murder, and the murder of children). I have never understood the combination of support for abortion and opposition to the death penalty among Democrats. One would have thought that it is the guilty and not the innocent who deserve execution.”
Surprising, but honest and lucid; thus the author has the merit of recognizing an obvious fact that otherwise intelligent people refuse to face – the baby in the womb is a human being, more or less physically developed; taking its life is equivalent to murder. We cannot pretend otherwise, or that we know nothing about it, as Barack Obama did during that famous debate. What conclusions can we then draw from this?
For Camille Paglia, the mere fact that it is a human being is not enough to guarantee him the protection of the State. Her argument is simple: unfortunately, this human being is involved in and dependent on the woman's biological processes, said processes, according to Paglia, escaping the jurisdiction of the State; she therefore has the right to dispose of this human being as she wishes; and this, whether she voluntarily participated in bringing him into existence (consensual sexual relations) or not (in the case of rape). We have gone from horror to decriminalization and from decriminalization to the trivialization of such a final solution. The question of responsibility arises and of the limits of freedom.
Society is governed by principles such as respect for others or the consideration due to others. Do I have the right to fully enjoy everything that belongs to me at the risk of seriously inconveniencing others and depriving them of their most basic rights; in this case, the very possibility of existing? Wouldn't that be an abuse of power and a flagrant violation of the rights of others without their consent? Can we still talk about a woman's right to dispose of her 'own' body, since this body is no longer hers alone, and is now temporarily shared with another life. What about the right of this other person to live, to have a future, a history? Must she pay for the mistakes of her parents?
And what about that troubling sentence about combining support for abortion with opposition to the death penalty?
“ One would have thought that it is the guilty and not the innocent who deserve execution.
Indeed, how can one vehemently demand that people who have committed atrocious crimes be spared their lives while equally vehemently proclaiming that unborn babies, guilty of nothing but existence, cannot enjoy the same right? Have we been so ideologically brainwashed that we hardly see the paradox inherent in this position?
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