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From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: Can we make progress?
Message-ID: <427@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Sep-85 09:16:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: mhuxr.427
Posted: Tue Sep 10 09:16:13 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Sep-85 06:13:29 EDT
References: <30381@lanl.ARPA> <265@bcsaic.UUCP> <11440@rochester.UUCP> <426@mhuxr.UUCP> <338@we53.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
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> > ME:
> >This is revealing. "Sexuality is the reason for abortion and VD", so
> >repress sexuality and the world will be OK, right? Are you saying there
> >were no abortions and no VD before the tearing down of the sex taboos?
> >Study history, Mr. Frank: a VD epidemic wiped out 15% of the population of
> >Rome in the 14th century, a "few" years before the beginning of the
> >sexual revolution.
> 
> brian:
> Study it yourself.  It was NOT "before the beginning of the sexual revolution",
> it was the RESULT of THEIR sexual revolution.
> 
You should check your facts. VD came to Europe with returning Crusaders
and spread because of unsanitary practices and extensive adulterous
activities. Such activities were just as extensive before the Crusades.
This was during a time when the Catholic Church and its anti-sex
precepts were at their most powerful. It was also a time when power ruled
and the powerful got to be as adulterous as they wanted. Most certainly not
a sexual revolution the way we understand the late 60s-early 70s to be one.

>                                                           ... I could have
> sworn that there was a time when  it wasn't considered inevitable that 
> teenagers would get into bed with each other.  The continued rejection by 
> our society of any form of self-control, particularly where it concerns 
> those "irresistable" passions, ....

>    Let me say this.  Sex is good.  It's wholesome, healthy, and beautiful, and
> FUN! There is nothing wrong with it, or with the powerful desires that 
> puberty brings on.  There is a LOT wrong with misusing those desires for 
> selfish gratification, or letting those desires rule you, as someone 
> always gets hurt, pregnancy or no.  You won't hear any of that from the 
> folks at Planned Barrenhood, or from the ACLU [??], or from anyone else who 
> thinks it his raison d'etre to protect us from progeny .  

No article I have seen advocates teen people ruled by their bodies. I feel
it much healthier when teenagers determine their sex life because of informed
choices, and not on orders from third parties. I feel it is much healthier
when teenagers understand the signals their bodies send them and choose
to take or not take action accordingly. I feel it is *not* healthy when they
don't understand what is happening or worse, have false ideas about their
sexuality and thus make bad choices.

If you think sex is "good, wholesome, healthy, beautiful and FUN!" why do
you denigrate organizations like Planned Parenthood that seek to keep
it that way? People have pointed out again and again that the teenagers
who go to Planned Parenthood do so because sex education is not forthcoming
from their parents. Yet you flame the concept of sexual education, from
whatever source. What do you want? It is one thing to remain virginal
until marriage, quite another to get to your wedding night without the faintest
idea what is going to happen or why! I have known several people who
have found themselves in that situation and they invariably suffered for it.

>                                               ... More than that, my sex 
> life as a married man is NOT enhanced by the temptations of pornography, 
> hard, soft, or sunny-side-up....

Who said anything about pornography? What deos that have to with sex education
and abortion (besides some ramblings about society's decay)?

> Teenage pregnancy is not the result of underinformed teenagers, it's the 
> result of teenagers who have not been trained to control themselves or
> taught that there is good to be had by keeping themselves virgin until 
> marriage.  I'm not so hot on birth control, as you can see here.

But if sex is so much "FUN!", why wait until marriage, especially if you decide
not to get married for a while? Is the argument "sex is for married people only,
junior" "But why daddy?" Why indeed? Religious reasons? Then those
who don't share your faith will be forgiven if they reach different
conclusions, yes?

>    My point here is not to argue the legal or even the moral issues of
> abortion.  The real poverty of spirit that leads to the very idea of 
> considering abortion is what I want to address.  In partial answer to an 
> earlier posting, the system of values that would lead to a reduction of 
> the abortion rate is not hard to find; all you have to do is go back a 
> few years to when it was lower.  I'm not in any way eulogizing any period 
> in our past, just saying that when something was better, you really ought 
> to consider why.  There were fewer teenage pregnancies then: why?  There 
> was a lower teen suicide rate then: why? Couldn't have had anything to do 
> with the fact that do-your-own-thing or if-it-feels-good-do-it weren't 
> recognized as modern wisdom, could it?  Yes, the seeds of that attitude 
> were sown in the permissive forties and the materialistic fifties, but 
> before they bore the fruit that we see now, there was a lot less of all 
> the things that we decry today.
> 
Fist of all, abortion was a legal, accepted and not immoral option 
throughout the 18th and early part of the 19th centuries. In the mid 1800s,
the newly formed AMA decided that the midwives who performed abortions
and delivered babies were incompetent and started a campaign to stamp
them out. It succeeded in declaring abortion illegal, not on moral
grounds but on grounds of health dangers to the mother. It is only in
the Victorian era that moral taboos got imposed on abortion.
Even then, from roughly 1870 to 1970, abortions got performed,
but in back alleys, with coat hangers. Women died or became permanently
sterile. Are these the good old days you wre referring to?

Spare me the cloak of your morality, sir. I can understand opposition
to abortion. I am willing to try an reach a compromise with those
who would make their opposition public policy. I am not willing to
listen to jeremiads from those who long for a golden age of
hypocritical morality.

Marcel Simon