Tea at Trianon: Pro-Choice: The Choice of Failure

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 18, 2014

Pro-Choice: The Choice of Failure

From TFP:

The pro-choice cliché resonated somewhat well during the 60s and 70s, but it is now falling upon deaf ears. A 2003 CBS/New York Times poll found that 35 percent of young women ages 18 through 29 thought abortions should be available to anyone who wants one, down from 50 percent in a 1993 poll indicating a 15 percent drop in only 10 years. Corresponding to this lack of sympathy for abortion from young women, the total of abortion clinics nationwide has shrunk dramatically. According to the website AbortionDocs.org, the total number of surgical abortion clinics remaining in the country is now 582. That is a 12 percent decrease in surgical abortion clinics in 2013 and a 73 percent drop from a 1991 high of 2,176.

As feminists struggle to give plausible answers as to why the steady decline in clinics and the resistance to the abortion movement continues, they fail to see the more profound reasons why pro-choice caught in the first place and what has happened to public opinion since. Liberal optimism thought that it was possible to ride the wave of success indefinitely considering that each successive generation would increasingly favor their cause as morals declined.

However, this did not happen. The ferment in public opinion that was evidenced by declining morals by the late sixties indicated an increasing willingness to accept abortion and to throw off all moral restraints. Slogans such as “it’s forbidden to forbid,” “if it feels good do it,” or “do your own thing” summarized the ideology that drove the sixties revolution. (Read more.)