Today, almost all who actively struggle with the issue of abortion, whether for or against, realize the inescapable link between abortion and contraception.
Last month, Canada’s leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail, printed a full-page article entitled “Abortion and the pill,” subtitled “When women got control over conception, why did the abortion rate increase?” The article, extracted from a recent book by Anne Collins, did not, in fact, answer the question posed in the but-title. However, many observers have noted that the increase use of contraception has, paradoxically, increased the abortion rate. One has followed the other.
Collins’ article traced the abortion issue to its source with early birth control champions. The author defended abortion rights by tying them into the ideal of liberated womanhood (freed from slavery to childbearing). Summing up the views of a pro-life woman who now regrets her own abortion, Collins says:
By insisting that society take the abortion decision out of the hands of women, she insists that women are moral children, unfit to handle the freedom and responsibility thrust upon them by the contraceptive revolution. She wants to retie the knots of female bondage of child-bearing and compel continuing self-sacrifice.
Pro-lifers, in Collins’ view are “champions of fetuses” and, if fetuses win (through a return to restrictive abortion law)… women are sacrificed to them.
Because she sees, correctly, that abortion and contraceptive are inextricably entwined, the author naturally rejects the idea that abortion has anything to do with ”absolute values of right or wrong.” or that killing the child is a sin. Reproductive freedom is to be maintained at all costs, according to this view.
All of this is more proof- if anyone still needs it- that the battle of pro-life and pro-abortion is far deeper than immediately meets the eye. It is a battle between adhering to a God-given freedom on the one hand and a libertinism made possible by technology on the other. The former requires sacrifice (practicing chastity; leaving marriage open to the possibility of children) and leads to true liberty. The latter seeks only self-satisfaction and egotism- and threatens to enslave us all to idols.
