Difference of opinion on the appropriateness of having abortion be a legal instead of illegal action has caused a time warp of passionate activism that has turned the entire issue into a impassible screaming match about right and wrong. These things are not of interest to me in my topic today. I've never really noticed that people behave according to right and wrong, regardless of what they think. People will do what they feel they want and need to do in the circumstances they are in. Even in retrospect, they rarely ask if they were right or wrong, but may ask if they were short sighted at the time of the decision. They may even believe it is wrong and do it or right and not do it. There is a great amount of debate on whether the current health care bill allows public money to be used to fund abortions. While I am not trying to say that the bill does or does not allow this, I am going to give the reasons why the bill should be interpreted according to tradition which absolutely disallows any use of public, governmental money for elective abortion.
Today is passover (Well Tuesday is passover, but this may not post until after midnight making the date Wednesday). It is the remembrance of the day that Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt to become a free nation. As we have been reminded in the news and literature of this holy week, Moses is a national icon, and for both the Founding Fathers and the Civil Rights movement, a man to revere. But in case you have forgotten, Moses existed because his mother had to hide him from a national abortion program. The Egyptians were afraid the Hebrews were going to become too strong to be kept as slaves, so one of the Pharaohs started a birth control program where the midwives had specific directions on how to maintain the balance of power by killing the male babies as they were in the birthing process. Moses' mother managed to bear him without a midwife and hide him in a basket which was sent floating down the river for a princess to find, and the rest is history as they say, which you can watch this Saturday night by tuning into The Ten Commandments.
Now a days, governments aren't quite as rankly power seeking as the reports from ancient Egypt seem to indicate they used to be, and programs for birth control are billed as human rights, so that the poor can have the potential of increasing their economic status without the interference of unwanted extra mouths to feed. It is primarily the rich who sit around and discuss these needs of the poor. Every totally destitute person I have ever met has cared only about their child, not about their economic status in life. But then, I am not in the business of urban renewal or economic stimulation. I am a nurse, and hanging onto people over possessions is a lot of what the world of healing is based on.
To prepare for this posting I read a few United Nations reports and discussions of over population and the plans that have been considered to cope with over population. These proposals made me wonder if no one had ever heard of Darwin, that they had to calculate who would survive as opposed to allowing nature to take its course, but I suppose Darwin is too brutal for consciences social scientists to accept, and trying to create a survivable world up front by controlling populations seems less cruel than having everyone "duke" it out for survival in an uncontrolled setting.
But again, I am not trying to judge or limit any one's personal opinion or scholarship about the best ways to approach our duty to love our neighbor as our self. There are many ways to fulfill this duty, and some seem extremely paradoxical.
What I think should be understood is the limitation of power that is required by the U.S. Constitution that eliminates the government from paying for abortion. Now I know that I can not quote the Constitution to prove this. But did you know that the Declaration of Independence complains about population issues? In the list of grievances, King George is blamed for trying to "prevent the population of these States: for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations" etc.etc. Similar to the concept of Pharaoh reducing the population by killing babies so they would not become strong enough to oppose him, the Founding Fathers accused the King of preventing their population from growing so that they would have strength in numbers.
We seem to think now that increasing numbers of people are a negative rather than a positive thing, but I am living in a city where empty buildings are a dime a dozen, so I think we should be taking another look at what nature says is a strength. But whether we get personally philosophical about the subject or not, we have to admit that our system of government was specifically set up to prevent the government from having the kind of power that Pharaoh and King George had: power to make decisions that can change the power of the people through numbers.
Now you may say that since the individual mother is the one asking for the abortion that it isn't a matter of the government making a choice, so it doesn't matter if the government pays the bill. But government is not an issue of choice, government is an issue of power. As soon as the government is providing the money, the government has power - ask any State Legislature about this one. We need to keep the tradition that keeps government money away from abortion because we don't want the government to cross that line of having power in the arena of abortion. To make abortion legal is to give power to the citizen by allowing choice. To pay for it is to pull strings around that choice. Of course the law won't be made for the purpose of pulling strings, but eventually that little bit of control will become a crack in the wall between individual choice and policy making for the greater good, and more surprising things than Pharaoh or King George could happen.
To give you an example of the kinds of things that happen when policy makers provide money for birth control, I refer you to the quarrels of the late 90's that the UN had with its birth control programs. They saw it as a human right, but poorer countries saw it as a way to control their people. In South America there were accusations that governments were using UN money for forced sterilization of poor peoples or minority groups. Of course this was bitterly disputed, and I am not interested here in who was right or wrong. The International Criminal Court considers sterilizing people against their will a crime against humanity and the quarrels are usually interpretations of "willingness." I am simply trying to show that without strong walls about certain activities (bright lines in law as we say) trouble abounds. It would be good for the Feds to avoid paying for abortions so that they don't wander into an accusation of minimizing the growth of minority groups who may be the default groups that would use such a benefit.
But even more than that, it is a principle of our "people-based" nation that the government should not have basic control over our lives. The government is given the right to pay for war and executions, but all other activities are about life and productivity, not death. We don't want the government to have any power over citizen death that is not allowed by the Constitution and all its procedural safe guards, and that means no government money for abortion.
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