Today's MacGuffin: Abortion

Well, I am starting off with an easy one today (yeah, right!). Today's MacGuffin is abortion.

The MacGuffin

It's the perfect political MacGuffin. Most people have never had an abortion. Some people may know friends or loved ones who have had them, or have had the opportunity to and chosen not to. However, for most people, it is an issue many people care intensely about, even though many of us have never been personally affected by it. I am not here to tell you whether abortion is right or wrong; whether it should be legal or illegal. That would be the easy thing to do. That would be what the talking heads would do. Keller is here to tell you what the real issues are and why the talking heads chose to give you this MacGuffin rather than to discuss the real, hard issues.

Abortion has been so MacGuffin-ized in American society that it has been reduced to two words. You are either Pro-Life or you are Pro-Choice. You are told that if you are Pro-Life, you believe that an unborn fetus is a human life, which should be afforded all of the protections as any human, and that to take that life is no less a crime than to intentionally take any other human life. You are told that if you are Pro-Choice, you believe that decisions about a woman's own body are to be made by that woman and that woman alone, under the advice of her loved ones and competent medical professionals, and not by politicians, religious leaders, or anyone else. And that is it. Any time an issue has been reduced to two opposing positions, understand that the entire issue is a MacGuffin. The whole point of the issue is to present something you should care deeply about, and then to allow politicians to use the same convenient, simplified label as you might, and thus to get you to automatically vote for them.

The two positions are ludicrous. Think about it. Who is not for life? Life is the fundamental right; without life all other rights are moot. Can the dead speak? Can the dead assemble, or petition the government, or own property, or pursue happiness? Likewise, who is not for choice? Isn't this America, land of the free, home of the brave, where no one, least of all the gubmint, is going to tell me what to think and feel and say and most of all do? So we have an argument based on two positions that no American would ever actually oppose. As a result, the argument is reduced to an emotional, knee-jerk reaction; not one based on what is actually good for the nation or that actually fixes or changes anything.

No one, not even the most ardent Pro-Choice person, would ever say that abortion is good. No one desires more abortions, that people should actively seek to find ways to increase the number of abortions in America. No one would ever say "Go out, honey, and get pregnant. We need to abort more fetuses." There's the issue. There is where the common ground is. There is the hard question. Not "Is it the government's role to regulate abortion?" That's the MacGuffin question.

The Real Issue

The real issue, the one no politician will ever answer because it involves making real hard changes and real hard decisions, something no talking head would ever risk, is much deeper. The real question is "Why do people have abortions and what should be done about it?" Does making abortions illegal stop them? Do people stop having unprotected sex and having unwanted pregnancies because they can't abort the fetus? Contrawise, does anyone make the choice to have unprotected sex because they could just have a legal abortion, and would they make a different decision if abortion were illegal?

So why do people have unwanted pregnancies? Who has unwanted pregnancies? We have these studies. Consider this one: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3422602.html, titled "Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000-2001". The study analyzed the demographic data of 10,000+ women who had abortions in 2000 and 2001. What did it find? That the abortion rate was highest among, and I quote, "Women who are aged 18-29, unmarried, black or Hispanic, or economically disadvantaged—including those on Medicaid" Additionally, and I quote the study again "Abortion rates for women with incomes below 200% of poverty and for women with Medicaid coverage increased between 1994 and 2000." On the other hand, women in the highest economic brackets and those with college degrees showed the sharpest declines in the abortion rate. The results are clear. If you don't want to have an unwanted pregnancy, be rich, advantaged, and educated. If you don't want someone else to have an abortion, educate them and enable them to get out of poverty.

And there is why you never hear any politician talking about the real issue. Why? Because providing people with education, and providing the means to get people out of poverty is expensive. Its not that we don't have the money to do this, its that we would have to take the money away from somewhere that the talking heads cannot afford to take it away from. The politician could take the money from some niche interest; some pork-barrel line-item that was put into legislation to reward some big campaign donor. They will not do this; because to face the real issue, to make your life better, they would have to take money from the people who really got them elected; and that is not going to happen. So how do they get your vote instead? How do they get you to put them into office when they aren't actually going to do anything to fix your life? They get you to have an emotional, knee-jerk response to the issue of abortion and make sure that you will identify with them. They use the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice MacGuffin because to actually fix the problem would require them to do the hard thing. The right thing. And they aren't going to do that if it means that the people funding their campaigns might not give them any more money.

The next time the issue of abortion comes up, ask yourself "Does this talking head actually have a plan to solve the problem?" If all they want to do is stick a label on themselves then the answer is no... Make your own decision on whether or not abortion should be legal or not; but don't make the choice because some talking head has told you that you should feel one way. Make the choice because you feel it will fix the problem. And don't vote for the politician because he chooses the same pointless label you would. Vote for the one that actually proposes a solution, and that will actually enact it.