Posted on 02/01/2013 5:16:16 PM PST by Morgana
WASHINGTON, D.C., February 1, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Before abortion will ever come to an end, people must have a more accurate understanding of healthy sexuality, according to a leader in the pro-life movement.
“Instead of reminding people what they are doing when they have an abortion, we need to have have people think about what they are doing when they are having sex,” Helen Alvaré, a law professor at George Mason University, said as a featured panelist at the National Press Club during a symposium held by Americans United for Life last Thursday. Helen Alvaré. Helen Alvaré.
The pro-life movement is appropriately squeezing the “supply-side of abortion” through legislation focusing on ultrasounds and informed consent, as well as an expanding network of crisis pregnancy centers, said Alvare.
But what is being overlooked is “the demand-side of abortion” – the hook-up culture that often leads to unintended pregnancies too often aborted.
“Young women talking about what it's like out there in the market for sex, marriage, and mating will tell you they are not happy” with what Alvaré calls “the Unbearable Lightness of Sex.”
Planned Parenthood's murky view of sex – that it is a pitfall that can potentially lead to unwanted children whose existence will dash women's dreams forever – has distorted the procreative function and “taken all the fun out of sex.”
“We need to reconnect” physical intimacy with having children in people's minds, so they know that what they're doing "has meaning,” she said. “We need to reform our marriage laws as to entrance and exit – so we put marriage and children together.”
Statistics suggest solving marriage will, to a large extent, solve the abortion crisis. Some 85 percent of women who seek abortion are unmarried. Infidelity causes some married women to abort.
The present environment of strings-free sex benefits men, who feel no sense of responsibility toward the mother or child, and leaves isolated women alone to deal with single parenthood or the lingering guilt brought on through abortion, said Alvare.
“I think women would like to get married a little younger and have their children a little younger – so sue me,” she quipped.
A series of polls and a growing body of women's literature would back her up. Women are increasingly skittish about marrying late after a generation that is dealing with the reality of plunging fertility, which begins in the late 30s.
Researchers at the University of California-San Francisco recently found “that women did not have a clear understanding of the age at which fertility begins to decline," as they wrote after a recent poll, which they publicized in Human Reproduction.
Women in such liberal publications as Slate and The New Republic – both decidedly outside the pro-life camp – have noted the disappointment of women who learned too late the error of the feminist slogan, “you can have it all.”
Men, too, must man up to their responsibilities as fathers. “Of couse, we have to defeat the porn industry alongside that,” said Alvaré.
The daunting task of restoring a sense of healthy sexuality is all the more necessary because of the sexual revolution. There has been a massive increase in non-marital sex, illegitimacy, and abortions "since the widespread introduction of contraception, and there is no reason to believe this is going to end,” she said.
Such data convinced author Mary Eberstadt to write in her book Adam and Eve After the Pill that Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated Catholic Church teaching against contraception, has been vindicated. In Humanae Vitae the pope had predicted an increase in abortions, as well as infidelity, the devaluing of women and a general lowering of moral standards, as a result of the embrace of contraception.
“If you were to ask which document of modern times was the most unwanted and reviled document it would have be Humanae Vitae,” Eberstadt told LifeSiteNews.com last year. “Yet this document contains more truth about the sexual revolution and the world it would usher in than any other document.”
While full conformity with the view of the Catholic Church on contraception is likely too far to go in one step, beginning a national discussion about the real meaning, and consequences, of sex plays an irreplaceable role in changing a culture that countenances a million abortions a year.
“This is a revolution I'm talking about, but a revolution is needed,” Alvaré said. “I think a lot of women are ready for it.”
also, none of this will get better either until you get rid of no-fault divorces. the left has treated every aspect’of men-women relationshps so cavalierly and so imdifferently and that’s been the entire mindset that’s caused the problems all across the board.
Boy, we sure ain't getting our money's worth, are we?
"Instead of reminding people what they are doing when they have an abortion, we need to have have people think about what they are doing when they are having sex," Helen Alvaré, a law professor at George Mason University, said as a featured panelist at the National Press Club during a symposium held by Americans United for Life last Thursday. The pro-life movement is appropriately squeezing the "supply-side of abortion" through legislation focusing on ultrasounds and informed consent, as well as an expanding network of crisis pregnancy centers... what is being overlooked is "the demand-side of abortion" -- the hook-up culture that often leads to unintended pregnancies... "Young women talking about what it's like out there in the market for sex, marriage, and mating will tell you they are not happy" with what Alvaré calls "the Unbearable Lightness of Sex."
Nothing will change until both pro-life and pro-choice women take responsibility for propagating abortion through their “victim” attitude.
If men could opt out of forced paternity, like women can, the age of rampant permissive sex would be over.
Why not inform women that their right to choose exists well before intercourse.
Wow! This woman is spot on!
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
Seems like a fairly concise statement to me.
What part are you having trouble understanding?
My wife worked in Stanford's infertility clinic for a number of years. The statement above is an understatement.
To quote myself:
I hate to tell you how many women fitting that description are showing up at infertility clinics desperate to have a baby (my wife worked in one), not to mention having a much higher proportion of babies burdened with lifetime learning disabilities such as Down's Syndrome (she works in the Newborn Intensive Care unit now). Effectively, our educational system is structured to preclude the middle class from replacing itself.
As this demographic trend continues, as the demands of what constitutes an education grow, and as machines replace even professional positions, the only people having kids even approaching their full potential will be the very well-to-do, with the very poor having little prospect of a competitive education at all. History teaches that this arrangement leads inevitiably to social cataclysm, representing not just the death of a culture but a nation.
Worse, were it even possible to "fix" said existing system, we would have to wait between 15-20 years for the benefits to even begin to be realized. Needless to say given our parlous finances, disaster will have preclueded even the possibility of that "eventual" marginal improvement.
Hence, simple reproductive biology teaches that this problem of "eductation" MUST be dissolved as a matter of life and death, NOW. The matter is too urgent to be left to succeeding generations, while improving the existing system won't cut it. - Source
I’m not sure what Bainbridge is having trouble understanding. I’m having trouble understanding how you see us pro-life women as having a victim attitude.
If men could opt out of forced paternity, like women can, the age of rampant permissive sex would be over.
It has been my experience from many years here on FreeRepublic, that given a choice between saving babies and losing their monopoly on evading parenthood, even pro-life women will sacrifice the baby...every time.
Yeah, you're right. Sorry. I've been involved with this idea for so long it has become ingrained with me.
Please see above post.
Excuse me. I should have said “given a choice between saving babies, and providing for women who ‘make a mistake,’ ....”
Get out from behind your keyboard and go stand with me on an icy morning in front of an abortion clinic. Help me counsel a woman who is seven months pregnant and peparing for a late-term abortion. Help me assemble a crib for a mother who was talked out of killing her child. Then tell me that we're prepared to sacrifice babies in order to avoid parenthood.
And how has ANY of those things gotten us one step closer to ending abortion?
Clearly the paradigm being pursued by pro-life women has failed, but they refuse to change it for fear of losing “the bird in the hand.”
As for your challenge, I’ve done many of them already, but I’m not vain enough to think preserving a few individual grains of sand offsets the fact the beach is being washed away right out from under me.
bfl
I think this person has an “issue” with the fair sex. If both pro life and pro abort are blameworthy that includes pretty much all women.
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