PONDERING 2015

PONDERING 2015 AS IT COMES TO A CLOSE: HOW LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES EACH HAVE ELEMENTS WITHIN THEIR RESPECTIVE IDEOLOGIES WHICH SEEMINGLY CONTRADICT ONE ANOTHER AND CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT FROM A MORAL PERSPECTIVE.
I was just over at a family member’s place for Christmas Day yesterday and we got to talking of course about what ails the world and so forth. This family member is conservative and Pro Life. I’m liberal and, atypically, also Pro Life. But I got to thinking about the customary policy stances of liberals and conservatives on both domestic and foreign policy issues and the more I thought about it, the less they all made sense.
So here goes. Conservatives are mostly Pro-Life, so ostensibly they advocate for a greater culture of life and procreation and family at the domestic level. Yet in foreign policy, conservatives are usually more militaristic and in favour of military intervention and military solutions to human problems, including going to war to defend and promote our way of life at home and abroad. So on the one hand, conservatives ostensibly advocate for life by wanting to make more babies by being Pro Life, but are more willing to sacrifice said babies on the battlefield in war by being more militaristic in foreign policy.
Then there are liberals. Liberals are mostly Pro Choice, meaning they defend and promote a woman’s right to a ‘safe abortion.’ They say that they also believe more in pacificism and non-violent conflict resolution and are ideologically opposed to killing people in war as a way of resolving conflict and that we should all sit around a table and negotiate a settlement of our differences. So ostensibly they advocate for greater freedom of choice and respect for not only women’s rights and reproductive health choices, but also respect for all human life on earth through non-violence, but in fact simultaneously perpetrate the perpetuation of what amounts to de facto legalized infanticide writ large through the policy of Pro Choice.
No wonder our civilization is at such loggerheads with itself. Both of its major ideologies promote on the one hand a respect for life, and a simultaneous culture of death and dying. No wonder there is such talk about the end of the world and the end times etc. We seem to have planted a demon seed within the structures of the functioning of our models of so-called ‘civilization’, which appear to be, more and more, predicated upon not so civilized precepts such as structural violence, inequality, and disparity of income, opportunity, wealth, property, and rights.
One has to wonder how long a so-called ‘civilization’ can survive when, in the case of the province of Quebec, in some years, upwards of 30% of all pregnancies over the last 30 years have been terminated by abortion! It’s not even a question of morals and religion any longer, it’s a sheer question of whether or not we want to have enough babies to maintain our tax base so as to maintain our public service delivery system of health care, education and social services.
If our public services system keeps on subverting itself by promoting abortion on the one hand with official government policies which supposedly are put in place to defend women’s rights, while simultaneously funding in vitro fertilization at great cost for infertile couples who want to conceive, then I think that we have a problem. We are working at cross purposes and using taxpayer dollars to do it.
I believe that official government policy should give at least equal credence to Pro Life policies and fund them equally alongside Pro Choice policies if we are going to have true ‘Choice’ in reproductive rights in this country, in lieu of any legislation to define the legal rights of the unborn fetus. I believe that women and the men who get them pregnant should have equal access to publically financed and publically delivered Pro Life services and should be able to be equally steered to such services by public health officials such as Social Workers, Public health nurses and Doctors. Because right now, the default mode in the public health system for any so-called ‘at risk’ or ‘unwanted’ pregnancy, is to steer the woman, irrespective of the man’s involvement, towards termination of her pregnancy.
I know, ostensibly, carrying the baby to term alongside adoption and termination are all three supposedly presented to the Mother in equal measure. But in my Social Service Worker course work, where we do simulated case studies, it is clear that the way the three options are being presented to the Mother, that termination is being presented as the most favourable option by the Social Worker. There are ways of couching the three options to make one more appealing than the other and such cases were clearly demonstrated to us by our teachers in class via simulated case studies.
So like I said, being Pro Life isn’t even being about being Catholic or Christian anymore, although many Pro-Lifers such as myself are usually from a faith-based background which is Christian. It’s especially about giving women equal access to true choices in reproductive rights which respects their essential dignity and their right to fulfill their elemental charge as bearers and givers of life in this world. A woman’s child bearing function should not be a socio-economic burden to her and the man who gets her pregnant. This is why public Pro-Life services need to be funded by the taxpayer to step up to the plate and help women who are with child and the men who have made them such, to not feel alone and bereft of help in their newfound responsibilities as parents.
Starting a new family is a big deal, so why not help out low income families with housing support and food assistance, clothing and so forth, through community-based programs which could be financed partially with public funds? If we can spend so many millions of dollars on terminating so many millions of pregnancies through abortion, then certainly we can divert at least some of that money, as well as additional funds to supporting young families who want to start a family.
It all depends on what we truly want as a society. A culture of life or a culture of death. Let us choose to be conservative in our culture of life, and liberal in our culture of peace. Then and only then, might we have an ideology which does not seem so much at loggerheads with itself and with each other. Merry Christmas folks.

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Tagged with: christianity, politics, pro-life pro-choice, religion, Society
Posted in culture kampf, democracy, politics, pro-choice, pro-life, religion, Society