Why is abortion so popular with women who would never dream of having an abortion?
This is among the questions I’ve been asking myself for years, while trying to understand what motivates people to vote the way they do. Again and again I see examples of people voting to the left of their actual convictions. At the bottom of it, I often suspect they vote not for the effect of government programs on themselves, but what they will do for other people. Yet this does not mean they are altruistic.
The classic case is “tax the rich.” Very few people are in favour of having their own taxes raised, or their own spending regulated. But if a politician will assure them that he is going to put taxes up on everyone above a certain income, he is sure to generate some enthusiasm among those below it.
As Jonathan Swift put it, “Who would not at a crowded show, stand high himself, keep others low?”
The cultivation of envy is an important part of any leftwing political agenda; and the old Marxist obsession with “class struggle” provided the core appeal of socialism. It will not raise the average citizen’s standard of living, and few are fool enough to think that it could. But it may well bring down those above him. And maybe, just maybe, the “little guy” can share in some of the spoils.
Jacob Burckhardt, in writing about the French Revolution, stressed this feature, overlooked by other historians: that the Revolution was very popular at first, among the rural peasants who would suffer horribly from it later. They were under the impression that “liberté, égalité, fraternité” meant sharing out the property of their semi-feudal lords.
I have used this very obvious example to make my point, but of course time passes, and there are some things people learn. At the moment nobody really wants socialism, and not even the NDP is promising to deliver it. I daresay people are even getting tired of taxing the rich, though there is still a significant constituency that may be conned by this. They no longer believe medicare is “free,” however.
For the parties of the left, survival requires finding new ways to channel popular fears and resentments. Not all of these are directly economic. For example, a large part, and perhaps the great majority of the general public, is anxious about immigration; does not subscribe to multicultural “ideals”; is conscious of “demographic decline.” And it is understandable: birth rates have fallen well below replacement levels throughout the West; and while immigration is needed to supply taxpayers to support all the retirees in the manner to which they have become accustomed, there is a deep fear that a tide of babies from the world’s most benighted regions is about to engulf us all. Political correctness makes this hard to express, however.
The “culture of death”—of family breakdown, contraception, abortion, pornography (this last is demographically significant, for as men become more addicted to pornography, they become less interested in conventional, procreative sex)—feeds on itself.
I wrote on the weekend about Michael Ignatieff’s demand that Stephen Harper include abortion and contraception “services” in his G8 scheme to improve maternal and child healthcare in the poorest countries. My immediate purpose was to remind readers of the huge and vicious lie upon which the Liberal leader is trading. For we do not improve the health of a baby by killing it.
The proposition may be evil and absurd; yet according to several media sources, there is evidence it is popular—especially among woman voters who had been trending towards Harper’s more socially and fiscally conservative policies. I know several examples of “swing voters” in this class, and can more or less follow the thinking. I’m afraid it is not flattering to them.
Note the genius of Ignatieff’s appeal: not for more contraception and abortion here, where we have surely had enough, but rather in “the poorest countries”—which we think have long been producing “too many babies.” And, too many babies who could be clamouring to come here one day. Harper’s policy might increase the load; Ignatieff’s might reduce it.
Even within North America, abortion appeals to some because it does, in fact, disproportionately reduce the offspring of certain racial minorities. The eugenic argument for it was actually the first to be made, back in the days when it was still acceptable to speak about the fertility of the “lower orders” and the “inferior races.”
This argument is still very much alive, though today dressed up in feminist jargon. “Population control,” through the United Nations or otherwise, has always consisted of “breeding instructions for the blacks, browns, and yellows.” And this is precisely what Ignatieff is selling, to the sort of people who want to buy it.
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