May 2007

ARTICLE TOOLS

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One of the things I loved about Seinfeld was how it poked holes in our society's moral shallowness. During one episode, George Costanza's boss, Mr. Lippman, summons him.

Lippman: It's come to my attention that you and the cleaning woman have engaged in sexual intercourse on the desk in your office. Is that correct?

George: Who said that?

Lippman: She did.

George: [pause] Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon … you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time.

Lippman: You're fired!

Like George, many people today exhibit moral blindness. Take, for example, the recent article by Emily Bazelon in The New York Times Magazine, "Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?" At the outset, Bazelon writes that "the scientific evidence strongly shows that abortion does not increase the risk of depression, drug abuse, or any other psychological problem any more than having an unwanted pregnancy or giving birth." Those pro-lifers who come alongside women misled or bullied into an abortion are caricatured as wild-eyed, intellectually dishonest (or ignorant) fanatics working out their own issues.

Then Bazelon describes how certain leaders of the "anti-abortion movement" have pragmatically chosen to focus on the women who have abortions anyway:

If the activists have a Moses, it is David Reardon, whose 1996 book, Making Abortion Rare, laid out the argument that abortion harms women and that this should be a weapon in the anti-abortion arsenal. "We must change the abortion debate so that we are arguing with our opponents on their own turf, ...