From the Junk Heap of the Watertown Daily Times
Warren's Abortion Rhetoric
Copyright 1998 by Jeffrey Stueber, all rights reserved.
Note: This is an expanded essay built around an editorial I wrote to my local paper listed above.

In the October 28 issue of my local paper a reader named Warren (I'm not using his last name obviously although I did in my reply to him which I sent to the paper to be published) sought to defend Russ Feingold from Republicans' use of "emotionally-charged" language, especially Mark Neumann's. For those who don't know, Russ Feingold is at present Wisconsin's U.S. Senator and Neumann is running to defeat him. Feingold has refused to work to ban partial-birth abortion and in a radio show hosted by Charles Sykes, Sykes played a tape of a debate between Feingold and another Senator which showed how Feingold said that such a decision over to perform partial-birth abortion was between the physician and the mother. In other words, Feingold refuses to work to stop this procedure. Warren backs Feingold and this is the reason for this essay and my reply to the Watertown paper.

Warren states Feingold is not "the bad guy in this picture" and this is because he did not impregnate the women who seek abortions, neither did he order any to have an abortion. All Feingold wants is for these women to have safe abortions. In fact, it was the women and only the women who decided to have unprotected sex and abort the children. Whether these women have a right to have these abortions is something they alone must decide (this is like putting the wolf in charge of guarding the hen house and arguing that the wolf alone must decide whether he should hunt the chickens!).

Instead of laying the blame where it rests, Warren attacks Neumann who cannot stop abortions unless he "creates situations in every community, every family and every person, which will result in women and girls not having sex until they are married to a responsible man." That's a strong order for Neumann and we can see easily that unless Neumann makes our society the utopia it should be, at least in Warren's eyes, then abortion will just have to remain a right which protects women against the results of the choices they are free to make. Yet, somehow I wonder if in order to make that utopia Warren demands, Neumann would have to make demands on our lives which would frustrate Warren and prevent that which Warren asks of Neumann.

The appropriate concern here is that this logic may go too far. I'm not prevented from having moral outrage over crimes past and present just because I wasn't able to prevent them and create a tranquil community where crimes are impossible. The rest of his logic is equally plastic. To demonstrate, imagine a Senator named Joe, a civilian named Jack, and a woman who has just drowned her five-year-old child (deliberately). She just didn't want the children any more. There is a conservative backlash against this and efforts are made to make drowning children illegal. Yet, Senator Joe fights to keep it legal and civilian Jack defends Senator Joe: "He's not the bad guy. He didn't father any of those children; neither did he drown them. Those who oppose drowning kids have no plan to improve families or make responsible mothers. They're just trying to take away rights from individuals. These conservatives have no business protesting drowning kids until they can create situations in each family where parents want their children and won't drown them."

At such an argument as this most of us would probably "flip our wigs," yet so few don't when such logic like Warren's is used on abortion. That's because of the cultural importance of the right to abortion, something that undoubtedly spurs Warren to also remind us how often it has been said, "You cannot legislate morality." Morality is the only thing we do legislate. Feingold wants to keep abortion legal because he believes it is morally "right" and he is ready to fight to legislate his moral opinion just as Neumann is. Senators and Congressman also vote to raise numerous taxes on us because they feel it is the "right" thing to do, the "moral" thing to do. The question is, "Whose morality should we legislate?" This issue undoubtedly has been left to the voters, but Warren's faulty logic only helps "muddy" the issue.

The rest of Warren's essay is more humorous. He asks Neumann to "examine his own soul." Neumann was a teacher but quit because the money supposedly was easier; he supposedly "chose the path of least resistance." Warren concludes with his call to protect the environment, something that he seems to care for more than protecting the lives of the unborn. All I can say after reading Warren's article is that we should pray that the "pro-choice" crowd does not make him an official spokesman or that others do not replicate his desire to attempt to argue for that which seems able to garner so little proper philosophical support.