Soap operas v. fundamental issues

When slavery was still legal in the United States, a slave was considered threefifths of a person for purposes of calculating the population of the different States and the number of representatives each State was to elect to the House of Representatives.

Despite all the rhetoric about progress and development, the idea that not all human beings are people, or whole persons, was not new then, and has survived to this very day.

Despite all the talk about dignity for minorities, civil rights and liberties, the need for progress to move out of the “dark ages”, and so on, we still manage to cohabit with the idea that not all human beings are equal.

One such category of human beings is the foetus. This is interesting, because one premise for the argument that the foetus is not a person is that the question of whether or not you are a person depends on the stage of existence you are currently in. Another premise is that the State decides whether you are a person. (You might remember the highly legalistic argument brought forward by Hillary Clinton during last year’s American presidential elections.)

The argument could easily be applied to old people, or terminally ill patients. They are not equal to other people. Their lives, like the life of the foetus, are inferior to that of other human beings considered full persons.

There is a lot to say about the relationship between equality and liberty. My quick and short answer to the many questions which can be raised is that equality and liberty can co-exist only if administered by fraternity, or brotherly love. Unless there is brotherly love, liberty will take the upper hand on equality, and some will have to be sacrificed for the others to enjoy their liberty. The reason for this is that equality needs enforcement whereas liberty needs only force.

The human being in the foetal stage can, according to the dominant ideology of the West, be sacrificed on the altar of the god of liberty. I think there are at least two ways of viewing this (apart from the crude consideration of unadulterated selfishness).

One way of looking at the promotion of terminating human life at the foetal stage is through the lens of class struggle. If you promote pregnancy termination as a family planning tool among the working classes, you can control their numbers. The implications for electoral purposes are clear: fewer workers, less votes for parties which support pro-worker policies and divert public money toward social programmes rather than projects which interest other classes.

At the same time, a reduction in the number of workers brings in its wake economic implications. The upside is that workers with fewer children have more spare money to spend on non-child-related products. The downside is that a smaller workforce not only slows down production (which, ironically, might be good in economies struggling with oversupply – though that’s another story) but also dampens demand.

In come the migrants, be they economic or political. Migrants refill the emptying ranks of the working class, replenish the State coffers (by paying taxes), and rekindle demand. That’s the economics; the politics is that migrants take at least a generation to get politically organised and active in the host country, affording the other social classes enough breathing space to maintain their control on the organs and methods of government.

That’s the class-struggle analysis of the abortion phenomenon, and concentrates on the workers. With regard to the other social classes, abortion is promoted as a woman’s right to choose whether to become a mother or not.

The class-struggle argument is ethically despicable because workers are encouraged to use abortion as a family-planning method (to avoid poverty) whereas, instead, their living conditions could be bettered (and there are enough resources to better them – just look at all the money burnt to save the brigand banks) to avoid poverty without making people kill their own unborn children. The bourgeois argument of a woman’s right to choose is ethically despicable because it reduces the baby to another product one can acquire (or dispose of).

This latter view is based on the idea that there is the right to have a child. As soon as the argument is put forward that this right exists, the next logical step is to furrow back to the argument’s premise: a child is a commodity like any other, and can therefore be acquired. And given that the liberal (also called “capitalist”) system we live in is conceived in terms of the right to own and the right to make money grandparents’ association, which seeks to protect the grandparent-grandchild relationship, seems to be inspired by the notion that the child is a person who needs to know his/her roots and ancestry.)

The right to have a child also implies the right not to exercise that right. In other words, the right to choose. For these “rights” to exist, the unborn child has to be denied its personhood and to be categorised as a commodity. This way, the bourgeois can easily (and guiltlessly) decide that the termination of a pregnancy is nothing more than the termination of a production process, with no real consequences on another human being.

The two neoliberal approaches I can make out in the abortion debate are therefore these: one, family planning for the workers, with the excuse of helping them avoid poverty while the real reason could be to ensure political hegemony; two, the freedom to acquire or not to acquire another commodity for the bourgeois.

I find both approaches to be ethically objectionable. They both deny the essential dignity of the human being, whether he/she is the offspring of a working-class family or of a capricious bourgeois.

I also find it ironic that such an objection, deliberately couched in Marxian, or quasior pseudo-Marxian terms, is not far from the beliefs of any serious Christian.

Social conservatism, which is making a comeback after the neoliberal and progressive overkill, appeals to people who hail from both the left and the right of the spectrum.

The important question is: will the disgraceful soap operas keep distracting us from the fundamental issues which have a direct effect on the framework in which we live out our personal relationships?