Rick Perry said recently that he wants to make abortion, at any stage, a thing of the past. (He was speaking at a press conference organized by Texas Right to Life on Tuesday December 11, 2012.)
This may seem like an admirable and laudable goal, but the problem is that it does not relate to human nature. Whether we like it or not, abortion has existed since the beginning of time, and has existed in every human culture. Abortion exists because unwanted pregnancies exist. And unwanted pregnancies exist because of the fallibility of human nature. People are the product of their nature, and desire, and a hundred other emotions bundled up with the urge for sex, is a product of human nature.
We can only end abortion if we end unwanted pregnancies, and we will only be able to stop unwanted pregnancies if we are somehow able to change human nature.
I recently read a quote from Abraham Lincoln on drinking. Lincoln was addressing the Illinois Temperance Society when he said that to think that criminalizing alcohol would stop drinking and drunkenness is to expect a reversal of human nature, which is Gods decree and never can be reversed. [From Raiding Consciousness: Why the War on Drugs is a War on Human Nature, by Lewis Lapham, published in the Winter 2012 issue of Laphams Quarterly, and on-line at TomDispatch: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175626/tomgram%3A_lewis_lapham%2C_drugs_and_the_national_security_state
I am neither praising nor defending abortion, just suggesting that we need to address it as a product of the human condition.
