It's sort of fun to see this campus engaged in a good old-fashioned abortion debate. You walk around campus and you can see the word sitting just behind people's lips, as if they might blurt out ABORTION!"" if you asked them the time. Mount Abortion had been lying dormant for a while. Unless you were a single-issue McCain voter, it had been lost in the roar of the economic crisis, gay marriage and Miley Cyrus' side boob (!). But now, thanks to the quiet retirement of a Planned Parenthood doctor, aborted fetuses are back on the menu - the menu of pertinent issues, that is.
It's hard not to get excited about abortion. Not the act itself, that is; I think if anyone gets their jollies thinking about something like abortion, then we should bring back electric shock treatment until they don't. But as a fan of heated debates, it's hard to find another issue that gets people going like abortion. Boy, does it get people riled up. It really has a way of getting to the core of what we're doing here. You get the feeling people from a less complacent time would have already gone to war over it and settled the matter. But now the powers that be have decided it's not worth losing a bunch of lives in a war unless you can make an assload of money off it, and no one's dumb enough to try to make money off something like abortion. Well, except for the Madison Surgery Center, apparently.
Since everyone is a partisan in this debate (except for those nancy boys who say they don't think men should have a say in the matter), and because my editor has reminded me this is not an opinion column, I'm not going to alienate half of you by declaring where I stand here. But since my usual goal is just for people to make it through the first two paragraphs before they flip over to Graph Giraffe, I'm not going to go to great lengths to hide it at this point, either.
Abortion has the makings of a great all-around debate topic, with tempers sure to be flaring and solid arguments zinging back and forth. The problem with abortion is that tempers flare all right, but just when things seem to be getting good, one side already has had it and is ready to quit and play Mario Kart. The pro-choice side gets angry. Really angry. But not angry because the other side is throwing bible verses at them or repeating the same five words over and over with their hands over their ears, angry to be having the debate at all. They'll say that it's pointless, that everyone thinks they're right, and that's not going to change, so it's pointless to argue. I'd hope everyone involved thinks they are right, and I'd at least like to hear the reasons why they do. But it's as if they feel Roe v. Wade set things right, and to even discuss the matter now only opens the door to backsliding.
People are big into rights these days, as if they were pokéballs and we gotta catch 'em all. If a politician took the podium and said he was going to make sure ""that everybody gets all of the rights,"" I have a feeling his audience would be wildly enthused, if a bit confused. Yet, no one would agree that people should have a right to just anything. If we treat our lil' political society as a classroom, the teacher (let's call her Ms. America so she's hot) can't go giving hallway passes to boys who want to go spray paint ""Fuck This Place"" on the building. She has to make a value judgment about the activity her hallway pass facilitates.
That's the conundrum with the abortion debate; it comes down to a value judgment. Some rights, like voting rights, pertain to acts almost everybody thinks are good things. I don't think anyone thinks abortion rights pertain to a good act, though some may say it's to a lesser evil. Therein lies the value judgment. Just because people value things differently doesn't mean we can't talk about them. If you had to pee really bad in math class but you knew the teacher didn't think that was a good enough reason for a hall pass, the two of you should still talk about it before the room starts stinking.
Email dhottinger@wisc.edu to ask what the hell THAT'S got to do with anything.
