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Rise in percentage of Americans who are against abortion
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Protest at Notre Dame: AP Photo/Joe Raymond
A recent Gallup poll revealed that American opinion on abortion has shifted. For the first time in about 15 years, a majority of Americans (51 percent) consider themselves pro-life. (See full story here).
Just a year ago, only 44 percent were pro-life. Further, for the first time in a decade, more men are opposed to abortion than women, at 54 percent versus 49 percent.
This may come as disturbing news to some. I used to blame various restrictions on abortion and reproductive health on partisan politics and the Bush Administration, but now it seems that such measures have the backing of the American public.
I also can't help but be appalled at the fact that men are more opposed to abortion than women. I understand that those men who are anti-abortion (yes, the failure to use the politically correct term, "pro-life" is intentional) believe that they are merely opposing murder, and that they have a right to defend innocent life.
They believe this despite the fact that the fetus at its inception has no brain function, no ability to feel pain, and no self-awareness; under this kind of reasoning, we should oppose the killing of plants and insects as well. In light of the scientifically faulty and suspect idea that life begins at conception, I cannot help but perceive these sentiments instead as a sexist desire to control the means of reproduction. It seems to me that they feel entitled to such control, perhaps because it is one of the easiest way to subjugate women.
In the alternative, it could be a base male instinct to want to propagate as many of their genes as possible. These men may oppose abortion because they don't like the idea that their potential children could be aborted, thus foiling their plans to pass on their DNA. Either way, it doesn't look good.
54 percent is over half of the male population. Over half the men in the United States believe that if they have sex with a woman and she becomes pregnant, she should carry the pregnancy to term. However, it is interesting to note that 81 percent of men have had premarital sex by the age of 44 (see study here). Even if we ascribed all the men who do not have premarital sex (a mere 19 percent) to the men who opposed abortion, there is still a whopping 35 percent of men who necessarily have premarital sex and oppose abortion. Even without these numbers, we can also see from everyday experience and common sense that there are plenty of single mothers and plenty of men who father illegitimate children and never marry the mothers.
So there is at least a substantial chunk of hypocrites out there who believe that they can go around having sex at the risk of creating children, but need not bear the responsibility of the consequences and contribute to raising the children they create. Although there are various child support laws, the fact of the matter is, women usually end up with the children, and men can find all kinds of ways to skip the state or deny paternity. Men who are opposed to abortion, but have premarital sex essentially assume that pregnancy is a woman's problem, and child rearing is predominantly a woman's responsibility. While they feel fine about engaging in activity that could possibly result in a child, they believe that they have a choice in whether to raise a child, while a woman does not.
If these men truly believed abortion is murder, they should not be having sex at all, because that would be the only way to ensure that a woman does not abort a fetus. A woman need not get the consent of a boyfriend or one-night-stand to get an abortion. So the fact that these men continue to have premarital sex at the risk of creating a child they do not want, but emptily cling to some claim of a moral high ground about what the woman should do, means that their claim of protecting the innocent is facetious at best.
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