What are the Benefits of Creating the Problem and Killing the Solution?

 

Aside from the January 6 Committee hearings in the USA, the hottest topic around has been the overturning of “Roe vs Wade,” the landmark legislation which guaranteed the right of women to have an abortion.

Abortion is an emotive topic and the repercussions of “Roe vs Wade” are not limited to the USA. The arguments used by anti-abortion activist in America are used around the world. When I wrote a piece on the topic, where I admitted that I ended up in my first marriage because my then girlfriend only agreed to the termination of the pregnancy if we got married, I was accused of “confessing to murder,” and placed under the cosmic punishment of having to work as a waiter.

My position on abortion remains the same as Singapore’s legal position on prostitution. While unpleasant, it is better that it is in the open and done in medical clinics rather than in back alleys. Just because something is not pleasant and downright nasty, it does not mean that it should be illegal.

I will leave the abortion debate to the intelligent because there’s been an even more interesting side story, which despite my limited capacity, I hope is never adopted in Singapore. In the aftermath of the ruling on abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas made a statement that suggested that the court needed to review several recent decisions like gay marriage and “the right to contraception.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/thomas-constitutional-rights-00042256

 

 Now, I can understand that not everyone is comfortable with the idea of “Gay Marriage.” However, I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would be against contraception, especially if they were against abortion.

I don’t have any hard statistics on hand, but if my personal experiences were anything to do by, a good proportion of abortion cases come from people not knowing how to use contraception. The great “emancipation” of women came with the invention of the “pill” which gave women greater control of when they wanted to get pregnant. As for men, the advent of HIV made condom use a given. If I had, for example, been smart enough of fork out $12 for a box of condoms every week, we would have saved $4,000 plus on a termination and three years in a marriage that made both of us miserable.

So, logic has it that if you are against abortion, you should be pro-contraception. If more people used contraception, they are less likely to need an abortion. A state that is run by rational people who understand human nature would do something like this. They would make contraception incredibly easy. Then, if anyone walks into a clinic needing an abortion (with the exception of incest and rape), you could impose a fine on them on top of the cost of abortion – thus discouraging people from having abortions.

However, rationality and understanding human nature, particularly when it comes to sex, is a scarce commodity when it comes to laws governing sex. Suddenly, you get a group of God’s appointed agents trying to compensate for their own misdeeds.

The stupidest aspect comes from what I’d call an “anti-knowledge” movement, which argues that if you “teach” kids about anything, they’ll end up feeling bad and do bad things. The most visible sign of this can be seen over the teaching of “Critical Race Theory,” where we needed a decorated combat veteran to make the point that you need to study things in order deal with them because a veteran sex offender was upset that kids of his pigmentation would feel bad for being born with their pigmentation if they studied a certain subject.

Anti-Knowledge is most often seen in the debate on sex. You have the group that actually believes that if you teach kids about contraception, they’ll end up having sex and you should teach them “abstinence.” It goes without saying that in every experiment where a group of teenagers are taught “abstinence only” and another are taught “abstinence plus” (best to control your hormones but in case you can’t), there was inevitably a higher need for abortion in the “abstinence only” group.

Laws can be used to promote certain social behaviors or to discourage behaviors that have a negative social outcome. However, they need to be crafted intelligently with an understanding of human nature and ground reality. You got to recognize that solutions exist to problems and promote the solution. If you kill the solution, you are only going to make the problem worse.

As mentioned, the best form of crisis management is to ensure that the situation doesn’t get to crisis stage. If you go against contraception and abortion, you are only creating a crisis that can’t be managed. However, it becomes easier if you understand that contraception is the solution to lessening abortion.