Ten Things Conservatives Can Do (Or Not) To Improve The World

Conservatives in the United States and around the world tend to focus their policy-making on prohibitions and abolitions: from drugs, to abortion, to science, to the government itself, all they do is focused on trying to stop others.  The irony is that others don’t want to make conservatives do anything at all: in fact, nobody actually counts on them to do things, since they’re focused on not doing things.  Debates rage in societies about dozens of issues regarding the proper role of government, morality, and even science.  Often in these discussions, conservatives tend to proclaim that the other side shouldn’t do this or that, and then advocate for some sort of prohibition or other.  Given the repressive nature of this group of society, I thought it might do good to propose to them, briefly, solutions to the hot-button issues in a way they can understand (i.e., things they can avoid doing themselves).

1. Against abortion? Don’t have one.  First of all, assuming conservatives are 50-50 male-female, half of them should have nothing to say about this issue.  Second, there is no such thing as anyone who is pro-abortion; there are just those who realize abortion does more harm when it is illegal than when it is legal, and those who don’t.  Pro-life is, as the late great George Carlin said, anti-woman.
2. Don’t like homosexual marriage? Don’t marry one.  OK, so two guys three houses down the street live together an want to get married.  Does that in any way affect their neighbor’s relationship with his/her wife/husband?  If the answer is no, then you there’s nothing to fear from gay marriage.  If the answer is yes, then there’s a lot to gain from it!
3. Don’t want universal public health care? Pay for your own.  If people don’t have to worry about going broke when they get sick, does that make them less free, or more?
4. Think global warming is a hoax? Get out of the way and let the rest of us fix it.  The potential costs of not doing anything far outweigh the costs of doing something unnecessary or ineffective.  If we add to that the fact that it’s already happening—you don’t even need to bother with the science, just look at the news—getting out of the way and letting the rest of us do something is the least conservatives can do.
5. Don’t believe in evolution?  Fine, just let the man give his biology class.  We don’t teach numerology along with math, alchemy with chemistry, homeopathy with physics, or holocaust denial with history.  If skinheads can sit through history class, then surely Christians can sit through biology.
6.  Don’t like assisted suicide?  Then don’t do it.  Death can be a painful and humiliating experience, but it doesn’t have to be.  If we can choose to die, or to suffer miserably, drag our family with us, and then die anyway, how is that choice difficult at all?
7. Don’t like migrants? Don’t hire them.  Pretty self-explanatory.
8. Think drugs are bad? Don’t do them.  Same principle as abortion.  Besides, we know what will happen if we legalize: just look at Portugal.
9. Don’t want stem cell research? Don’t use it.  There will be more for the rest of us and we’ll need less of point #6.
10. Don’t like free speech?  Then shut up!  If you have ridiculous ideas, then you will be ridiculed.  If your ideas are not respectable, they will not be respected.

In short, all conservatives have to do is be people of congruence and integrity.  Nobody is going to make them marry a homosexual, do drugs, have an abortion, kill themselves, or anything that goes against what they believe… All the rest of us ask of them in return is that they don’t legislate their opinions onto our lives.  If they want to be backward superstitious bigots, then that’s fine!  When they give up sovereignty over their own bodies and minds, they hurt nobody but themselves.  Meanwhile, those of us who care about civilization and progress can move forward, and everybody wins.

Legal Abortion Saves Lives. No, Really!

This an English version of my post in Spanish on abortion in Mexico, but it’s not a word-for-word translation, since the status of abortion is different in America.  However, the reasons I’ll give for keeping abortion legal in the States come from the same arguments for its legalization in Mexico.  Given that this is always a raging topic of discussion in American social and political life, I thought it appropriate to comment on it.  Hopefully, the perspective from an outsider will help contribute a grain of sand to the debate.

There’s but two arguments that I’d like to present for keeping abortion legal in America; both come from a practical approach to the situation.  I know that the usual debate about the issue centers mostly on the humanity-citizenship of the fetus on one hand, and the individual reproductive rights of women on the other.  However, I don’t need to get into that discussion for the practical reasons that abortion should be kept legal.  The debate is certainly very entertaining, but I think there are practical points to be made that trump any argument for the humanity of the fetus, at the same time that they don’t require any feminism (not that that’s a bad thing).  Therefore I will, for the sake of argument, concede right now that a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, and a baby are equivalent.  I don’t actually think they are, but it’s actually not relevant to my points.  The only thing I ask the pro-life reader in return is to recognize that the lives of the women involved are just as valuable as those of their unborn.  Fair enough?  Well, here goes:

On The Purpose of Laws

Why do we actually make things illegal?  Sure, there’s the intention dissuading people from certain behavior, but that has no effect on reality.  Homicide is illegal, and yet it happens everyday.  The same goes for fraud, kidnapping, burglaries, etc.  Making something illegal has little or no effect in actually convincing people not to do it.  The real, practical reason we have laws is to have legal justification for sending people to jail.  So the question then becomes: why do we send people to jail?  Obviously, rehabilitation is not the answer.  Sure, there’s the odd case of an exemplary prisoner who turns his life around but, for the most part, criminals are worse after they go to jail.  So the thing that jail is useful for is, actually, to remove an individual from society.  Society says to the criminal: “You may not care or understand that what you did was wrong, but at least we’ll make sure you won’t be able to keep doing it.”  That’s what jail is about.

Practical Argument for Legal Abortion #1: Crime & Punishment

What should be the penalty for aborting, assuming it were illegal?  In Mexico, the penalty depends on the circumstances of the abortion but is usually no less than 10 years in prison.  But is this fair or necessary?  Depending on the term of the pregnancy, an abortion may be possible through the administration of hormonal drugs that basically induce a miscarriage.  However, this procedure doesn’t always work, and surgical methods are usually required to complete the abortion.  If the pregnancy is more advanced at the point of abortion, then the surgical method is the only viable option.  Do women like going through these procedures?  Does anyone seriously think that women enjoy abortions?  The surgical procedure is, basically, a rape with surgical instruments.  After going through something like this, what incentive would a woman have to do it again?  It’s not like women get paid to put themselves through this.  The emotional trauma resulting from such a procedure, both for their own violation and for the loss of a human life, leaves life-long scars.  What is the use of putting women in jail for years after they’ve gone through an abortion?  As in the case of drug consumption, the supposed criminal is also the victim, because the crime itself is the punishment.  Putting women in jail for aborting is useless overkill.

Practical Argument for Legal Abortion #2: Women are People, Too

When abortion isn’t legal it happens anyway, just as prostitution, murder, drug use, fraud, kidnapping, and all other crimes.  The difference is that illegal abortions (known colloquially as back-alley abortions) are not only lethal for the fetus, but also for the mother.  Using the stats in Mexico to make a rough argument we can then extrapolate to America, we have: 100,000 illegal abortions per year in Mexico, resulting in 1500 women dead from complications such as hemorrhage and infection.  For the sake of argument and calculations, we can simplify the ratio conservatively to roughly 1 woman dead for every 100 illegal abortions.  In Mexico City, the only place in where abortion is legal in Mexico, there have been 58,000 abortions since legalization in 2007.  This means 580 women who would have died from complications in a back-alley abortion got to live.  Considering that those abortions would have happened anyway if abortion were illegal, a net 580 human lives were saved.  If you can count, you can see why legalization is a preferable scenario. If you could choose between 58,000 dead versus 58,580 dead, wouldn’t you take the lower number?  The short version is this: if abortion is legal, a human life is lost (remember the disclaimer I make about this statement in the intro); if abortion is illegal, those same lives are lost, plus an additional one for every hundred.

Americans, especially women, should value the right that they have to abortion.  In Mexico, women are still jailed even for accidental abortions.  There have been cases of 10 year old girls forced to give birth after being impregnated by rape, and anti-woman legislation is still alive and well all over the territory (the penalty for cattle theft is 9 to 25 years in prison in some states, compared to 3 to 6 years for a man who kills his wife).  America should cherish the progress it has made in women’s rights and the separation of church and state.  It is still, weather we Mexicans like it or not, our closest neighbor, ally, and example.

Why Abstinence Education Fails

Teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are some of the most prevalent underlying problems in societies around the world.  They can lead to other problems such as abortions, low education (especially among teenage mothers), higher mortality rates, and even contribute to overpopulation and thus poverty.  If these problems could be tackled efficiently, the fabric of societies around the world would be strengthened.  However, the conservative right around the world, particularly the religious portion, has made it impossible to properly address the issue by implementing the counter-productive strategy of focusing on abstinence education, rather than an integral sexual education in conjunction with accessible contraception.

At first glance, abstinence education seems to make sense.  Basically, the premise is that if a certain behavior is risky to an individual, then it should be avoided.  And so, if teenagers (or adults, even) engage in sexual intercourse carelessly, and if that behavior results in pregnancy or an STD, then they shouldn’t be having intercourse.  Sounds reasonable.

The problem is that, under that logic, almost any activity could be banned on grounds that it poses a certain risk.  For example, some people who drive do so recklessly or under the influence of some substance, and then cause accidents.  Therefore, we shouldn’t teach people how to drive.  Yes, even the responsible ones who aren’t likely to have any accidents or even tickets should abstain from driving, because something could happen to them.  Because there is a certain risk, they shouldn’t be doing it.

Obviously, this isn’t done.  This is because it is fundamentally unfair to punish all of society for the recklessness of some individuals by limiting their freedom.  If some people drive recklessly, then we encourage the use of seatbelts and give tickets to dangerous drivers.  Anyone can recognize such unfairness in an extreme example such as the one above, but not everyone recognizes it when it comes to sex in teens.  Why is this? One simple but huge reason is religion.  When it comes to sexuality, religions around the world have but one view: there is no such thing except for procreating.  If it happens to feel good, that’s only an unwanted side-effect.  The irony is that most people around the world don’t have sex with reproduction in mind.  The only thing they’re looking for, most of the time, is pleasure.  If there were nothing pleasurable to sex, the human species would probably die out in a couple of generations, especially in developed countries where religion has been tamed and reproduction is just an afterthought–if it is a thought at all.

In the real world, however, it turns out that humans are animals and as such they have instincts and urges.  The attempt to suppress sexual behavior in teens has resulted in the worst possible scenario: they have sex anyway (anal sex is actually way up in abstinence focused states and countries) and are in most cases completely oblivious to the risks involved.  This results in STDs and unwanted pregnancies, along with psychological problems in some cases.  In every generation, the potential workforce is diminished by the scores of men and women who won’t grow to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or CEOs.  Instead, they’ll have to find a quick and easy minimum-wage job to make ends meet for themselves and their newborn.  Some young women opt for terminating the pregnancy, resulting in tremendous psychological trauma.  What’s worse is that, without proper education about why what happened to them happened, they re-engage in the same behaviors and fall into the traps again.

But why do teens not pay attention to the religious ban on sex?  Well, they probably do, it’s just that they don’t understand it.  The problem is that they don’t see anything risky with their behavior (because they don’t know enough about it) and so abstinence is to them just another tool that adults use to control them.  If they understood what STDs were, and how people get pregnant and how to prevent it, they would regulate their own behavior.  Kids are not stupid.  None of them actually want to get HIV or gonorrhea, and very few even want to have kids of their own one day (at least when they’re in high school).  However, sex is one of the things grown-ups do, and they want to do it, too.  Ironically, the more sex information kids have, the more likely they are to postpone their sexual activities for later in life.

Just as we don’t ban driving, but instead encourage drivers to use seatbelts, encouraging condom use should be the minimum we could do for teens.  The ideal situation would be that they could have access to all contraceptive methods, regardless of their age or gender.  Young men and women would greatly increase their chances of getting ahead in life before creating a family of their own, or even opt not to have a family at all.  Entire life projects would not depend on chance anymore, but more on the merits of the individual.  Obviously, a life without HIV would probably be easier, too.  Thorough sexual education is probably the single biggest action that can be undertaken to improve quality of life in the world. It would greatly help in attaining the only cure for poverty that has worked every time around the world, and is the one thing that all religions oppose: the empowerment of women.