Sex, Society, and Offspring

Sex should never, ever be tied directly with offspring unless it's someone's, and preferably multiple people's choice. Abortion should be legal because a person's right to the pursuit of happiness through sexual pleasure should trump the state's right to protect the potentiality of human life (context matters, so certainly there are other epochs when this is not true). Abortion should be legal right now. But it's not.

Somehow, the state still maintains that it has a vested interest in protecting the well being of a fetus, and that it's interest in doing so increases as the fetus matures. This is probably wrong, but most people cannot yet see it that way; they don't want to see it. Why does the state have a vested interest in protecting an unborn human? Presumably, we assume from a legal standpoint, reflecting societies values, that human life is inherently valuable to the society, and therefore this makes sense. The value of the human life comes in many forms - it's joyous and harmonious relationships to others, the contributions is makes to maintaining our species and our societal structure, etc. I think we can all agree that human life is generally valuable in both quality and quantity. But, like anything, too much is not good. If the planet were filled entirely with humans we couldn't move, we couldn't leave, and we would all pretty much get bored and want to die. Economically, we probably want a population size that optimizes for both quantity and quality of life. At some point, we don't want more people. What would be some good indicators that we have enough people? And at that point, does the government still have a vested interest in protecting an unborn human? The answer is that we have a vested interest in agreeing to policy structures locally, nationally, globally that help regulate the population in such a way that we generally all agree is mutually beneficial. This is incredibly difficult. Ideally, we would not regulate, people would just have a small number of children, and thankfully, this happens naturally to some extent.

People are unjustifiably hubris when it comes to defending the nature of our species. We have failed before, and we will fail again. What we can hope to achieve is to learn from our failures and lessen the magnitude of each one consecutively. In a way, that will happen when we ruin our planet and or have a lasting catastrophic global depression sometime over the course of the next several decades. Let's compare our global civilization to that of the Easter Islanders. We likely won't fail in the sense that we will all have to leave the planet, because 1) we can't leave and because 2) extinction would require an incredibly extreme change of global climate, potentially beyond the likes of climate change and/or nuclear war (though I would be interested in a well though-out counter claim). We will fail in the sense that we're effectively lowering the carrying capacity of our planet in the long run and at a minimum we will undergo massive penalties to the quality of life experienced by human beings across the globe, and potentially a sizable loss in the quantity of that life as well.

Ultimately, my point isn't that abortion should be legal - it should, but that's not my point really. My point is that it should be legal so that we correctly balance our desire for quantity of life against our desire for quality of life. We want abortion to be legal, all abortion. And, we want everyone to feel safe and secure about meeting their sexual needs. Let's legalize all abortion where it's someones choice. Forward!