July 18, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:56
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| I guess, like most of you, I've had a lot of thoughts about abortion over the years. | |
| I went from very sort of pro, like, well, of course, and how could we have a society wherein it was not perfectly legal and, in fact, funded back in my days of collectivism and socialism, to now, it is a very tough and very complicated question. | |
| And I'm going to try and frame it in a way that hopefully will make some sense and maybe it will help clarify Your thinking, certainly doing these kinds of videos helps me clarify my thinking, so let's see if we can get something useful going on together, shall we? | |
| So, originally, I accepted the argument, you know, it's a woman's body, it's a woman's choice, and she should not be forced to carry a child to term, and it should not be illegal, of course, for her to get an abortion, back-galley abortions, coat hangers, death, disease, infertility, | |
| you name it, right? So, I accepted the idea and the argument that And the only way that you can do that, of course, is to focus only on the woman's preferences and not on the fetus's life. | |
| I mean, they kind of got to be erased from the equation. | |
| In order for you to say it's an absolute right, then the preference of the mom has to be the only thing that you consider. | |
| And the actual life of the fetus, the potential life of the child, has to be nowhere in your equation. | |
| Because if the fetus, if the life of the fetus, the life of the unborn child is at all a factor in your equation, then by golly, of course, it gets very complicated very quickly, right? | |
| So if someone's rushing at you in an alley with an axe and you shoot that person, there's not well, you know, it's 51-49, it's 80-20, it's like 100% you're in the right direction. | |
| It's self-defense, and you did nothing wrong. | |
| In fact, it probably would have been wrong to let yourself get chopped up when you were able to defend yourself. | |
| So there's no, you know, a woman gets raped, there's no 50-50, it's like 100% the rape is wrong, 0% the rape is justified, and there's no ambiguity, right? | |
| There's all that. And maybe difficulties are proven, but once proof is established beyond a reasonable doubt, there's not a lot of complications that come out of that. | |
| Now, the only way you can gain that kind of moral certainty with regards to abortion is if the mother's preferences are 100% and the life of the fetus is 0%. | |
| In other words, in this sort of example, you have to have the same kind of moral certainty as if the fetus were a grown man chasing the woman down an alley in the dark with a chainsaw and she turned and shot him and saved herself, right? | |
| I mean, it has to be That clear. | |
| And the trick, like what happened to me when I was younger, or what was done unto me, I suppose you could say, was the life of the fetus was simply nowhere to be found in the equation. | |
| Did not exist in any way, shape, or form. | |
| Blobber cells, you know, it's like... | |
| Getting a cyst removed. | |
| It's like cutting your toenails. | |
| It simply doesn't enter into things. | |
| Now, once you say, and, you know, as a father who loves his child enormously, I just can't take that out of the equation. | |
| I can't take the life that comes from pregnancy out of the equation. | |
| And that means... | |
| That it is no longer simple. | |
| Now, with Trump's SCOTUS pick, Kavanaugh, there's this great terror that Roe v. | |
| Wade is going to be overturned, right? | |
| And half a century or whatever it is of abortion rights will be overturned and the 50 million or 60 million babies aborted in America, roughly equivalent to immigration, when you think about it. | |
| That somehow this is going to be terrible. | |
| And listen, I mean, I don't envy the choice of a woman who gets pregnant outside of a committed relationship, outside of a marriage. | |
| That's not a fun place to be. | |
| And of course, society for thousands and thousands of years has recognized that and said, yeah, that's a terrible place to be. | |
| So let's try and design a society so that women don't end up in that situation, which is why no sex before marriage, which is why, you know, committed relationship and, you know, use birth control, but be married. | |
| And so there was a lot in the West, at least, that was put into recognizing how difficult a choice that was for the mom and recognizing that society should bend every fiber of its economic, moral and social muscles to prevent women from getting into just that moral and social muscles to prevent women from getting into just that kind So from that standpoint, there was a lot of prevention. | |
| It's the better part, a cure. | |
| And then the leftists came along. | |
| Now, the collectivists came along, the socialists, and so on. | |
| Now, they... Claim to be operating from a place of compassion, right? | |
| And of course, it's always easy to be compassionate with other people's money. | |
| It's always easy to be compassionate when you're running up debts or counterfeiting money through the Fed or central banking. | |
| I mean, it's like the migrant crisis. | |
| I mean, it's easy to say, let's be kind. | |
| When you don't get the bill, like if everyone who said, I think we should take a migrant was presented with a bill, as is the case in Sweden, for $344,000 for the first year, well, then you have something to balance, right? | |
| You say, okay, well, I want to help migrants, but I don't have $344,000 with which to do so. | |
| So maybe there's some other solution. | |
| But when people just When magic money is just erupting out of nowhere, when it grows on trees, then why would you say no to helping people when it costs you nothing? | |
| Because you're mean and vicious, right? | |
| So this is just part of the price of the pain that we pay for fiat currency, which is everyone can just make their moral decisions and look good and pat themselves on the back and do all that base moral posturing. | |
| And nobody gets a bill, so... | |
| You have to really understand abstraction. | |
| Money is philosophy in action. | |
| Money is philosophy in the moment. | |
| Money is principles when you don't understand long-term consequences. | |
| Is this good or bad for you, right? | |
| Well, you get a bill. | |
| Is smoking good or bad for you? | |
| A lot of people can push that off. | |
| But if your insurance costs double, well, you get an immediate amount of feedback for all of that, right? | |
| So, the left sort of come across like, oh, we're so kind and we care and we don't want women to get, you know, harmed or hurt by back-alley abortions and so on. | |
| And of course, who does? Of course, who does, right? | |
| But the left, they don't have compassion. | |
| Anybody who runs up, and this is true of the Republicans pre-Trump as well, and we'll see how Trump does with all of this, but there's no compassion in running up debts. | |
| There's no kindness in ladling the young with like a million dollars plus of unfunded liabilities. | |
| There's no kindness. | |
| In lying to 17- and 18-year-olds about the value of a college education and roping them down into $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 worth of debt because you want to lure them into the brain-shredding collectivist propaganda factories of higher education and pretend that you can spit them out anything other than a... | |
| Spark-circuiting, broken-brained robot designed to serve the left. | |
| So they don't care to improve public schools, to give parents choice. | |
| There's no compassion, you understand, in this stuff at all. | |
| Their goal is simply to gain and keep power. | |
| So the question is, how does abortion serve that end? | |
| How does legal abortion serve that end? | |
| The end of the left. | |
| It's a very, very important question, right? | |
| Because if you think it's about compassion or kindness, you're barking up the wrong tree. | |
| As I used to hear when I was a kid, you're barking up the wrong tree. | |
| What you want to be doing is looking at what the left advocates as a methodology for gaining and keeping political power. | |
| That's what it's all about. So the question then becomes, how does abortion help the left gain And keep political power. | |
| Well, let's say that abortion were made illegal tomorrow. | |
| Then what would happen is Women would then start to face enormous risks for having sex. | |
| Well, having, you know, procreative penis, vagina, ejaculate, sperm, egg, sex, right? | |
| Well, that is very interesting. | |
| How does easy sexual access, consequence-free sexual access, serve the left? | |
| It's very interesting to think about. | |
| Okay, so suddenly women are going to have to really think twice about who they sleep with because they could get pregnant, right? | |
| Now suddenly, marriage becomes much more valuable, because if a woman is willing to have sex with you in a committed relationship like marriage, but she's not willing to have sex with you outside of a committed relationship because she doesn't want to take the risk of getting pregnant, and the dangers associated with that, if abortion isn't free, easy, and subsidized by the taxpayers, most of whom hate it, Okay, so suddenly marriage, committed relationships becomes a lot more valuable. | |
| Suddenly, women have to start looking for moral qualities in a man, right? | |
| Because if you want to have sex, as young people and middle-aged people and old people do, but young people in particular, if you want to have sex, then you have to, well, it's much safer to do so in a marital relationship. | |
| So then you have to start thinking about who you're going to have sex with, who is actually attractive to you, and the standards for a woman who wants to become a wife are very different, in fact, quite opposite than the standards of a woman who just wants to sleep around and have fun and, you know, get that thousand penis stare after 10 years, right? | |
| So then you sort of work it through and you say, okay, so if abortion is illegal, Then men get access to sex through a committed relationship like a marriage. | |
| That is a big change. | |
| To access sex, you need to get a woman to marry you. | |
| To get a woman to marry you, you need to be productive. | |
| You need to have, you know, like a job. | |
| You need to have some savings. You might need to have a car. | |
| You need to come from a decent family, hopefully, or at least have a good deal of self-knowledge. | |
| All of these kinds of things you need. | |
| So, what happens then? | |
| Well, young men and young women begin to think of family and children because there's no legal abortion. | |
| So they want to have intercourse, and the way they do it is to get married. | |
| Now, you get married, you don't mess around, right? | |
| You get a job, you get a little condo or an apartment somewhere, and you then start to think about having kids. | |
| Now, if the woman is thinking about having kids, not birth control, fine, right? | |
| But just not this ex post facto birth control, retroactive birth control of abortion. | |
| But it's sort of on your mind. | |
| So men and women will get married younger. | |
| Now, if men and women get married younger, what happens to the tax base? | |
| Well, of course, if you get married younger, there is a good deal of possibility, once you're in a stable relationship, that the woman doesn't feel quite as compelled to go out and get a job. | |
| She starts to think about having children younger rather than older, right? | |
| Because I've heard from a lot of women, they say, well... | |
| I need to have a career because I just can't rely on a man. | |
| Well, what if you choose a man who's reliable and you get committed and you get into a relationship like a marriage? | |
| Well, then do you really feel there's much need to go have your own independent life and all that? | |
| So then you start to have kids younger, which means that there will be more children being born. | |
| More children being born means that Well, there's less of a tax base, right? | |
| Because women are raising children rather than out there working. | |
| With less of a tax base, there's less capacity to redistribute income, which is what the left and a lot of the red Republicans want to do as well. | |
| So you have a lot of kids. | |
| Suddenly the government has to create a bunch of... | |
| Well, they have to have a lot of medical resources available because kids consume medical resources. | |
| They have to get a whole bunch of schools up and running because there'll be a lot more kids. | |
| Like, if there's a baby boom, the entire socialist decay system falls apart. | |
| Right? So a baby boom is like the worst thing that you want if you're like a leftist. | |
| If you want your civilization to continue, a baby boom is a pretty good thing. | |
| But if you want to just have raw naked political power, a baby boom is bad because it costs the government money and lowers its income at the same time. | |
| So you'd actually have to make some difficult and rational decisions when it came to your government and its spending and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So that's really, really bad. | |
| Whereas, of course, if there's abortion... | |
| You know, women can fool around, they can sleep around, they can date around, they can push off into virtual infinity having kids, which means that, well, a good chunk of them won't have kids, and those who do may have one or two children and will probably keep working at the same time. | |
| The abortion thing is a very, very important keystone in the arch of continuing the massive rise of government power. | |
| Also, you see, if women get married, and in particular then if they have children, when they're relatively young, what happens is, and this is very clear from the data, is that if women are in a committed relationship, independent upon a man for their resources, for themselves, for their children, then they want Lower taxes, of course, because higher taxes take away resources From their families, right? | |
| I mean, if you're a single mom and you have no husband, taxes can go through the roof. | |
| For all you care, you're not paying any. | |
| Usually, if you're on welfare, which a lot of them are, you're not paying any taxes. | |
| And taxes going up means that there's more money for the government to give resources to you. | |
| But if you're a married woman and you're reliant upon your husband's income, then if taxes go up, there's fewer resources available for your family, which is why married women tend to vote for smaller government and unmarried women tend to vote for Larger government. | |
| So that is pretty tough for the left. | |
| Your tax base is going down, your costs are going up, and you've got a lot more people who are voting for smaller government and smaller taxes, which means that you have less crack to shoot into your veins and underneath your toenails and redistribute to all of your friends. | |
| So it's really important to understand just... | |
| What a central part of collectivism, of the left's plan, I guess you could say, for the world, which is basically just to eat it until we all expire. | |
| The abortion question is very powerful, and the reason why they consider it so unambiguous, like the mother's needs 100%, the fetus's life 0%, is because the moment it becomes a complicated question, they fear that society may end up Recognizing the right to life of the unborn child, banning abortion, and that changes the entire sexual dynamic of the West. | |
| Suddenly, a woman becomes very valuable for not having sex, for holding off until marriage. | |
| Whereas right now, women are kind of handing it out to some degree, like candy on Halloween, and that destabilizes everything. | |
| Also, when people live these chaotic lives of sexual hedonism and so on, it's often associated with drinking, it's often associated sometimes with drug use, it's associated with just general irresponsibility as a whole. | |
| And when people's lives get chaotic, they have a pretty desperate need for the government to give them structure, for the government to give them housing and healthcare and retirement savings and all that, because their lives I've known some people like this and they are just crazy entropic forces of nature. | |
| And so if you can get people to postpone being responsible, if you can get them to just kind of sleep around and drink and do drugs or just... | |
| Gain weight and not be healthy. | |
| And, you know, you see these half-sosed British girls staggering their way along on a Thursday night. | |
| And it's like, oh, these are really, really chaotic lives. | |
| And you can live with that chaos to some degree, but it means that you will become dependent upon the government because everything that we consume in the present Is something that we're probably going to need in the future. | |
| And I guess if you've known people, and let me know in the comments below, if you've known people who have this kind of chaos in their life, whose lives are just random and disorganized and wild and dangerous and irresponsible, hmm... | |
| Well, the government kind of likes that. | |
| The government likes promoting chaos and demoting or attacking stability, which is why, you know, the leftists always love the 60s and hate the 50s, like with a burning passion. | |
| I remember in a feminist course I took in college reading the book Homeward Bound about how terrible it was to be a woman in the 50s, which, let's just say, it may be more debatable than the leftists claim. | |
| But It is a very central issue on the left. | |
| They do get quite panicked about it. | |
| It's not because they care. | |
| It's not because they love women's freedoms. | |
| It's not because they love anyone's freedoms. |
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