Abortion Policy and The Extended Society

Roxann Bilger of Houston, TX, is able to articulate what so few people seem capable of grasping, or at least inclined to grasp:

Abortion, specifically, may not be at the top of many people's list of hot issues, but to listen to Sen. Santorum is to understand that a society's views on the sanctity of human life are directly connected to its prosperity. He frequently cites the link between poverty and prosperity on one hand, and education, employment and marriage before child-bearing in a stable, two-parent family, on the other. If you do these three things in the proper order, your chance of being poor is very greatly reduced. Abortion, by its very nature, is antifamily. Strong families are the building blocks of strong communities, which in turn are the foundation of a prosperous nation.

Rick Santorum is my candidate for the Republican nomination--despite his shaky economic plans to fossilize manufacturing as a major component of the American economy--because he understands this.  Moreover, he understands that unless the family (rather than the individual) is regarded as the basic cell of society, the individual will suffer from want of the love, care and solicitude that he needs in order to flourish.

The individual shorn from the family is ripe for a collapse into various forms of harmful dependence.   It is no coincidence that Statists the world over are universally obsessed with destruction of the traditional family norm.

It bears repeating: the social issues and economic issues are inextricably linked in the human nature that underlies both.  Catholics are correct on the social issues.  Classical liberals, generally, and Austrian school economists, specifically, are mostly correct on the economic issues.

Personally, I think that divorce, especially easy divorce, was the grievous wound in the social soul.  It's practice wasn't legally sanctioned until the Napoleanic Code at the turn of 19th Century.

Ironically, those changes were championed in the name of women's equality.  High profile exceptions to the rule among professional women notwithstanding, it is women and children who suffer most from divorce--as a statistical matter.

200 years is a relatively short time in the annals of human history.  With so much empirical evidence to suggest the folly of adopting destructive family (and sexual) norms, there are good reasons for the public to reopen its mind to common sense truths bearing the stamp of antiquity.

It may not happen this election.  But, sooner or later, truth will win out.  As we all know, nature always presents a bill at the end of the party.