Toronto March for LifeI wasn’t going to write anything about the recent revelations that NBA star J.J. Redick had his then-girlfriend, model Vanessa Lopez, sign a contract agreeing to abort a baby they had created together (and, one assumes, any ill-fated siblings that might come along later.) I wasn’t going to comment because in spite of the jokes I could make about Redick’s name (especially considering the context), I don’t care about professional sports and I assumed that pretty much everyone would recognize that Redick was a self-centred and horrible human being, albeit all too typical these days.
And then everybody starting saying that abortion contracts were a great idea.
The Week came out with an article entitled “The surprising case for abortion contracts,” in which they discovered that there is no longer much of a stigma to being criminally irresponsible, and thus why not put it in writing? After all, “for men who worry that an unexpected pregnancy would shackle them romantically or financially to sexual partners, this may be a straightforward way to put concerns at bay,” the (female) author notes helpfully. There is a downside, though—“Open discourse about an unwanted pregnancy, and its potential termination, may temporarily kill the mood.” Awkward choice of wording there, since “the mood” isn’t the only thing being killed. But come on—what’s a couple of corpses over the course of a vibrant and sterile sex life?
Kat Stoeffel over at New York Magazine agrees wholeheartedly: “Abortion can be kind of heavy, so abortion contracts should be lighthearted and verbal — along the lines of ‘our objective is not procreation, pinky swear’ — and definitely precoital.” What a lovely, dystopian vision of 21st century romance—“What? You want to kill any offspring resulting from a casual fluid swap too? This was definitely meant to be.” But it gets worse: “At the very least,” Stoeffel writes, “abortion contracts might quiet the men’s rights types who believe women are conspiring to get pregnant and deny them their right to choose.” Conspiring?? By what, having a uterus and not being infertile? Who are these morons and how have their parents allowed them to squat in the basement for so long?
And so it goes. Salon published an article entitled “Maybe an abortion contract isn’t so crazy,” which isn’t surprising because they’ve never met a fetus they wouldn’t be okay with offing. The Atlantic Wire actually noted last year that abortion contracts have happened before—pre-nuptial agreements (which at this point are pretty much just severance packages) have stipulated things such as “If the wife were to get pregnant, she’d have to have an abortion. He was in his 40’s but didn’t want to have more kids.” This meaning that any kids that showed up, of course, would be forcibly shown the exit.
This is the result of the post-modern definition of “freedom,” devoid of the realization that if “freedom” includes the right to kill another human being for any reason or for no reason, the word itself becomes meaningless, if not insidious. If not constrained by human rights and human decency, “freedom” results in a culture that can accept kill contracts as a part of sex. As Eleanor Roosevelt once noted, “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”
