Amerika

As many of you know, most Americans want abortion to remain accessible and I join them in this belief. If you have sexual liberation, you need a safe way to get rid of unacceptable genetic combinations.

Of course, we could avoid the whole sexual liberation drama and instead focus on getting people into marriages, at which point those unwise enough to do otherwise would genetically self-destruct and easily mark their tainted offspring.

However, in an egalitarian time, nothing egalitarian ever loses, so sexual liberation is here to stay until we overthrow the fundamental belief in equality itself. Feminism, socialism, diversity, and narcissism flow from that belief.

We should however discuss the longterm social fallout of Roe v. Wade on those who did not have abortions. That is, we need to look into the psychology of not just accessible but socially-endorsed abortion.

Generation X was the first generation of kids to come up in a world where abortion is normal. We belonged to parents who saw us as optional children, or creatures which could have been aborted or avoided.

The dominant message of the time was that of individualism. Take a Dale Carnegie course to learn to become a better salesman, make yourself a fortune in the postwar economy, and move to someplace like Del Webb’s Sun City.

In essence, this was the same bourgeois idea we have always seen in the West when the workers take over: you are a victim, and you have no obligation to anything but yourself as a result, therefore take whatever you can get and get out.

It is a working class refrain as old as the hills. You are responsible for nothing except to rebel against The Man. The “elites” pick up on it because it gives them an excuse to take out their enemies while claiming to be part of the victim cult.

The individualism of the Baby Boomers meant that for the first time, growing up and getting married to have a family with children (if you could) was not a universal goal. Instead. it was one option for utilitarian “happiness.”

If you were not happy with your marriage or children, you could claim egalitarian victimhood… that is, you were deprived of something that you should have had. This meant that ironically your children were oppressing you.

In the same way that people claimed that lack of legal abortion was oppression, they also found their own children to be a burden if the children did not do exactly what the parents wanted.

For Generation X, this was a real threat. Kids were getting kicked out of the house at eighteen or even before, turned in to the state, or relocated to distant relatives in the chaos of divorce and sexual liberation.

We realized that we were the first generation that was entirely disposable. We were optional children. When we displeased our parents, we know they were thinking fondly of the ability to unmake us through abortion and divorce.

Not surprisingly, this generation grew up with a reluctance to form attachments to others. Democracy as a psychological influence seems to take normal groups and turn them into apathetic bourgeois narcissists, and this is just one turn of that cycle.

Tags: abortion, generation x, optional children