Children: blessing or curse?

In response to Toure’s Abortion ‘Blessing’ Still Has Me Rattled:

John, besides the icy inhumanity and mind-boggling selfishness of Toure’s abortion hosanna… well, no, wait a second, let’s pause on the selfishness for a moment.  Aren’t liberals always telling us selfishness is the ultimate sin, while supreme virtue lies in altruism?  I guess Toure’s nonborn child might have a few things to say on that subject, given the opportunity.

But the larger point that troubles me about the abortion culture, perfectly captured in Toure’s remarks, is the way it has almost complete shifted pregnancy from blessing to curse, particularly in the minds of the young.  President Obama famously contributed to that re-definition by describing pregnancy as a “punishment” for his daughters.  

Beyond the moral and spiritual objections we can raise to this, it’s also very bad news for our demographic survival.  I have it on very good authority that giving birth to a child is extremely difficult.  Raising children is difficult and expensive for both fathers and mothers.  Social survival requires a very large number of people to not only accept these hardships, but do it more than twice – you can’t get past replacement birth rate without plenty of families raising 3 or 4 children.  And raising those children in a health environment absolutely and indisputably requires stable traditional marriage.  There is no substitute, not across a population of millions, raising the next generation of an entire nation.

Treating pregnancy as a punishment, abortion as a minor outpatient procedure, and marriage as either a silly artifact of nostalgia or a vicious attempt to make gay people feel bad about themselves dissipates the reverence for enduring love and procreation that society requires to endure.  Not to give the moral dimensions of marriage and family short shrift, but the case against free-loving abortion-on-demand hedonism as a default social policy can be made without them.  

Toure, and those who created the culture he promotes, are the architects of social suicide, not to mention vast amounts of human misery, and a heartbreaking loss of human potential.  I wonder what his child might have offered the world.  I am not now, nor will I ever be, prepared to regard every developing baby as a net minus, a drain on our resources that might be better nipped in the bud, sparing us the burden of raising them, and the child the agony of living in the rotten world we have created.