Signs of moral renewal?
New York Times (Free registration required) DAVID BROOKS August 7, 2005
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
A lot of the credit has to go to the people who have been quietly working in this field: to social workers who provide victims with counseling and support; to women’s crisis centers, which help women trapped in violent relationships find other places to live; to police forces and prosecutors, who are arresting more spouse-beaters and putting them away.
The Violence Against Women Act, which was passed in 1994, must have also played a role, focusing federal money and attention.
But all of these efforts are part of a larger story. The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.
The decline is the abortion rate may be related to the trend towards increasing virtue and decreasing abuse that David Brooks describes. I didn’t want to watch the movie “Vera Drake”, about a 1930’s era British abortionist, but I did catch the line from the trailer, where she tells the police “I help girls who are in trouble”, and I thought about what that comment meant.
Undoubtedly, from ancient times to the late 20th century many women became pregnant, not because they wanted to, but because men forced themselves upon them. Until recently there was no term for what we now call “date rape”, and probably no way for a women to report that such a thing happened without incurring great shame. Many armies considered rape one of the spoils of war and indeed as recently as the 1990’s we saw the Serbian paramilitaries engaging in the systematic rape of Bosnian women.
In his book “Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus”, author Tom Cahill suggests that Christ’s admonition against looking at a woman with lust, was not meant to suggest that every sexual desire was evil, but that the cruel sexual exploitation of women by men, so common at the time, was indeed so evil that it would be better for the would-be perpetrator to cut out an eye.
Rape doesn’t justify abortion, but it does explain how so many women found themselves in what seemed like impossible situations that they could only escape through abortion. As we look for ways to fulfil our moral duty to reduce abortion we need to look beyond merely restraining the woman, and continue to correct the attitudes and behaviors that may put her in a position to even consider it in the first place.