Today, someone I have known since high school, even though we have very different belief systems and ways of life at present, posted a rather sarcastic posting about the last Republican vice-presidential nominee and his statements against the evil of abortion. Naturally, as might be expected, the discussion quickly turned to the deeper root causes of abortion, with opinions about those causes and their significance depending widely on one’s political/moral worldview. For the sake of argument, and this is not really the sort of argument one really ought to desire, but it is sometimes necessary to relate, let us examine the root causes of abortion.

Even though I do not consider them a credible source, it is worth reflecting on what the Huffington Post considers to be the root causes of the high rate of abortion among African-American women: “The root causes are manifold: a long history of discrimination; lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community. There are no easy solutions to these complex challenges. Innovative strategies to reduce entrenched poverty, improve education, and broadly reform health care all will have to be part of the longer-term approach [1].” We can take this as the left-wing analysis to the problem of abortion. Looking at this list of problems, one sees a standard refrain of blaming discrimination, but a surprisingly large number of these problems are the faults of the community itself. Their neighborhoods are unsafe and unclean because they commit large amounts of crimes and cannot take care of their neighborhoods. Likewise, despite massive favoritism in academia, they lack education because it is not valued enough. Likewise, the mistrust of the medical community is their own fault–we are responsible for the trust we have or do not have.

Nevertheless, let us comment a little bit on matters of education. What sort of education is necessary to reduce abortion? First, there might need to be a bit of education about the value of a life. This is a more complicated matter than it might first appear. To value the lives of our offspring, whether they are in the womb or outside of it, we have to feel valued ourselves. One of the most important root causes of abortion, and many other social evils (including rape and incest, as well as bullying and tyranny in general) is that of disrespect and contempt. If we treat all human life as worthy of respect and concern, and treat the needs of all people as important, then we attack the root spiritual cause of a great many social evils in our world.

Respect is not an easy thing to possess. Those who harp about the lengthy history of discrimination and demand better health care and education for subaltern groups are not particularly proficient in respecting others who demand that people take personal responsibility for their actions. There ought not to be an either-or way of thinking when it comes to this. To be sure there are structural evils in this world, though these evils are more due to entrenched habits that are passed down from parents to children, or passed by educators to students in general, than they are due to deliberate bias in most occasions. If one is going to speak out against systems that keep people down, we need to look less at conspiracy theories and more at our own patterns of behavior. After all, there is little we can do for others except for setting an example of integrity and godliness in our own lives. However, there is a lot that we can do as far as working on our own patterns of thought and behavior so that we avoid self-destructive habits that rob us of success and happiness.

This is not a world where people learn respect very well. Some societies respect the elderly or parents or authorities in general and give little respect or care for others. In Thailand, for example, parents routinely sell their children to employment contractors, some of whom are involved in prostitution, and expect their exploited children to respond with filial piety as well as a large cut of the proceeds of resulting wages. This is ungodly, but to disrespect the elderly and to condemn them to end their lives lonely and isolated and often abused is also ungodly. Disrespect and contempt are at the base of elder abuse as well as child abuse, of racism and sexism whatever the races or sexes that practice those evils. To blame white men as the exclusive people responsible for the world’s evils is itself to show the root causes of abuse and tyranny and oppression in this world. When we practice disrespect and contempt and then blame others for the evils of this world, we show ourselves to be hypocrites in that we share the same root causes of evil that we condemn in others but cultivate in ourselves.

How do we expect women and children to be treated with honor and repsect unless their parents and loved ones know honor from their own lives? How do expect to show contempt for others and yet demand that they respect us? Would they not instead respond with the contempt that we have shown them, treating others as we have been treated instead of as we want to be treated? By recognizing that we have work to do ourselves, we can make our commentary to others less critical and less partisan in our approach. The root causes of many evils spring from the fact that we simply do not have love and respect for our fellow man, whether they are friends or family, strangers or enemies. If we could but learn how to practice love and respect better, then we would be able to reduce the evils that we committed, and show others who are similarly interested in reducing evil what can be done.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-chen/demographics-of-abortion_b_567915.html