Nights Of Passion

WHILE THE GERMANS are constructing special huts near World Cup venues to assist the world’s oldest profession, Dana L. is fulminating against the administration that prevents her from immediately neutralizing the consequence of a night of passion. It’s that kind of day.

The elite toleration of prostitution by our western elites, writes Roger Scruton, is easy because the elite never has to deal with its consequences.

Our legislators do not live in the areas of cities where prostitution is flagrant; they do not have to deal, in their daily lives, with the network of pimps and racketeers who live from the earnings of their female slaves; they do not have to fear for their daughters.

But the toleration of prostitution is socially harmful because it disturbs the basic transaction between the sexes.

The prostitute used to be seen as the enemy of respectable women. She threatened the bargaining power of her sex, by offering cheaply what others were trying to offer at the highest possible price, namely marriage.

That is Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good money. Our modern elites have been delighted to interfere with this awe-inspiring transaction. It doesn’t really affect them and their daughters. And anyway, they are ambarrassed by traditional bourgeois marriage.

But in the mean angry streets of the welfare state the assault on marriage and the toleration of prostitution is demoralizing and brutalizing men and women in their millions.

In safe and comfy liberal land, Dana L. is mortally offended, in the way that only liberal women can be. She got to tell her story in the Washington Post.

The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn't want.

She didn’t want an abortion, but she did want to abort her child. It’s just that when the married mother of two called her OB/GYN after a night of passion to get a prescription for a morning after pill, the receptionist told her that her doctor did not prescribe that pill. “No reason given.”

There wasn’t time to get a prescription from her midwife’s practice, so a month later she found herself pregnant.

So she had to submit to the humiliation of an abortion. To top it off, the abortionist was an hour and a half late.

It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.

And to think that, all these years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, this is what our children have to look forward to as they approach their reproductive years.

Dana L. is a lawyer and a writer who lives in Virginia.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a lot to say about this self-centered approach to life in Smart Sex.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.