When I started in the early years of this century to apply a consistent analysis of the consumer revolution that had begun to assemble itself in the 1950s and some aspects of the sexual revolution that had come in its wake ( See Meditations on Post-Modernity at http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1576546-Meditations-on–Postmodern… ) it started to dawn on me that some of the rather blithe assumptions of my youth lacked sufficient substance to withstand rigorous critical inspection; particularly the ideology coming out from the now old New Left libertarian laissez-faire human rights crowd. But change in my attitudes was slow in coming, for ‘progressivism’ had once been my ideological meat and drink.
In any event, it wasn’t until the last two years when I started to write a critical evaluation of the equalitarian/equivalence claims of the homosexual lobby and to analyze the status of non-reproductive relationships, (‘Caligula’s Horse’ at:http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1660079-Caligulas-Horse and then ‘Confessions of a Homophobe’, at: http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1893090-Confessions-of-a-Homophobe… that ‘questions’ started to arise in relation to the abortion ‘debate’ in the 1960s.
It started to become obvious to me just how poorly constructed the ideological fabrication of the sexual ‘revolution’ really was. Although the abortion debate seemed important as a free standing issue with large consequences in its own right, it was actually a fairly small tranche amongst much more powerful sets of ideas, technological changes and cultural moves. And it was this that gave pro-abortion protagonists their credibility and persuasiveness. Shifting attitudes towards the legalization of abortion practice didn’t just suddenly come out of the ether, swinging by their own bootstraps. If that had been the case, they would have been a much more manageable force to be reckoned with.
Twenty years earlier, had our outstandingly successful local pro-abortion campaigner, Dr Bertram Wainer, tried to defy the abortion laws the way he did in 1969, he would have been unceremoniously thrown into jail, had his licence to practice as a Doctor cancelled and would have fallen into a deep social disgrace that only obscurity and collective forgetfulness would eventually erase. And no one would have dared to defend him publicly, for fear that some measure of that fierce opprobrium would fall on them.
As I sifted through the history of the sexual revolution, I started noticing that while there was a political environment of conflict between capitalist ‘progressivism’ and its ‘progressivist’ ideological critics …
