Aborting

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN had a way with women, women other than his wife, a wife whom he did not see for the last five years of her life, because he was in France, among other women. He didn't even bother to write. His celebrity among the French brought him "benefits", despite his oldness and fatness. He also had very definite, and fascinating, attitudes towards women. Among them, that one should pursue older women, partly because they don't yell, tell, and are grateful as hell, but also, as he made explicit in his famous essay on women, women age, he asserted, from the head down; she who looks older in the face is yet younger below the neck. Benjamin was, as they say, a "body man". We must trust that he never told any of his paramours to "put a paper sack over your head".... Franklin also had views on abortion, not on whether it should or should not be allowed by law, not whether God ordains it or condemns it - nothing moralistic or legalistic, because in late eightheenth century United States abortion was neither a moral nor legal matter. Then, it was merely a part of life, and, so it seems, fairly common. So common that Franklin provided instructions on how to accomplish an abortion, in the comfort of your own home. This he did in a book called "The American Instructor", one of the most popular books of the day. It had originated in Europe, but Frnklin published an "Americanized" version of it. Essentially, the American Instructor was a basic knowledge book, containing instructions on how to read, write, do basic math, and it included a section on home remedies for common ailments, among them, pregnancy. Books in those days were prohibitively expensive, and an average American coffee table had a copy of the Bible, and a copy of "The American Instructor", if nothing else. The solutions to unwanted pregnancy included consuming nasty things and inserting even nastier things, and so forth. This information is presented here and is intended to remind us moderns that American cultural, moral, and legal history has no tradition of opposition to legal abortion from its inception. Opposition to abortion arose primarily in the late nineteenth entury, when laws outlawing it were passed piecemeal in several states. Abortion in early America was considered "normal", private, and of no concern to anyone other than the mother. Nobody seems to have gotten their panties, as we say today, bunched up over it. Truly, the question should not be decided by nine people, most of whom have never been nor shall ever be pregnant. So perhaps the forthcoming Supreme Court decision, in which abortion laws will be placed, or rather "replaced", in the hands of the states, will, ultimately, prove to be the best solution. We can then have it both ways. If one doesn;t want to live and support a united state in which abortion is legal, one can, as Ronald Reagan used to callously say: "vote with your feet".