Abortion is a subject that over the decades has constantly produced heated debates. The passion with which each side argues its case would suggest to somebody ignorant of the subject, that both parts have the truth on their side. Unfortunately, it has been a sterile and useless discussion and both sides could not have been further away from the truth.

One of the camps in this debate has always taken a religious position and that has tended to lead to a dead end. However, the other part has also not been very coherent. Irrational ideas have also impregnated the position of the liberals.

Had people decided to follow the path of logic, they would have reached very different conclusions. They would have realized that it was irrelevant to debate over the rights of the mother or the unborn child. Taking any of the two positions was simply not addressing the core of the matter.

What was needed from the start was a more potent technology than the existing one. Highly advanced contraceptives that offer no risk of failure, that are not uncomfortable to use, that are also effective on men, and that need to be administered only once with an effect of several years, is what was needed. That was the only thing that would have uprooted the problem.

Such an impressive technology would have been attained by considerably increasing investment in research and development in that particular field of medicine.

The history of the world shows that problems get solved with technology and not with legalistic procedures or moral preaching. The first is the preferred method of liberals and the second the preferred method of religious people.

With a potent contraceptive technology, the whole debate vanishes because nobody ever comes out unwillingly pregnant. As a result, there is never a need to abort. Unfortunately, nobody thought of taking that road.

The history of the world is filled with useless debates, and it is also filled with sorrow and pain.

During the Middle Ages for example, Europeans spent a thousand years debating over how to solve their numerous problems. They contended over the best way to pray to God, which was supposed to be the key to solving their problems. They were dying by the droves from hunger and epidemics, but it never occurred to them that what was needed was a potent agricultural technology to increase farm productivity and a potent pharmaceutical technology to vaccinate the population. They just went on and on with their sterile debate and while everybody discussed stupidities, they continued to suffer and die.

During most of the twentieth century, the world incessantly contended over whether capitalism or communism was the best system. Both sides were totally convinced that they were right and at the end it turned out that both were wrong. At the end, capitalism only proved to be less incompetent than communism. What was needed from the start was that economists would have done their homework and developed a real economic theory of growth. Instead, they argued scholastically over two systems that were almost equally incapable of generating fast economic growth.

For centuries parents debated over which of their children they would sell to prostitution, or to crime, or which would they abandon. Since the level of technology was so low, poverty was endemic and people were forced to make horrible choices. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth century the pace of technological development finally began to grow rapidly and poverty started to retreat. Eventually, parents stopped making horrible choices. In Third World countries today, where the level of technology is still very low, parents continue to have those debates and make those choices.

It is perhaps useless to demand from religious people to adopt a logical posture. However, what is frustrating is the position of the opposing camp, which is supposedly holding the banner of science and rationality. Liberals have a nasty habit of digressing from the bottom line into endless legalistic and futile arguments.

We need to focus on technology and only on that. Had we done that from the start, the history of the world would not have been smeared with blood and pain.