The Straight and Narrow

He who sets to work on a different strand destroys the whole fabric.
-Confucius, The Analects.

I spoke the other day about the TV show Family Guy and its use of the abortion issue in an episode the Fox network won't air. I said there that details of the episode were not important. I have decided that perhaps they are, for reasons not actually related to the tasteless series.

The short story is that family matriarch Lois Griffin agrees to have a child as a surrogate mother for an infertile couple. Yet by unhappy coincidence, or is anything a mere coincidence in a cartoon world where extremely poor behavior is an excuse to make an extremely poor point, the couple is killed in a car crash. Lois then has to decide whether to have the child or abort the baby.

The easy answer is of course that she must have the child. The bottom line is that a human baby is a human baby and must be respected as such. But there are other issues here which, though arguably less important under the circumstances of the episode, are nonetheless critical in the more general context of moral behavior. First among these is the idea that when you start from an illicit premise you are bound to create worse results as you work farther and farther away from it.

Lois, presumably, I'll concede, as I have not seen the show in question, has an abortion (who knew that was coming?) because, with the couple she was helping gone she was no longer under an obligation to have the child. This can be seen as nothing less than a wanton disregard for human life. Yet see where the entire issue began: as a bid to have a child for someone not you and your husband. As something outside the traditional parameters of family and essential morals. To wit, when you begin at a bad starting point, it is all the easier to commit a greater wrong precisely because you're already committed to wrongdoing. When your first choice is bad, it is too easy, now that you're comfortable with doing bad anyway, to do other bad things.

Human beings are creatures of habit. When you leave the straight and narrow it becomes easier to further bend the path as you go along. Once that process has begun, it can be difficult to retrace your steps and get back to what is good and proper for no other reason than your habits become ingrained and harden. Eventually they are not pliable but become set in stone. If we are to be people of value at all, we must ask ourselves what kind of statues we want to make of our lives and act accordingly.