Art Marmorstein: Tough discussions coming for states after Roe v. Wade decision

In around 1485 or 1486, Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli came up with probably his most famous painting, the "Birth of Venus."

Botticelli’s choice of subject was nothing new. Venus and her equivalents, including the Greek Aphrodite and the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, are among the most common figures depicted in art. Archaeologists dub one of the oldest of all sculptures, the “Venus of Willendorf,” on the assumption that this 25,000-year-old work was intended to represent a Stone Age fertility goddess similar to the Venus of later tradition. In virtually all civilizations, a Venus equivalent plays a prominent role in myth, legend and the visual arts.

But while Botticelli’s choice of subject is nothing new, he treats Venus in an entirely original way. In keeping with his Neoplatonist philosophy, Botticelli gives us not an erotic Venus, but a figure intended to inspire in us a love of beauty, a love of nature and, ultimately, a love of God.

Botticelli was taking on a difficult task. Erotic love (eros) and divine love (agape) are often poles apart. Eros tends to be selfish, a force that tempts us to put our own impulses ahead of what’s best for society, what’s best for our families and even what’s best in our own long-term interest. It tends to be transitory and capricious.

Agape love is very different. It’s entirely unselfish. It’s patient and kind. It’s not proud or envious. It rejoices in truth. It doesn’t give in to anger. It bears all things, believes all things and endures all things. It’s anything but self-seeking. And it never fails.

Can eros and agape, two very different types of love, ever come together?

Well, they can and do. They come together not just in Botticelli paintings, but in that magical, everyday miracle, a baby.

The erotic attraction that brings couples together produces a helpless creature that, without a mother’s selfless and self-sacrificing love, would never survive. Add to this a man committed to a selfless and self-sacrificing love for his children and their mother, and, if things go right, the powerful force of eros has been tamed and directed to a positive purpose, binding husband and wife together as one.

But what happens when things don’t go right?

Every society in human history has taken a stab at this one. The earliest extant law-codes regulate issues ranging from the rights of a divorced woman to the support of children born outside of marriage.

And it’s crucial to get the recipe right. As Sigmund Freud noted in "Civilization and its Discontents," eros can’t be allowed to simply run wild. Frustrating as it may be, sexual desire, like our instinct to violence, has to be controlled if society is going to survive.

In recent decades, America has gone through a radical transformation of the laws and social norms governing marriage, sex and family, moving in the general direction of what the hippies used to call free love.

But “free” love turns out to have had a price tag after all. Forty percent of American children are born to single mothers, and more women than ever have to shoulder the burden of raising the next generation on their own, often without sufficient resources. More than 40% of children live in low-income families, with half of them below the government poverty line.

While there is no single cause of family breakdown, the availability of abortion on demand is partly to blame. Treat abortion as a legitimate option and men won’t feel much responsibility at all for the children they father or the women they impregnate. It’s all on the woman, after all. Her choice: she can just make the baby disappear if she wants to — and the father will even pay for the disappearing act — and, as his next trick, disappear himself.

Don’t think that’s the way things work? Well, OK, but this is part of a painful conversation America needs to have and soon will have thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

By returning the abortion issue to the states, the U.S. Supreme Court has set up a situation where state legislatures will have to address not just abortion, but all sorts of directly or indirectly related issues, including family breakdown, domestic violence and childhood poverty.

Will legislatures figure out better ways of dealing with some of these problems?

As far as the nation’s children are concerned, it’s hard to see how things could get much worse.

Art Marmorstein, Aberdeen, is a professor of history at Northern State University.

This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: Art Marmorstein column birds bees flowers trees love