Posted on January 20,
2020
I'm OK, You're Dead
Callousness is no defense for abortion
by
Daniel
Clark
With another anniversary of Roe v. Wade upon us, abortion advocates have revealed the latest
spin they want the media to put on the issue, and the media, to the surprise of
few, are obeying. Take this headline
from The Hill: "Study: Huge majority
of women who had abortions say they made the right decision." The
Washington Post agrees: "Five years
after an abortion, most women say they made the right decision." According to Yahoo lifestyle news, "Most
women feel relief and happiness after having an abortion, study finds." Expect such headlines to only get louder and more
ludicrous in the coming days.
Conservative
publications like National Review
have pointed out obvious flaws in the "study," such as that its pool of
participants by design excluded all women who did not want to talk about their
abortions, and that the organization that conducted it, "Advancing New
Standards in Reproductive Health" (ANSIRH), is a pro-abortion activist group
that makes no effort to hide it. Take
this profile of ANSIRH's co-founder, Tracy Weitz,
from its own website. "Dr. Weitz is a lifetime advocate of women's health and
reproductive rights. Trained as a qualitative
sociologist, she designed and undertook mixed methods research at ANSIRH
focused on strategies to expand abortion provision in the United States."
Abortion advocates are lying to us as always, and the
media are groveling at their feet as usual, but it's important not to spend too
much energy refuting their main point of contention. For to do so is to accept the premise that the
decisive factor in the abortion debate is how those women who have had
abortions feel about it. This is
basically a post-abortive "choice" argument, by which an unborn child's right
to life is dependent upon its being wanted.
Okay, so everyone knows that ANSIRH is lying about how
many women are content with their decision to abort, but what do the
percentages matter? Having no conscience
about abortion does nothing to make the dead children any less human, nor does
it create any constitutional endorsement of the act.
One of the worst liberal cliches
of all time is the claim that if men got pregnant, the legality of abortion would
be unquestioned. Contrary to the media narrative,
public opinion on abortion is not divided by gender. Women are split right down the middle on the
issue, and so are men. There's no reason
to expect that if men got pregnant, we'd be any more pro-abortion than women
are now. If anything, the fact that men
don't have to face the physical consequences makes it that much easier to be
cavalier about abortion.
What
if the cliche were true, though? Let's assume for a minute that women who have
had abortions really are happy about it, and also that men get pregnant, and
we're happy about our abortions, too.
Granted, that degree of popularity would shield the legality of
abortion, but it would do nothing to make it right. A new human being would still be created at
the instant of fertilization. An
abortion would still be the dismemberment and killing of an already existing
child. To participate in such an act and
feel good about it is no reason to be treated as a moral authority on the
subject.
Whenever there's a study purporting to show that
college students have no compunction about cheating, we don't see headlines
blaring that cheating makes people happy.
Instead, these news stories tend to be judgmental toward the students,
and concerned about the direction in which they're leading our society. Yet copying answers and plagiarizing term
papers is relatively harmless behavior, certainly nothing comparable to killing
a completely innocent person in the grisliest manner imaginable. Why should a lack of shame only translate
into justification when there's a dead baby involved?
Because it's what the pro-abortion side feels is its
best remaining argument, evidently. In
2015, abortion advocates launched the "Shout Your Abortion" campaign, in hopes of
destigmatizing abortion by encouraging women to treat it as an occasion to
celebrate. Contrary to what ANSIRH would
have us believe, participants were scarce, apart from second-rate celebrities
looking for publicity. Actress Martha
Plimpton, for one, told a Seattle audience that their city was where she'd had
her first and "best" abortion. A
resume-enhancer, no doubt.
There's a word to describe the inability to feel
remorse for having inflicted harm on others.
It's called psychopathy. ANSIRH
and its amplifiers in the media are now proposing that we make that our guiding
principle.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press