Posted on April 30,
2022
Nothing To See Here
Abortion is shielded by its own horror
by
Daniel
Clark
Two recent news stories have involved series of images,
each of them depicting the slaughter of innocents, which have been treated
dramatically differently. One of these,
showing Ukrainian civilians gunned down in the streets of Bucha,
was seen regularly for several days in national newscasts. All that was needed as justification was a
disclaimer about the graphic nature of the footage. The other set of images, of late-term babies
that were killed at a Washington abortion clinic, has gone totally unseen by
consumers of mainstream news media.
These
tiny human bodies were obtained by the anti-abortion group Live Action, whose
medical experts have argued that some of them were probably killed illegally,
through partial-birth abortions or by being born alive and left to die of
neglect. Even compared to other pictures
of aborted babies, these are difficult to look at. Words like "horrific" and "chilling" don't
even begin to describe them. It is
nevertheless difficult to believe this is the reason they haven't been shown on
TV, given the media's willingness to show us vivid images of death in other
contexts, such as war.
One explanation is that the media simply don't want to
be seen as the bad guys. It's a
phenomenon peculiar to the abortion issue that when people see pictures of the
mutilated bodies of the innocent victims, the predominant reaction is to get
mad not at the killers, but at the people who showed the pictures. Paradoxically, the legality of abortion is
thus shielded by the very atrociousness of the act. Even if not for the factor of liberal media
bias, few people would be willing to attract the ire of the public by putting
these images on display, when they could instead be posing as fearless
truth-tellers, by exposing the inhumanity of the Russian aggression against
Ukraine.
There is no misdirection of blame where the war is
concerned. When people see the carnage
in Bucha, they know that it's Vladimir Putin's doing,
and he makes an easy target for their anger.
So why, when it comes to the babies' bodies, is it not as easy to
identify the abortionists as the culprits?
Perhaps it's because there's a lesser degree of separation in that case
between the killers and a large percentage of American news consumers.
Very few Americans condoned Putin's invasion before he
launched it. People are therefore
perfectly comfortable condemning his actions from afar. Responsibility for the slaughter of babies in
our own country is not so clearly defined.
It certainly doesn't end with the abortionists themselves, and the other
clinic employees. Nor is the circle of
moral culpability confined to women who seek abortions, the men who, the truth
be known, are the ones more often making the choice, or the activists who
openly advocate abortion as a positive social good.
The images also serve as an unwanted reminder to men
who splash their DNA around indiscriminately, guided by the "pro-choice"
paradigm, according to which all outcomes are the responsibility of the women
alone. Ditto that for patrons of the
pornography industry, which has been especially supportive of abortion because
it's just plain bad business for the women they exploit to become mothers.
Feminist
academics, and the students they've succeeded in indoctrinating, have an
irrational love of abortion, because it is the keystone that holds together the
theoretical dreamworld they've constructed, in which the rudimentary facts of
life do not apply. If they were open to
being persuaded by the grisly truth of the matter, they would not have so
totally invested themselves in unreality in the first place. One might as well try to talk sense to a true
believer in professional wrestling.
Then there are those who condone abortion while
telling themselves they're doing no such thing. They pretend to be neutral by saying it's none
of their business, a self-deception that is obliterated by the sight of the
real, human victims. They defend legal
abortion on the basis of it being "the law of the land," as if they didn't live
in a representative republic, but instead meekly accepted all laws with which
they disagree. Many of them offer
variations of the Jimmy Carter "personally opposed, but" position, when there's
nothing about abortion to personally oppose that would not call for it to be prohibited.
When these evasive actions fail, and they're
confronted with the reality they'd been so desperate to avoid, it is only
natural for them to lash out like cornered animals -- which, in a way, is what
they've become.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press