Gut Check
A comment expressing something not far from my own reaction about aborticide from Wittingshire
Three times I’ve had to explain abortion to a child. Each time I, too, felt ashamed. There’s no way to soften this blow; children are fascinated by pregnant women, love to point out that not so long ago they were inside their own Mommy’s tummy. They may not know the biological details, but they know where babies come from; they know how their own lives began.Each time circumstances demanded that I explain abortion to a child, I watched that child’s eyes grow big with disbelief, then sick with horror. And each time I knew that some fundamental trust of adults, some basic belief that grown-ups were merciful and just, had gone.
Oddly, each of my children said, then, the same thing: “I know it must be true because you say it is, Mommy, but I really don’t want to talk about it.”
And each turned from me and walked away.
My own emotional reaction, I fear to say, is something quite bitter: I feel betrayed by the pro-abortionists. They took my innocence and abused it, and I pray I shall find it in me someday to forgive them.
For all the years of my life, they told me that a child in the womb was not a human, or, at least, that whether he was human or not was a matter of personal conviction. Every art and artifice at their command, peer pressure, personal insult, sly propoganda in the midst of otherwise innocent books and movies, all, all was directed toward this end: to deaden my natural sense of right and wrong, so that I would regard as a merely personal choice what was actually the crime of Medea.
When my son was (wrongly) diagnosed as having a spinal disease, the doctor urged us to consider “all our options” by which he meant my wife and I should contemplate the murder of our child. When I finally saw a sonic picture of my son in the womb, even at seven weeks, he was as clearly human as any pro-abortionist with whom I’d been debating (and their ability to reason was not noticeably more acute than his, to judge by their performance).
So, the pro-aborts are basically a group of people tried to get me to kill my son.
If the child dies of her wounds in the closet, it is no argument to say the duty to raise and protect is excused on the grounds of impossibility. From a legal standpoint, that makes about as much sense as the parricide arguing for leniency on the grounds that he is an orphan. If the child is dead due to the parent’s negligence or deliberate act, the duty to raise and protect condemns that parent; the parent is not excused from the duty.
If one has a duty, on the other hand, negligence of that duty is culpable, as is deliberate malfeasance. Come now: if I were to reach into my wife’s womb with a medical instrument and poke out the developing eyes, or lop off the tiny buds of limbs, it would be no excuse to say that the unborn organism is a foetus and not a human being. Once she was born, the malformations I induced would be present. I would win no awards as the world’s best parent. Merely doing the act before the child has a legally protected status does not change the chain of cause and effect: if I maim a child in the womb on Monday, and she is born on Tuesday, I am liable for the damage to the child on Wednesday, as I was the cause of it.
Now, how does this logic change if I maim the child severely enough that she dies? If I slay a child in the womb on Monday, and she is stillborn on Tuesday, I am free from all liability for my actions on Wednesday? Have I fulfilled my duty as a parent to raise and protect my child in a reasonable fashion, making a good faith effort?
Again, how does this logic change if I meddle with the unborn child’s genetics, so that she grows into a blind paraplegic? If preventing the limb from growing in the first place is as blameworthy as cutting off the limb as it develops in the womb, then the undeveloped blastula, even from the first moment of its existence, falls under the same parental duty to protect it. If I have a duty to raise and protect the child, this duty applies to any actions of mine that damage the child, including those that take place before the child is recognized as a legal person with rights.
Once we admit that it is immoral to maim a child by meddling with the blastula at the earliest stage of pregnancy, it follows a fortiori that it is immoral to kill the child by aborting the blastula at the earliest stage of pregnancy.
If we hold it to be blameworthy that the mother does not foreswear cocaine and cigarettes during pregnancy, lest the child develop birth defects, in what sense is it praiseworthy to damage the child beyond this degree, indeed to make the child cease to live? Surely a dead baby is damaged more severely than merely a damaged one? Surely having a medical technician puncture your skull with scissors induces more of a birth defect, indeed, one is dead at this point, than some petty disorder like being born with a cocaine addiction?
If the pre-born organism is not a human being, then it is not cannibalism to take the flesh left over from partial-birth abortions and cook it into steaks on the grill. If, on the other hand, the medical risks, the moral judgment, we might notice upon beholding a mother eating the tissue taken from the an unborn organism that once was growing in her womb, is more severe than the medical risk she runs, or does not run, or the moral judgment we feel, or don’t feel, we might notice seeing her eat a Cheeseburger, it cannot logically be maintained that the organism in question is not a human being. If one argues that what grows in a mother’s womb is not human tissue, the diseases incumbent to cannibalism must be absent. If one admits it is, biologically, human tissue, one cannot argue that human tissue comes from a non-human organism.
Themother should at least be able to tan and stuff the little corpses and mount them, as big game hunters do. If Junior is not a human being before he comes out of the womb, what is the ground for an objection? Why not proudly display the fruits of your exercise of this constitutional right? How would showing off Junior’s wee little big-headed body be any different than wearing an “I VOTED” sticker on your lapel after Election Day?
Again, the argument that slaying the child in the womb causes the child no pain is false, at least in the case of later stages of development. Indeed, I have heard soft-hearted aborticides seriously contemplating whether the “organism” should be given anaesthesia, to ease the pain, before death is induced. There is moral retardation for you: discomfort is bad, but death is a choice.
If there were any honesty on the death cult side of things, they would not be so adamant about not letting the mother see images of the child in the womb during examinations. It is a natural and honest impulse, a maternal instinct, that must be lulled.
Notice my basic argument does not care, and does not raise the non-issue of the child’s humanity. It does not matter to me when the child has a so-called right to life. If my duty is to see to it that the child is raised and educated, and if being born is a necessary logical precondition, then QED I must not take steps to prevent the birth of the child if I am to raise her, no matter what her status is, human or not.
The intelligence of the child has nothing to do with anything. Retarded children are still children; and my cat is smarter than my newborn. Intelligence is a characteristic of humanity, not a definition of humanity. Like other characteristics, it does not exclude us from humanity if we do not deploy it. Humans are bipeds; Long John Silver is not a biped; is Long John a human?
If my disinclination to shoulder so weary a task does not excuse me of the duty to raise my children, I do not see how I have fulfilled the duty by killing the child in the womb: indeed, this seems to be as complete and entire a neglect of that duty as anyone can imagine. The child never even sees the light of day: even a single afternoon on Earth is denied to her.
And I am just a man. My sense of paternal instinct, one would hope, is weaker than that of a woman toward the helpless life within her. The mother-child bond is alleged, in a sane race, to be the strongest there can be. That this bond has been weakened to the point that , not only are we discussing this matter in the public forum as if the child-killers had some sort of argument, the argument is expressed in terms of the emancipated mother’s RIGHT to contemplate and commit infanticide.
The logic of Moloch escapes me. If aborticide were a right, it is one that can only be exercised by a woman whose own mother did not exercise it. Let us say that, at the least, it is not an inheritable right.
By the way, I have yet to hear a reasoned argument against my argument. Usually the cultists merely snarl at me, because I use the term “child” to refer to the offspring of an organism, and did not use their particular Newspeak jargon. They insist that all right-thinking people call homo sapiens in utero “foetus”, and that no foetus can be a homo sapiens. A dictionary shows that, in the ordinary (non-nuts) meaning of these words, a child is an offspring, a foetus is a stage of development, just as adolescence is a stage of development. As if they were to say teenagers are not homo sapiens, because they are going through puberty. As if they were to say a puppy is not a dog, ergo not of the canine race. To argue an infant is not a human infant because it is going through a infantile stage of development is not only not an argument,it is not even a convincing play on words.
The other argument I encountered was that there was no such thing as “duties” and that therefore it was a moral obligation incumbent on me to support aborticide, or, in other words, a duty. Again, this logic was less than crystal clear.
The irony is that these are the same kinds of people who are in love with the argument that altruism is developed by the self-interest of a selfish gene. If there was ever any practice that cannot be carried as a gene or as a meme from one generation to the next, indulging in the feast of Saturn, consuming one’s own children, is that one.
What does happen to the little corpses afterward? For the late-term and partial-birth ones, I mean. Are they piled up outside the abortion clinic? Carted off as medical waste, or given a decent burial?
I’m curious. Ah …. here is a link about the burial rights and burial rites of the unborn tots: read the whole thing.
Two boys playing near an ambankment bicycled home and said they’d discovered 54 dead babies in boxes. Their count was off, because the little limbs had been lopped off–a real-life example of what I used above as an absurdly bloody hypothetical–and the ACLU, ever vigilant, sent a letter of protest to a Church group that wanted to give a decent burial to the bodies.
Okay. I am less curious now. Sick, sick, sick. What is clear to me is that the future will look back on this era as we look back on the Aztecs.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
