By DEXTER DUGGAN
Amid the controversy over whether the growing organisms in mothers’ wombs should be allowed to live long enough to become human beings by anybody’s reckoning, even permissive abortion’s strongest supporters might wonder how much longer they can live with their own crying consciences.
Their ever-increasing unease and extremism demonstrate consciences in turmoil, no matter how much they’ll try to shrug off the growing presence inside themselves of moral discomfort, gnawing pain over what they intuit is deeply wrong.
These worried partisans seek a desperate numbing by becoming ever more radical on how late and how much abortion is acceptable to them, even while scientific development and knowledge have kept shoving them to ever more uncomfortable corners to squirm in.
Nearly a half-century ago, in 1973, the shiftless and illiterate U.S. Supreme Court, whose members never saw a sonogram, washed its hands of responsibility for deciding if its pro-abortion Roe and Doe decisions were sentencing countless millions of innocent human beings to death.
Evading its required accountability, the court’s 7-to-2 pro-abortion majority concurred that “the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer” of “when life begins.”
Oh, how things change and develop, on many fronts. Who today would dare to write of “man’s knowledge” rather than “human knowledge”? But even back then, it was a known and established principle that a judge doesn’t impose a death sentence if he/she isn’t sure beyond a reasonable doubt of the guilt of the accused. To say nothing about uncertainty regarding the very humanity of the organism to be put to death.
“But, officer,” says the hunter under arrest, “I thought it was okay for me to fire into the bushes because I wasn’t sure if it was an animal or person rustling around there. After all, it’s deer season and I do have a hunting license.”
The High Court decision by Justice Harry Pontius Pilate Blackmun pretended that the experts of his time were “unable to arrive at any consensus” on when human life begins, which was a convenient shrug devised to smother the fact that many centuries earlier, the exemplary pagan physician Hippocrates, never having heard of genetics and chromosomes, still thought it necessary to forbid abortion.
And even Blackmun conceded his decision was limited by “this point in the development of man’s knowledge.” Was scientific comprehension forever after to be limited to what was known in 1973? Throw away your cell phones. Throw away all forms of personal computers and social media. As one pundit just observed, back then we talked to telephone switchboard operators and flew in airliner cabins adrift with cigarette smoke.
For all of Blackmun’s stumbling in the dark after he presumed to switch off the lights for everyone, was definitive knowledge about the preborn never to be attained? U.S. Protestant physicians in the latter nineteenth century had discovered more about prenatal development than Blackmun pretended was apprehended nearly three-quarters of the way through the twentieth.
Moreover, even Blackmun conceded that if the fetus were understood to be a legal “person,” as the state of Texas contended in Roe, “the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the (Fourteenth) Amendment.”
And Blackmun was determined that the case for permissive abortion must not collapse.
If a question is under debate, the search should be for evidence. Are there dangerous cracks threatening the collapse of the big dam upstream from an imperiled city? Do we attain the answer by looking at photos of opposing demonstrators holding signs, some lettered that the dam is safe and others that it’s not? Or do we look at photos of fissures expanding in the concrete?
What sort of photos do media members prefer to show of abortion demonstrations? More likely demonstrators for permissive abortion rather than against. But definitely unlikely that they’ll show evidence-based photos directly addressing the question, 4D ultrasound images of the human-looking organisms themselves.
Because that would provide evidence generally unwelcome to the propaganda chambers called newsrooms. And it also would require pro-abortion excuse-making that although those developing torsos and limbs and crania really look like babies, they must be discounted as insignificant cellular masses.
Think of the nineteenth-century confrontation over human slavery in the U.S. For those who saw the issue as simply agricultural, a grainy photo of sunny fields with no laborers around was entirely appropriate. For those who saw it as maintaining a Southern lifestyle, picturing a plantation mansion up the hill with no lightly clad slaves in sight was acceptable.
It may have been considered lacking in “neutrality” to show a slave with his back covered in scars from repeated lashings, but that was the truly evidence-based information illustrating the dimensions of the controversy. Just as the distressing images of dismembered, bloody babies put an end to abstract theorizing about abortion, although abstraction is what the partisans of the slaughter want.
How preferable, if it comes to the dramatic, to show a coat hanger and forget what the coat hanger is intended to tear at. How preferable, in order to keep the high-suction vacuum machines churning, to urge pregnant mothers to regard themselves as cornered, hopeless victims.
We need not even regard preborn babies as creatures already possessing humanity in order for us to show humanity and mercy to them. Dogs never will become human, but we don’t let the pound take them alive and kicking and yank off their legs or crush their skulls to cause death.
They may be gassed or given a numbing, fatal shot, but that at least acknowledges some restraints on how we act out our own humanity. But dare to propose administering some kind of anesthetic before aborting that organism in a mother’s womb? Intense pain courses through the body of the pro-abortion placard-waver unwilling to acknowledge the organism should be treated with any concern at all.
On May 16 the Daily Caller site noted that Seventh Circuit Federal Judge Frank Easterbrook dissented in a decision that disallowed regulation of the disposal of human fetal remains. Regulating the disposal of non-human remains is allowed, Easterbrook said, so even if a fetus isn’t a legal person, why must this regulation be held invalid?
“Because ‘X is not a person’ does not imply ‘X is beyond regulatory authority’,” he wrote.
Easterbrook wrote: “Think of animal-welfare statutes. Dogs may not be beaten for fun. Bullfights are forbidden. Horses may not be slaughtered in Illinois for the dinner table under a statute this circuit sustained largely on animal-welfare grounds….Many states have laws that prescribe how animals’ remains must be handled. . . . The panel has held invalid a statute that would be sustained had it concerned the remains of cats or gerbils.”
An infertile couple may pay tens of thousands of dollars to create the same cell mass in the womb that others are glad to destroy by paying far less. Where is the sense in treating the same organism as both so valuable and so disposable? Oh, one is wanted and the other is not? A dangerous standard indeed to employ against the innocent, but very German National Socialist.
What everyone recognized 50 years ago as the miracle of development of early life is minimized and scorned now by those with an intense interest in attacking it. A heartbeat craftily is redefined as “fetal pole cardiac activity,” and a fetus’ sentient-looking activity in the womb is said to be merely unconscious jerkings.
How much longer before an online search for synonyms for “fetus” brings up “garbage” as one choice, considering how long they’ve been treated that way?
Laughing At Bullock
Noting the unanimity of the gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates’ extremism on pro-abortionism, the hosts at the Glenn Beck radio program had a laugh at recent Dem entry Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana.
Bullock complained that legislators in states were passing laws about abortion — even though that had been the historic standard practice before the Supreme Court suddenly decided to set itself up as the national abortion board in 1973. Why, the Beck hosts asked, does the very undemocratic Supreme Court get this privilege now but not legislators?
After all, one might add, the court’s specific role is to review the constitutionality of legislation, not to originate it. But if the court had followed its proper role, it wouldn’t have been able to impose national massive abortion to begin with.
A Washington Examiner editorial posted on May 16, noting some states’ recent pro-life bills signed into law, said, “The only reason abortion bans had to be passed this month in Alabama and Georgia was the lies that are Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. These shoddy decisions were based on fictional rights invented through the discredited idea of substantive due process.
“The legal and constitutional reasoning behind them was nonexistent, even pro-choice legal scholars have admitted,” the Examiner added. “. . . Maybe abortion defenders base their argument on so many lies because they have to. Because a big lie is the foundation of their view.”
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