The greatest moral issue facing our nation today is abortion. Books have been written on the subject. I do not intend to write a book, only to illustrate the necessity of protecting the most basic human right.
First, Roe v. Wade has to rank as one of the worst pieces of legal chicanery ever imposed upon the American people. Basically, the court, on a 5-4 decision, created a right to create another right. There is no "right to privacy" in the 4th amendment. The purpose of the 4th amendment was to stop politically based searches and seizures, a common practice of the British to harass those colonial rabble rousers.
And, if there is this right to privacy, then how come the federal government knows my income, my marital status, how many children I have, how old I am, where I work, items I purchased last year, where I give to charity, what investments and property I have, and many other things. These are all on my tax returns. If I neglect to disclose all my sources of income, can I claim a "right to privacy" that I am exercising a "choice"? Will the liberals protest for me?
If there is no "right to privacy", then there is no "right to choose", and if no right to choose, then no right to abortion. Abortion is simply a medical procedure, something the states have a compelling interest in regulating. If we take the abortion argument to its logical conclusion, then we have to argue that the states have no authority to regulate ANY medical procedure, let alone license doctors.
Let's start with the term pro-choice. I dare anyone who is "pro-choice", not to argue from the ethereal, legal realm, but to actually defend abortion. When we euphemize it, we can accept it. The bottom line is that they can't do it because it is indefensible.
Technology has given us a glimpse into the earliest stages of fetal development. What is becoming obvious to more and more people is that there is life in there, not a amorphous blob. There is a heart beat at less than 1 month, and by the end of the first trimester, there are: brain waves, heart beats, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arms, legs, hands, feet, fingers, toes, hair, eyelashes, and even fingernails. Most of the organs are developed in the first trimester. In fact, it is not uncommon for the fetus to have a different blood type than the mother. Yet, the law cannot see this is human.
Informed consent laws have been passed to make sure that women are given an ultrasound prior to an abortion. Need we guess who is the biggest opponent of these laws. So many women, when they see what is growing inside their womb, many before they knew they were pregnant, decide to bring the child into the world. And for every abortion that turns into a birth, the abortionist lose. They lose money, they lose another supporter.
Plato wrote about the world we live in, of the visible and intelligible things. The visible is what surrounds us, everything we can use our senses to understand. Then there is the intelligible world, the unchanging products of human reason. It was here that Plato gave us the idea of "forms", the Greek actually being
ideas, those abstract descriptions which are the essence of the visible world. The visible world is the many imperfect and greatly varying versions of the never changing abstract.
The abortionists must pursue a plan to specifically deny that there is a unique "humanness". They cannot or will not admit the obvious, that all those feature that a first trimester fetus have make it uniquely human. There can be no other possibility. When the baby comes to term, we have a visible representation of a human, of humanness.
If we cannot acknowledge the humanness of the fetus, how can we acknowledge our own? The truth is that we can't. It is clear, technologically, philosophically, and ethically, that abortion takes a human life.
Aristotle wrote that we must regulate our own behaviors, and that it is learned, the outcome of both training and practice. He also wrote that moral weakness is knowing what is right, yet doing what is wrong, following desire against reason. But is this the essence of a free society, to be able to act against reason? No greater authority on freedom, John Locke, wrote: "But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession...".
We do not have perfect liberty to act completely according to our desires. That is not a free society, that is anarchy. Anyone with an ounce of objectivity can see the impact of abortion on society. Women are starting to come forward and warn others about the harm their abortion caused them, both physically and emotionally.
It is not ironic that the founder of Planned Parenthood , Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist, and a horrible racist. Eugenics was the favorite "science" of the racial supremacist in the Thrid Reich. Planned Parenthood's website simply says that "Eugenics is the science of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction." And we had to destroy the village to save it.
They say only this about her views, "Sanger also entertained some popular ideas of her own time that are out of keeping with our thinking today." The next time a liberal criticizes the "slave owners" that wrote the constitution, just say, their actions were "out of keeping with our thinking today". That should settle the issue.
For Sanger's quotes on race and forced sterilization, do a google search. For brevity's sake, though, here are a few snippets. "...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born", "to create a race of thoroughbreds", and "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population". I guess we can only say one thing, Sieg Heil.
Abortion defies legal juris prudence, defies medical science, and most importantly, defies morality and philosophy. If we cannot acknowledge the life that grows in the womb, we deny the very nature of our humanity. We deny the miracle that birth really is. We deny the uniqueness of the human race. Of course, we should expect nothing less from the apologists of the Stalin and Mao. Slavery required us to deny the humanity of slaves and it tore the nation apart. Before the Nazis could kill millions in gas chambers, they had to call them untermenshen. Today, we kill millions of unborn children, and we simply call them fetuses while calling the murder a choice.
posted by Robert Mandel
3/20/2004 11:23:08 PM
