Today is the 35th anniversary of the infamous Wade v. Roe decision that allowed the promotion and practice of abortion as an acceptable means of terminating more human lives than THE Holocaust – and a few lesser genocides added on. I prefer to think of it as the yet unnumbered year until humanity regains its moral, ethical, civil and common sense equilibrium and bans the arbitrary procedure that is currently based solely on the simplistic idiocy that it is merely “a woman’s RIGHT to choose.”
My personal aversion to abortion is not religious based. I am far to poor of a Christian (if at all) to rely on church decrees. It is a matter of a secularly moral, just and civil society. Healthy cultures do not just go around torturously slaughtering their progeny. I oppose abortion, not from dogma, but from the fact that I love children and respect the enormously miraculous (in both the secular and theological sense) means by which they come into life. Once conceived, their humanness is caste. The pairing of the DNA establishes all the criteria that defines humanness. The new life's unvoiced rights exist regardless of the opinion of society in any particular millennia.
To provide the woman with exclusive right over the very life, or death, of an unborn child requires legal, ethical and logical blinders. The fetus is among the most precious “commodities” of life. It is clearly the “product” for two individuals, both with well established legal liabilities. Even if you do not accept the inalienable right to life of the fetus as a human person, it is irrefutable that at least two individuals have legitimate claims.
Most offensive of all claims is the mantra that it is the woman’s body to do with as she pleases. The fetus is not a necessary or natural part of the female anatomy. It is a host function, with codified responsibilities and liabilities. Ironically, if a woman desired to have her healthy kidney removed (no question a part of her own boy), it would be unethical and, in some cases, illegal for a doctor to perform the requested operation.
The feminists’ claim to legal and biological authority and superiority, simply because Providence or evolution placed the early stages of development within the female body, is a preposterous and arrogant fallacy – but a necessary fraud if one is to attempt any justification for abortion on demand.It is also important to keep in mind that humanness is not something we, as a society, are ever to determine. Humanness is inalienable. It exists as its own reality, not by the opinion of society. It cannot be granted or taken away by the edict of a despot, the opinions of scientists, the vote of a democratic majority, or the judgment of nine justices. It is not our moral obligation to make a determination of the moment of humanness, but to discover it through knowledge, logic, belief and general enlightenment.
Thanks to medical science, a fetus that was once too premature to be “viable” now survives. Only human ignorance allowed those earlier “viable” fetuses to be destroyed.
We should never think of abortion as a right. It is not. It is an infamous privilege. In reality, abortion exists as a selfish convenience – for the woman (or man), for a powerful segment of the medical community, and, to large extent, for our current society. Like all the other horrors of human history, it places convenience over life. In all cases, some humans must be dehumanized, become chattel, for the benefit for the ruling class. They are to be owned or controlled like lesser animals, or slain for their benefits to medical science, their perceived threat to the “superior” culture, to be eaten as game prey, or eliminated as a threat to the resources of a theoretically overcrowded society.
No matter how pathetic the claim -- poverty, immaturity, stress, etc. etc. etc. – the so-called woman’s RIGHT to choose is an argument of convenience. Or inconvenience, if you will. The only “right” involved is the pervasively ignored right to life, itself.
We know it is wrong, theologically or civilly, to kill another human. We know that our protectable humanness begins BEFORE birth. But, at what moment in the human gestation period does the newly conceived acquire the civil rights and protections to which all humans are entitled, if not always granted? That is the essential question.
Apart from conception, there is no moment, no event, that can be cited as the transition from a worthless growth to a protectable human. Since there is no clear moment in pre-natal developm
ent when we can persuasively declare the commencement of humanness, we should err on the side of life. While we demand to be assured of guilt “beyond all reasonable doubt” before the execution of a criminal, we do not apply “reasonable doubt” as a protection against the wrongful killing of a guiltless human at its earliest stages of life.Abortion is not our connection with an enlightened future, but some lingering barbarism from our primitive past. I am confidant that future hindsight will reflect on the era of abortion as a hideous era of an ignorant culture -- no matter how sophisticated it may appear to so many intelligent people today. It will take its place alongside the other horrors of human decadence, such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, Nazi medical experiments and periodic outbreaks of genocide. All were justified by the influence leaders of the cultures in which they existed. All were seen as beneficial to the perpetrating society.
Today is significant, not as a national day of celebration, but as yet another Memorial Day – a day upon we should sadly reflect on the loss of so many lives cut short by surgeons with disregard to the basic elements of the Hippocratic Oath. Unfortunately, we have no great cause to declare that these poor souls have not died in vane. There are no heroes yet, only victims.
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