{"id":1604,"date":"2017-01-27T21:45:23","date_gmt":"2017-01-28T02:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2017-01-27T21:45:23","modified_gmt":"2017-01-28T02:45:23","slug":"abortion-case-childless-pregnant-woman-remembering-roe-v-wade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/01\/abortion-case-childless-pregnant-woman-remembering-roe-v-wade.html","title":{"rendered":"Abortion and the Case of the Childless Pregnant Woman: Remembering Roe v Wade"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, January 27, 2017, masses of people converged on Washington D.C. to repudiate Roe v Wade, <\/em>the 1973 Supreme Court decision that endowed upon American women a Constitutional \u201cright\u201d to \u201cabortion.\u201d<\/p>\n

With respect to most of the issues of the day, I can understand and appreciate, even if I do not accept, the reasons that my opponents give for the erroneous positions that they hold.\u00a0 The so-called issue of \u201cabortion,\u201d however, is decidedly not one of them.<\/p>\n

There are few topics that are framed from the outset in so many deceptive terms as is the topic of \u201cabortion.\u201d\u00a0 Even its name, <\/em>the label that both its proponents and opponents<\/em> use when addressing this issue, is designed to veil the hideous reality that occurs when women exercise this \u201cright\u201d that a handful of lawyers on the Supreme Court created for them 44 years ago.<\/p>\n

For the purpose of convenience, I too will defer to common usage and refer to the topic under discussion as \u201cabortion.\u201d That being said, an honest discussion, to say nothing of decency, requires that we expose the euphemisms for what they are.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbortion,\u201d \u201cthe right to choose,\u201d \u201ca woman\u2019s <\/em>right to choose,\u201d \u201ca woman\u2019s right to choose to \u2018terminate the pregnancy\u2019 <\/em>or \u201cabort the fetus<\/em>\u201d\u2014these are the sorts of deceptive abstractions in which the advocates of abortion routinely trade.<\/p>\n

(1)In any other context, whether war, capital punishment, a school shooting, or whatever, when one party kills, or threatens to kill, another, we never say of the one party that it aborted <\/em>or threatened to abort <\/em>the other.\u00a0 Rival mobsters and gang-bangers don\u2019t seek to abort one another.\u00a0 President Trump didn\u2019t pledge to abort the Islamic State from the face of the Earth. American and Nazi soldiers weren\u2019t trying to abort each other.<\/p>\n

In all of these instances, it is understood that it is the activity of killing that is the essential referent.<\/p>\n

Now, some acts of killing are morally defensible.\u00a0 The point, though, is that regardless of whether the killing in question is justifiable or not, no one thinks to describe it as an abortion unless and except for when it is a woman pursuing the death of her unborn child.<\/p>\n

And this brings us to our next point.<\/p>\n

(2)That abortion advocates must rely upon a host of impersonal terms to sustain their position is telling commentary.\u00a0\u00a0 The truth, though, is that no woman \u201cchooses\u201d to exercise her \u201cright\u201d to \u201cterminate the <\/em>pregnancy\u201d or \u201cthe <\/em>fetus\u201d (notice the unwillingness on the part of proponents to even characterize the unborn as her <\/em>pregnancy or her <\/em>fetus).<\/p>\n

The cold, hard reality is that abortion consists in a mother <\/em>hiring a stranger to kill, by whichever means necessary, her child. <\/em><\/p>\n

Let this sink in.\u00a0 Those who support abortion maintain that it is morally permissible, perhaps even virtuous, that mothers resolve to have their children massacred.<\/p>\n

That the child is in the womb and at an earlier stage of development than it would otherwise eventually reach is, both ontologically and morally, of zero relevance. The tiny human being growing in its mother\u2019s womb differs from the reader of this essay similarly to the ways in which babies, toddlers, school children, and any other number of people differ from the reader of this essay.<\/p>\n

That is to say, prenatal human beings differ from post-natal human beings only in degree.\u00a0 <\/em>Words like \u201cfetus\u201d disingenuously imply that the unborn child differs in kind from the rest of us.<\/p>\n

In other words, it is meant, ludicrously, to suggest that, at the very least, the child in the womb is of a different species<\/em>.\u00a0 Yet even this is probably understatement, for many of those who are the most vocal, indeed, fanatical of animal and environmental rights activists would recoil in horror if animals were subjected to the savagery\u2014the hacking into pieces\u2014that is visited upon the unborn in abortion procedures.\u00a0 Nor would they tolerate it if even plants were treated with the indifference with which the unborn are treated.<\/p>\n

\u201cFetus\u201d can have the hypnotic effect of luring people into thinking that the unborn do not belong to an organic species at all, that they are more on the order of masses of tissue, of things.<\/p>\n

(3)Abortion is most definitely not <\/em>an issue of a \u201cwoman\u2019s choice over her own body.\u201d For that matter, neither is it, strictly speaking, an issue about some abstraction called \u201clife.\u201d Rather, the question of abortion is nothing less than the question of whether we are going to affirm a world that encourages mothers to love and care for their children or one within which they feel entitled to kill them.<\/p>\n

To reiterate, the relevant relationship here is not that of one rights-bearing individual to that of another.\u00a0 And it is certainly not the relationship between a human person and a non-person.\u00a0 Rather, the relationship on which the abortion issue hinges is that between a mother and her child.<\/p>\n

Still, the mother\/child relationship does not exist in a vacuum.\u00a0 A society that permits abortion speaks volumes about itself.\u00a0 In embracing the incoherent metaphysics of the childless pregnant woman (a pregnant woman with a \u201cfetus,\u201d a mother without any obligations to the child that grows within her womb); in recognizing in women a \u201cright\u201d to kill their unborn children, society as a whole determines how it as well views the relationship between the strong and the weakest of the weak, the powerful and the most powerless of the powerless, the present generation and the next.<\/p>\n

To be sure, far from being a moral right, abortion is undoubtedly the gravest of evils, for it expresses society\u2019s decision to treat its posterity, while their most vulnerable, as disposable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday, January 27, 2017, masses of people converged on Washington D.C. to repudiate Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that endowed upon American women a Constitutional \u201cright\u201d to \u201cabortion.\u201d With respect to most of the issues of the day, I can understand and appreciate, even if I do not accept, the reasons…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAbortion and the Case of the Childless Pregnant Woman: Remembering Roe v Wade<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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