A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Amazing they attend the same college – UPDATED November 8, 2010

Last week, I posted on a letter to the editor of the student newspaper at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that was one of the best defenses of human life, especially the most vulnerable of humans, that I’ve ever read.   This week, comes virtually the diametric opposite in terms of conclusions reached and arguments used.  In fact, a similar letter to the editor opens with one of the most shockingly foolish statements I’ve ever read:

For as long as the United States government has existed, it has been shirking a critical moral obligation. We are talking, of course, about our nation’s failure to protect the right of every woman to receive an affordable abortion on demand.

I have argued for some time that one of the primary selling points of Obamacare for the left is the fact that it will result in a permanent enshrinement of abortion as a fundamental ‘right’ in this country.  Obviously, the author of this letter subscribes to this view that abortion is a right, and how incredible that thousands of years of human philosophy and theology have managed to miss this fundamental right!  From Hammurabi’s Code to the Mosaic Law to Rome to the Constitution, all those stupid knuckle dragging idiots of the past missed one of the most central rights of all – the right of a woman to kill her child at will!  ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ indeed, but only if you are lucky enough to be born!  It’s amazing civilization has been able to advance for thousands of years in absence of this completely made up “right.”  But wait, they’re not done!:

Abortions in the United States are technically legal, but in practice they can be very difficult to come by.

Anyone involved in pro-life activities know that this statement is a complete falsehood.  In virtually every state, from conception to hours before delivery, obtaining an abortion is incredibly easy, and, what’s more and contrary to federal law, the government will pay for the abortion on some made up grounds of ‘medical necessity.’ 

Not a good start – a completely made up ‘right’ and a falsehood form the premise of the entire letter. 

Many women cannot afford the cost of a safe abortion, and even for those who can, a devastating shortage of qualified abortion providers means that they often have to travel long distances in order to reach a clinic. Once they do get to a clinic, they are frequently met with threats of violence from right-wing extremists or stymied by state regulations deliberately designed to make it as hard as possible for them to receive the care they need. The United States is very far indeed from providing universal access to abortion services, and the results of this oversight are nothing short of tragic.

Yes, it’s always such a tragedy that a mom might be somewhat inconvenienced in her desire to kill her child.  How very, very sad.  It might even give her sufficient time to reflect on the magnitude of the barbarity she is engaged in and change her mind.   As for the description of me, and millions of other pro-life individuals as ‘violent right wing extremists,’ what a ridiculous laugh.   Yes, a deranged individual killed Dr. George Tiller, but violence towards women getting abortions is, and always has been, virtually non-existent.  Violence towards the abortion industry is also incredibly rare, and runs completely counter to the entire, ‘real’ pro-life message, that all life is sacred and must be protected.

But they’re just getting  warmed up.  Below, perhaps THE most asinine statement I’ve ever read, but one that is simultaneously incredibly revealing:

A government’s failure to provide abortions constitutes depraved indifference to human life.

The authors try to support this statement by claiming that laws regulating abortion do not reduce the number of abortions performed, using claims made by two radical pro-abort organizations, but these claims are patently false.  Look at the United States.  Estimates for numbers of abortions performed prior to passage of Roe v. Wade, per year, are about 50,000-100,000 per year, on the highest side.  After Roe passed, the number exploded to ten times that number in a couple of years.  In states where there are more restrictive abortion laws, the number of abortions plummets.  The myth of ‘back alley’ abortions is just that – a myth, a straw man constructed by pro-aborts in order to try to make the inhuman, the utterly barbaric, somehow pallatable.   Even if you accept their figure that 70,000 women, worldwide, die per year from illegal abortions (a statistic impossible to arrive at, and they know it), that hardly justifies the murder of millions, does it?  And yet, that is the entire premise of their argument – governments are ‘depraved’ because they put very minor limits on abortion, resulting in the deaths of thousands of women.  Apparently, they believe a human being is not a human being until it has exited the birth canal and is ‘wanted.’   If it isn’t wanted, and happens to exit the birth canal alive anyway, I am quite certain this depraved couple would be perfectly happy leaving the baby to die.  This is so very typical of the left, in particular, the radical pro-abort left – their great concern for humanity only applies to those who do what they want, in this case, receiving an abortion.  The millions of victims of this barbarism just don’t count.  They simply don’t exist.

More:

Equality of the sexes is impossible without free access to abortions.

I’m quite certain that Moloch is quite happy with that statement.  Really, women, did you not know that you cannot be ‘equal’ in God’s eyes or anyone elses unless you can have your child killed on demand?

The rest of it is all the same – biased ‘statistics,’ straw men, special pleading, the logical fallacies are constant and laughable, but, then again, one of the authors is a “Women’s Studies” major, so I’m not shocked at the lack of critical thinking and the gaping holes in the “arguments”  presented.   I really do not see what is being argued in this letter as being in any way different from the kinds of arguments that have been used to justify all kinds of horrendous injustice in the past, from the maltreatment of minorities to those with mental illness.  If I have been a bit harsh, I was perhaps exercised by the incredibly inflammatory and callous rhetoric, the consignment of millions to death for the sake of convenience and a completely made up “right,” and the self-serving ignorance of it all.  The ironic part is this: by killing off huge swaths of generations yet unborn, leftists like Fatima Hussein (oh how that name is so inapropos), one of the authors, are killing the goose they want to pay for the golden egg of their generous, government provided health coverage, including abortion.  The US has, between 1973 and 2009, killed one if every three children conceived.  If those children had been born, we would not have the fiscal crisis in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and now, Obamacare, that we do.  We would have enough people to pay for all those retirement and other benefits for people like Fatima Hussein.

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.”  Yes, but the Lord has also created a world in which civilizations that become so self-absorbed and shortsighted as to kill off their next generations tend to implode from within.   And where will ‘women’s rights’ be then?

UPDATE: Commenenter berenike suggested I look up abortion data from Poland after abortion was outlawed in 1992.  The results are stunning, abortions fell off by three orders of magnitude, from hundreds of thousands per year to a few hundred per year.   In the face of this kind of information, pro-aborts try to argue that unreported, illegal abortions skyrocket and  make up for the difference.  That is not the case.  When abortion is made illegal, the demand for it plummets terrifically.