When you take away the inherent value of a human being, you can easily repress, jail, imprison, destroy him without bothering to involve your conscience.
When I was 30 weeks pregnant I went into labor. In the hospital for a week, then home on bedrest and terrible meds designed to keep my labor from progressing, my doctor worked heroically to keep my baby safely in the womb. At one of my weekly OB/GYN appointments, I sat across from a teenage girl, her boyfriend, and her mother in the waiting room. They were all nervous, but the theme of their discussion was about how it would all be over soon. That was the first time I saw the glaring hypocrisy, the horrible moral lapse, of abortion-rights advocates. My doctor, who I adored for working so hard to keep my baby safe in my womb, was also that day going to perform an abortion.
No one. Not one person can justify that moral hypocrisy.
No matter how its proponents gleefully laud the virtues of new legislation signed by New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo to legalize abortion at any point in pregnancy, this hideous new law legitimizes the murder of unborn babies for any reason, at any time. He even called for celebration using the lights of NYC’s World Trade Center building: the tower’s lights turned pink. Instead of a beacon reminding Americans of its indomitable spirit of freedom, the building was shamelessly used to herald the slaughter of the country’s most vulnerable people.
Virginia Democrats hoping to pass a similar law even stated that a mother might have the option to leave an ill, just-born infant to die if she has changed her mind. Did you catch that? Maybe, they say, a physically handicapped newborn might also be endangered if he is not wanted.*
A sickening celebratory air among abortion advocates encourages women to “Shout Your Abortion”–as if the murder of an unborn infant is cause for jubilation. And now more states promise to do the same. But this is not something new under the sun.
In 1729 author Jonathan Swift observed the huge numbers of poverty-stricken Irish families and penned his famous “Modest Proposal” to deal with the problem. Tongue in cheek, he proposed that the elite in his kingdom could buy, slaughter, and serve up the poor infants of the Irish nation as meals in the finest homes and restaurants in Great Britain. His satirical point: his fellow Britons cared more for their high society parties than they did for the poor children of the nation.
Now enter Cuomo’s Modern, Immoral Proposal. How to pander to the Left? Allow the wanton slaughter of millions of unborn children. Unfortunately, tragically, this isn’t satire. Cuomo signed the bill to serve up a bloody sacrifice to “Progressives,” calling this a moral victory for women’s rights.
Ironically, they equivocate their so-called morality. To them, it’s immoral to force women to continue an unwanted pregnancy. To their mind, they can commiserate with a sister or friend who loses a child to miscarriage, but Shout Your Abortion to herald the end of an unborn child.
In fact, Progressives tout all sorts of causes as moral. The cause of undocumented workers and their children is moral. The cause of climate change is moral. The cause of endangered species is moral. (Here your eyes have to roll: the endangered species, they say, face destruction of their natural habitats. Sort of like unborn children in their mothers’ wombs, if the mother is intent upon aborting.)
And to prove that we are a compassionate people, we send aid in the form of water, food, medicines, and doctors to nations suffering a national disaster. We spare no expense to bring home the bodies of soldiers who died overseas. Though we don’t talk about it too openly, we work toward toppling evil, dictatorial governments so their people can be freed from the bondage of slavery and tyrants. These are all good.
Yet how can we consider ourselves a nation that is kind, and just, and moral–when the most vulnerable among us are ripped from their mothers’ wombs, their hearts stilled, with no rights, no voice, no compassion? Even worse: how can we celebrate such monstrous evil?
In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., jailed while protesting segregation in the South, penned a masterful letter refuting a group of white religious leaders who objected to his presence in Birmingham. Those in power, he said, tend to dehumanize the people they want to oppress or annihilate. We could even say that the powerful legalize their suppression in order to justify it.
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? (Emphasis mine)
Jewish philosopher Buber’s comments were universal; they apply to the history of the Jewish people even from the time of the Bible, relegated to the status of non-persons–killed, deprived of rights, expelled, carted away all through history. That truth also easily applies to slavery in the United States, in which even the Supreme Court declared that blacks deserved only three-fourths the status of whites, and then the 19th and 20th century, in which–though freed–blacks could not live equitably alongside whites. When you take away the inherent value of a human being, you can easily repress, jail, imprison, destroy him without bothering to involve your conscience. What has this country done today? Taken away the inherent humanity of unborn children.
Our nation, in supporting and celebrating this hideous immorality, can no longer consider itself a moral nation, a free nation. If a nation will not (NOT cannot) protect the lives of its most vulnerable people, what separates us from the most gruesome regimes in history?
Writing Rhetorically 