Matt Walsh:
Late last week there was an interesting exchange on Fox News involving a couple of anti-choice radicals and the eminent scholar Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo valiantly defended the honor of Planned Parenthood, pointing out that, despite the unhinged rantings of women-hating right wingers, there is such a thing as a“good abortion.” A good abortion, he explained, “is sitting in a clean place, where the woman’s health is protected! As opposed to a back alley! As opposed to a back alley where the woman dies with some butcher cutting her to pieces!”
Indeed, women should not be butchered in back alleys; they should be butchered inside Planned Parenthoods. This is America, people. Women deserve to be cut to pieces and left for dead by doctors, not untrained amateurs. As for the babies, they will of course die and be mutilated no matter the location, but it’s important for this to happen in a safe and clean environment. Besides, if they’re killed in the mythical Back Alley, there won’t be anyone around to harvest their organs.
Geraldo’s reasoning is not only insightful and compassionate, but ubiquitous. Abortion advocates across the western world have almost completely abandoned the scientific and moral arguments for the institution, planting their flag on the supposed inevitably of it instead. They contend that because abortion does happen, itshould happen. Or at least that because it does, it doesn’t matter if it should. Pro-abortion folks argue that society’s duty is to not to prevent or condemn the murder of unborn human beings, but to ensure that it’s done safely and cleanly and at the gentle hands of a rich man with a framed diploma hanging on the wall.
Planned Parenthood likewise trumpets the safeness of killing babies, and some clinics are even adorned with signs declaring their clinics “safe spaces.” During the recent outcry over the selling of aborted children, abortion enthusiasts have hammered the inevitability and “safety” angle over and over again, both to justify abortion itself, and to excuse the trafficking of human body parts.
The rationale usually sounds something like this: “Look, I don’t like abortion, but it’s going to happen no matter what. Might as well have a safe and clean way to do it. And if the children are already dead, because they’ve already been killed, because they were already going to be killed, then we might as well sell their corpses to science so that we can cure cancer or whatever.” (They might have trouble naming any single disease that’s actually been cured by cultivating aborted children, but never mind that.)
This is a fascinating development in our culture. We seem to be accepting that abortion is a depraved and insidious evil, that it takes an innocent life, and that it can’t be justified on ethical grounds at all, yet we still insist on funding and facilitating the practice. “Hey, it’s a horrible, murderous thing, but since people will do it regardless, let’s make it easier for them,” the enlightened pragmatists say. Apparently, massacring a child is only truly objectionable if it happens outside and with a coat hanger (even though “back alley” abortions were actually conducted in doctors’ offices, not back alleys), but we can mitigate the problem by moving it inside and swapping the hanger for a knife, a pill, or an industrial vacuum.
I’ve thought long and hard about this argument. I must admit, due to my closed mindedness, I at first cringed at the notion that an admitted evil should be legalized, funded, and exploited simply because it’s likely to occur anyway. I found myself instinctively repulsed that child murder should be thought problematic only if it’s done in the wrong place and with the wrong instruments. But I am not so arrogant as to dismiss morally repugnant, intellectually bankrupt ideas on their face. Clearly, many millions of people find the logic compelling, and since when have millions of people been wrong about something?
So after much internal deliberation on the subject, I’ve decided that these folks have a point. Why burden ourselves with making murder illegal when it can more easily be relocated? It’s futile to have laws against things people do; laws should only ban things nobody would ever do. They’re much easier to enforce that way.
Think about it: for thousands of years humans have written silly “laws” against murder, rape, arson, burglary, etc.. But people still murder, rape, set things on fire, and steal. Why continue the charade? Almost 15,000 innocents are murdered every year (not counting the unborn). The FBI says around80,000 forcible rapes are reported. Statistics show that well over 10 percent of U.S. households fall victim to property theft annually. These things are happening, folks, often in unsafe and unclean conditions. In this environment, murder proves particularly dangerous, with well over 70 percent of cases resulting in injury or even death. And all because of our draconian laws and our feeble, backwards politicians attempting to legislate morality.
Enough of this. Time to stop living in a fairy tale land.
I submit that we take the “safe and clean” rationale all the way to its logical conclusion. If we’re able to think outside the narrow, stifling box of morality and basic human decency (which we clearly are), we’ll see that there ought to be clinics established to house and expedite all forms of brutality and bloodshed. Justifications for abortion aren’t exclusive or unique. If we propose that a form of murder ought to be legal, safe, and clean because it is inevitable, then we’ve made an argument that must, in principle, be applied to any murder, or any crime at all.
I have often wondered why every right that is specifically recognized in, and protected by, the Constitution is limited in some way, but a woman’s “right” to hire someone to murder her unborn child is sacrosanct, and must not be limited in any way?
Now we have college students who argue for the sanitarily named “post-birth abortion”, claiming that children up to the age of 5 years old aren’t really human, because they are “not yet self aware”.
“This is the whole problem with devaluing human life at any stage—it will naturally grow to include other groups of humans; in this case, born humans as well as preborn humans,” Harrington said. “[I] talked with one young man at the University of Minnesota who thought it was alright to kill children if they were under the age of 5 years old, as he did not consider them persons until that age.”
Did you catch that?
“as HE did not consider them…”
Sort of reminds me of arguments used by pro-abortion folks, such as “Until fetal development has progressed to the point where consciousness exists, there is no baby. There is only the potential for one to come into being.”
Comment #20 on this thread:
So… It is all right to kill a human being before conciousness exists…
It is all right to kill a human being before it becomes self aware…
Will it be all right to kill a human being before it becomes independent?
Will your parents be able to “abort” you for as long as you are living at home, wearing their clothing, eating their food?
After all, teenagers are certainly a major resource-sucking inconvenience in the lives of their parents, aren’t they?
Just like an unborn child in it’s mother’s womb…
And then, later in life will come the legal murder of the elderly, for the same high and moral reasons.
In fact, abortion could be seen as a rehearsal for euthanisia.
All of the same arguments apply.
Two relevant quotes:
“Give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile” (Unknown)
“Have you noticed that the people who are in favor of abortion have been careful to insure that they have been born first?” (Pogo)
Women do have other choices besides going to a Planned Parenthood abortuary as The Daily Signal reports:
They released a map to showcase the thousands of community health care clinics that could step in for Planned Parenthood if it were to lose federal funding.
There are plenty of health centers — that also can receive federal funding — to absorb Planned Parenthood’s patients should the organization be defunded by Congress.
Look carefully.
There are no gap areas where women (of any color) would have to travel very far to get to a different health center.
In fact, it looks like some women who think Planned Parenthood is their only choice are bypassing many closer health centers to get to a PP office!