That's Barack Obama, who thinks that in some circumstances, babies are punishments. Fortunately, Kyle-Anne Shiver explains the Bolshevik fallacy in that thinking.
Shiver's piece was so good I pulled the trigger on this post title before checking its grammar. But I be a writer. Really.
Along similar lines, Cassandra takes Linda Hirshman to school because Hirshman, trying to "reclaim the morality of abortion," forgets what Cassandra does not: "The casting of abortion, or stare decisis as it is euphemistically referred to on Capitol Hill, as 'pro-choice' could not be more misleading, for in this debate only one of the three parties concerned (man, woman, and child) has the slightest semblance of a choice." She explains more about that to good effect while using a Swedish case as an example.
It's worth noting if you read the material at the links that Cassandra describes herself as "a conservative who has reluctantly remained in the pro-choice camp." She blasts the Hishman essay for its stupidity and its absolutism. "Abortion is about the value of women's lives," Hirshman writes, either ignorant of sex-selective abortions or blithely unconcerned with how quickly that phenomenon undercuts her proposition (and Hirshman's assertion must be called a proposition, because it doesn't rise to the level of an actual argument).
Cassandra spotlights the logical weaknesses in Hirschman's essay with sniper-like precision:
"By eliding past the responsibility of adult women to take control over their own reproductive destinies, Hirshman allows herself to conclude that women's lives have more value than the lives of their sexual partners (who are increasingly being held financially responsible for supporting children it can be conclusively proven they did not father).
But more disturbingly, she also allows herself to dispense with the lives of unborn children as though they were of no value whatsoever. She is hardly the only one to do so."
That's right on all counts, which is why Cassandra may yet come around to my own pro-life position some day. I have no similar hope for Obama, because he's accepted the whinging of the abortion lobbyists as uncritically as he imbibed black liberation theology from the likes of John Cone and Jeremiah Wright.
A parting word on the Hirshman essay seems appropriate, even though Cassandra left most of it in tatters: Hirshman decries the alleged "absence of a robust description of the value of women's lives."
In poker terms, that is a significant "tell." It means that she has never meditated on the prayer of a woman that Christians call the Magnificat (about which I blogged a bit only two days ago). It also means that Hirshman is unfamiliar with Humanae Vitae, unfamiliar with Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body," unfamiliar with the anti-abortion stance of early American feminists, and unfamiliar with the biographies of countless women from Mary Magdalen and Abigail Adams up to and including Dara Torres, every one of whom's lives are immeasurably valuable for those who have eyes to see. And although I used famous women as examples in the foregoing list, obscure women would prove the same point.
In short, Linda Hirshman needs to pay attention. Talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight. Far from "reclaiming the morality of abortion," all she's done by abandoning the canard that no one is actuallly "pro-abortion" (China's infamous "one child policy" notwithstanding) is tried in vain to take a high road for which her premise and conclusion are fundamentally unsuited. Her "argument" suffers from the philosophical and logical equivalent of altitude sickness.
And Barack Obama? As Kyle-Anne Shiver and others have shown, if the man ever had any street cred as an "intellectual" candidate, it's in serious jeopardy. Memo to Team Obama and its acolytes: if that's your best, your best won't do.
Postscript (August 20): Ross Douthat echoes the point I made above.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
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3 comments:
I think the biggest thing that keeps me (reluctantly) in what is euphemistically called the "pro-choice" camp is two thoughts:
1. We live in a country where religion is, by law, separated from the State. So long as the question of when a human life begins cannot be definitively settled, so long as doubt exists, I think it becomes hard to separate early term abortions from birth control in the minds of anyone who doesn't agree that human life begins at conception. I accept that many believe it does. I think it does. But any such belief sourced in faith cannot be the legal basis for settling this argument.
2. Thus, as unhappy as it makes me, the SC's original determination of viability outside the mother's body was a good compromise. And thanks to science, viability is being pushed back farther and farther, (i.e., earlier in the pregnancy) which is all to the good, IMO.
Finally, I believe this is a matter for state legislatures and not one that belongs in the Constitution. And as such, I have to say that I think even if Roe were reversed tomorrow, abortion would continue in most states. It might be circumscribed somewhat, but I doubt it would go away.
But that is a conversation the American people should have been allowed to have.
Good points both, friend Cassandra. I'd say that the question about when human life begins is not "sourced in faith," however. It's biology. From conception onward, a man and a woman can only help to make another human-- there's no possibility of giving birth to something like a duck or an oak tree nine months later. "Benefit of doubt" and the medical advances undergirding that benefit cut both ways; it's just that you're looking backward from birth, and I'm looking forward from conception, which is a logical starting point, right? And note that there's no appeal to faith there-- it's an appeal to reason.
Oh, I agree Patrick. This is what leads me to call abortion always the taking of a human life.
Always. It makes my own position particularly painful, especially as a mother who faced each pregnancy (even the first one, which was unplanned) with a special joy I'm not sure someone who has never felt a baby move inside of them can fully comprehend. It's a weird feeling. But I think fathers can imagine well enough because they feel the same love and in the end, who cares who carried the baby? It is who loves it and raises it that matters.
It is just that if an argument arises, you can't *settle* the question. Until that clump of cells begins to resemble a baby, to some people it isn't. And even then, until it can live without the mother, in the hierarchy of life, it is subordinated. I understand the compassion that makes abortion advocates plead their case so ardently. I just wish they had some compassion left for the unborn.
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