Out of the mouths of silenced babes

  • I’m old enough to remem­ber when pro-abortionists (it was okay to call them that back then) were still say­ing what a golden era we were step­ping into with Roe v. Wade. It was going to be just won­der­ful. With moth­ers bliss­fully free from doing any­thing even as com­pli­cated as cross­ing state lines to ter­mi­nate their preg­nan­cies, we’d have an end to all child abuse and impov­er­ished fam­i­lies. Because — so the very forced logic went — with every lib­er­ated mom design­ing and plan­ning her pro­cre­ation, every child would be loved. In the day when abor­tions were safe, legal and free (or inex­pen­sive), human­ity would also be free from the ter­ri­ble and unfair risk of bring­ing chil­dren into the world with­out care­fully approv­ing of the time-table.

    Fast-forward to now: An edi­to­r­ial in the LA Times, brought on by another of the painfully reg­u­lar sto­ries of a mother killing a newborn:

    A 37-year-old taxi dri­ver in Mary­land was charged ear­lier this month with mur­der­ing a new­born. Days before, she’d been rushed to a hos­pi­tal, bleed­ing — and denied being preg­nant even though doc­tors found a pla­centa in her womb.

    Her deceased day-old son was dis­cov­ered wrapped in a towel below her bath­room sink. The mur­der charge, how­ever, stems from another baby’s death in 2003 or 2004. Inves­ti­ga­tors found the remains of three other new­borns on her property.

    And then, of course, comes the usual hand-wringing: But how? Abor­tion is so easy now.

    I really don’t know if intel­li­gent peo­ple still don’t get it, but the foren­sic psy­chol­o­gist who wrote this acci­dently let some pure truth slip out. (empha­sis mine)

    As a foren­sic psy­chol­o­gist, I have eval­u­ated 32 moth­ers who were charged with killing one or more of their chil­dren. Fourteen-year-old “Cathy” was one. She had been repeat­edly molested by her step­fa­ther, gave birth alone in her bed­room, and then threw her new­born against the wall. “Edna,” a col­lege fresh­man, was so inde­ci­sive about end­ing her preg­nancy that she suf­fo­cated her minutes-old baby in an act of delayed abortion.

    You want to just stop the tape right there. Exactly! Two gen­er­a­tions have been brought up hear­ing that it’s not mur­der to ter­mi­nate a nascent human being, no mat­ter whether it’s early in the term, mid-term, or late-term — is it really that hard to under­stand why women wouldn’t con­sider “post-partum abor­tion” to be mur­der? I’m sure they’re “in cri­sis.” I’m sure they have hurt­ing hearts. But all civ­i­lized soci­eties have said with one voice that end­ing a human life is mur­der, and say­ing you had a good rea­son (or a mother’s right) to do it is com­pletely irrelevant.

    The edi­to­r­ial writer gives kudos to states that allow moth­ers to drop off their unwanted babies at any emer­gency room with­out fear of repercussions:

    Since 1999, 47 states, includ­ing Cal­i­for­nia, have passed “safe sur­ren­der” laws. These laws per­mit the mother, with­out risk of crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion for aban­don­ment, to anony­mously leave her unharmed new­born at an emer­gency room or other des­ig­nated site (such as some police or fire sta­tions). In Cal­i­for­nia, an infant can be up to 3 days old, but age lim­its are more gen­er­ous else­where: 30 days in South Car­olina, and 1 year in North Dakota.

    One year old?! Lord, have mercy — this is sup­posed to be a good thing?! A mother can “change her mind” about a child she’s been feed­ing, putting to sleep, watch­ing take its first steps and say its first words? Do these peo­ple really not under­stand what they are say­ing by hail­ing this foul devel­op­ment — a nec­es­sary evil at best — as if it were going to solve all our prob­lems? The idea that chil­dren are dis­pos­able is what is at the very heart of what’s wrong with legal­ized abor­tion. Clever lies and well-intentioned plat­i­tudes have never really changed that — they’ve only made it eas­ier for women to jus­tify an immoral deci­sion as if it were moral.

    I’m old enough, too, to notice that the rhetoric has shifted. Sev­en­ties’ talk from the pro-abortion crowd was tri­umphal­is­tic, self-righteous and starry-eyed. They’ve never backed off the basic points that the deci­sion to abort is some­how guar­an­teed as a mat­ter of pri­vacy (even though no one in their right mind would say so), and that pri­vacy is guar­an­teed in the Con­sti­tu­tion (even though it takes the most heavy-handed revi­sion­ism to read that into it). But no one tries to promise a bet­ter world any­more, because it’s too easy to see that it just hasn’t hap­pened that way.

    We’re reap­ing the sorry results of this geno­ci­dal prac­tice. If sto­ries like these ones become even more fre­quent, I won­der whether it will alter the country’s opin­ions on abor­tion, or if we’ll just shrink back a lit­tle fur­ther from call­ing the mur­der of a child mur­der, recede a lit­tle fur­ther into that moral twi­light we’ve been entering.


    Related posts:

    1. The unwanted child might not be unneeded
    2. The Silenced Majority
    3. Abor­tion is mur­der, but that’s a woman’s right(?)
    4. Happy Mother’s Day with head noogies
    5. Harry Pot­ter — yeah, why not?

    August 13th, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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