Letter writer Mary Lou Pandorf wrote on Feb. 8, “I consider abortion abhorrent.” Then, incredibly she writes, “I could never make that choice for someone else” and “People who are pro-choice are not pro-abortion.” Hogwash.
While this kind of rhetoric makes people feel better, that “compassion” has sat on the sidelines while 55 million of their fellow Americans were legally poisoned, dismembered and chemically burned to death in the abhorrent procedure called abortion. It wasn’t noble 150 years ago to say, “I’d never own a slave, but I could never make that choice for someone else.” And it is not noble today to say that about an innocent child in the womb killed by abortion.
A slave was a separate, unique human being. A child in the womb is a separate, unique human being. Neither should be owned, tortured or killed, regardless of what man’s laws say. People who stopped looking the other way led to the Civil War and an end to slavery. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.”
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February 15, 2013 at 9:19 am
mthayes42
Many of the ethical decisions a society must make are difficult because there are good arguments for each of opposing positions. Abortion, it seems to me, is not that kind of decision. The differences between one side and the other are not that they have different answers to a difficult question but that they are asking entirely different questions. Pro-choice people are asking only about the welfare of the mother, not the child at all. That distinction is made easier for them by their denumanization of the baby: The unborn child is just a “fetus.”
Questions are crucial in a debate. Time and again I hear people ask, “When does life begin?” That’s an entirely useless question. Life began long ago and today is merely passed on. The right question would be either, “When does mere life become specifically human life?” Or, more precisely, “When does the newly forming person deserve to be treated with human dignity?”
It is impossible to say that abortion is not murder unless you first deny the humanity of the unborn. There is no rational, no meaningful way to do that.