It’s not really a child..
Seventy different “Pro-Life” organizations penned an open letter on the subject of criminalizing abortion this week. With the anticipated fall of Roe V. Wade, many states are proposing criminal penalties for providing or seeking an abortion. There has been a huge amount of disinformation purveyed by pro-abortion groups on this subject, including the absurd notion that these laws would be applied retroactively, thus violating the Constitution’s ex post facto protections. Unlike abortion itself, the Constitution’s explicitly guarantees that the people will not be subject to criminal liability for actions taking place prior to a law’s adoption. (Art. 1 § 10: “This prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto..”)
I expect pro-abortion groups to lie, to studiously ignore the rights of the unborn, to engage in hysterical fear-mongering, but I had higher standards for people claiming to believe children are being killed in the womb. For fifty years, “Pro-Life” advocacy groups have been claiming the unborn have a right to life, that we’re a nation with the blood of innocents on our hands, that we are enduring, in fact, a holocaust of proportions greater than that perpetrated by Nazi Germany. You’ve heard all this before.
Guess what? They didn’t mean it. They were just kidding.
They make it very clear here..
“..We state unequivocally that any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women is not pro-life and we stand firmly opposed to such efforts…”
They seek, on the contrary, to criminalize the profit-making abortion industry, the providers themselves, as well they should, but ignoring the customer for contract killing, and her accomplices, is something like arresting prostitutes but ignoring the johns. After all, isn’t a man really just a “victim” of the prostitute? Isn’t a bank robber just the “victim” of all that money being in the vault?
They make the claim, “Women are victims of abortion and require our compassion and support.” Would you make that same claim about a woman who killed her teenage daughter? The absurdity of claiming that the right to life begins at conception, that abortion is unjustified homicide, and simultaneously claiming there should be no penalty for it can only really mean one thing: they never believed the child was a human being in the first place. If criminal punishment for abortion is considered “outrageous,” it means you believe killing the pre-born just isn’t anywhere near as bad as killing your two year old.
Perhaps their argument is really very anti-woman: only the abortion provider is a moral agent; the mother is a just a witless victim, unable to make moral or intellectual distinctions. Their letter references a study indicating post abortive women experienced 2.6 times more psychiatric admissions than their full term counterparts. It seems to me that’s merely a simple recognition of our capacity for guilt, an admission that women know abortion is wrong, that it inflicts psychiatric harm, in precisely the same way a murderer knows his actions are wrong.
The damage they are doing to their cause, to fifty years of lamentation, will only be avoided if they come to accept the God ordained realities they insist on avoiding.
Dear National Right to Life,
As an anti-abortion activist for the last thirty years, I find your open letter of May 12, 2022 (attached) on the subject of criminalizing abortion confusing, frightening, and weirdly enlightening: it betrays your actual beliefs. You obviously don’t believe, after all, that the pre-born are human beings. You’ve been lamenting taking “..the lives of 63 million unborn children,” since 1973, but evidently they really aren’t children at all, by your estimation. How could they be– if the mothers, fathers, and doctors who kill them don’t deserve any criminal punishment? Maybe they are only theoretical humans so their killers don’t deserve any real life penalties?
On the other hand, if you actually do believe they are children, this is where it gets a little frightening. It sounds like murder itself is a regrettable, but completely understandable, outcome for mothers at their wit’s end. By that logic, maybe we should go a little bit further and assign no criminal penalties at all if she kills a one year old child, or a teenager, or you, or me. Evidently the laws against homicide have been the problem all along. Criminalizing murder, as you say, is not really “pro-life.”
You would have far more credibility if you just admitted that you aren’t quite prepared to pay the price for fifty years of rhetoric you apparently don’t believe. Something like “yes, it deserves criminalization, but we just aren’t man enough, Christian enough, truthful enough to go there.”
Sincerely,
James Riley
Oak Glen, California