Wages of War: Abortion

Abortion, Slavery, Poverty, Avarice

A New Four-Part Series Leading to 2020 A Year Without War

Part One: Abortion

“ Hey, Give Me Back My Sperm ! ”

Abortion makes everyone squeamish. Everything about it is creepy and weird. To abort means to; terminate, end, halt, stop, ax, arrest, cancel, scrap, call off, rescind, revoke, scrub, kill. The opposite means to keep and continue. Even when abortion has nothing to do with the almost-born, it connotes fear, and impending doom as in an aborted take-off or landing of a plane. It’s unpleasant now to even hear the word. It has become the ‘A’-word of contemporary morality. In its place are euphemistic phrases such as; protecting a woman’s reproductive health and choice.

But there are deeper levels of horror. At the epicenter of the current debate over aborting human fetuses is the very meaning ‘human’. Like so many other social morality debates, there are sharply divided camps over this nomenclature. The pro-abortionists, in varying degrees fetal viability, argue a human fetus is not human person until they say it is. They categorically deny that a human is a human person at the nano-instant of conception. They don’t argue that it’s a giraffe fetus, thankfully, for that would be transparently obtuse. No, they assert the right to redefine what is naturally, and biologically a tautological fact; a human person is a human person. Problem is grandma in still a human person even thoough she is in a coma attached to a ventilator and not viable on her own. This is where the abortionists logic breaks down. According to them, a human fetus is not a person because it is not viable outside the womb. Neither is grandma. So, let's kill grandma.

A human fetus is the logical category all of whose members are ‘human’. Or, using via negativa; no member of the category ‘human fetus’ is a member of the category ‘non-human fetus’. Since killing a human is murder, it is necessary to deny ‘human’ to the human fetus in order to morally justify abortion at any stage of fetal development. There is a wide bandwidth for the moral justification of abortion ranging from ‘the-morning-after-pill’, advocated by many, to actual infanticide 30 days after birth advocated by Princeton University moral philosophy professor, Peter Singer among other prominent advocates. One of advocates is President Barack Obama. As reported on factcheck.org. While Mr. Obama was a member of the Illinois legislature during 2001-2002, he voted against a statute that would protect a child that survived a clinical abortion attempt. To vote for such new-born child protection would, in Mr. Obama’s view mean that “…and if this is a child then this would be an antiabortion statute.” Factcheck.org presents his testimony thus;

Obama, Senate floor, 2002: [A]dding a – an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion. … I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.

Obama, Senate floor, 2001: Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a – a child, a nine-month-old – child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it – it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.

(Source: http://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/obama-and-infanticide/)

So, you ask, what does this have to do with war? Plenty. Abortion is a war enabler. Here's how. What is common to the ‘pro-abortionists’ are two assumptions: 1) a fetus inside a mother’s womb is solely her property to do with as she pleases, whenever and however she may so desire. 2) Definition of the word ‘human’ is subject to tests for viability which society can affix, adjust, modify or repeal by consensus and enacted by law. Both of these assumptions are without merit as they both lead to incoherence, inconsistency and logical contradictions in addition to being contrary to both natural law and biological fact. Here are the details of this indictment.

1. In point of biological fact, the fetus growing in the womb of any human female is not her sole property. As any school child from the former planet Pluto can tell you, a fetus is the product of a female egg fertilized by a male sperm. This biological fact is never mentioned in the abortion debate, but provides an interesting aspect to property rights. Since the fetus is part female egg and male sperm, then the only logical and biological way a mother could reasonably claim sole property ownership, with all incumbent rights of determination to dispose, would be to return the part of the property that does not belong to her, i.e. the male sperm. Unless the mother was raped or the fetus will kill the mother, these being the only reasonably acceptable marginal cases, the fetus is shared property. Consequently, as a matter of property law, the sperm donor to the fetus can simply make a reasonable demand. “Give me back my sperm.” Once that is done, then the mother can, as a matter of law, truly claim the fetus, or what is left of the fetus is her sole property to be disposed at her whim. The biological fact that no such return of sperm is feasible underscores the falsity of the pro-abortionist contention that the fetus is the sole property of the mother for her unbridled disposition.

2. A recent spate of videos purporting to show actual medical doctors and technicians employed by Planned Parenthood harvesting human fetal parts have flooded the internet. Some of these videos contain Planned Parenthood executives negotiating prices for these harvested human fetal remains. Still more purport to show other Planned Parenthood employees discussing procedures to kill human fetuses that survive abortion attempts. These videos were not taken with the knowledge or permission of Planned Parenthood or any employees seen in the videos. Unless we were actually present when these videos were made we cannot know the full context of what these videos purport. This may indeed be just another ‘vast-right-wing-conspiracy’ to destroy Planned Parenthood.

Nevertheless, regardless of the veracity of these videos and claims made by opposing sides, the controversy itself would be impossible without the second assumption of the pro-abortionists being sustained by culture and law. That assumption has two parts:

a. Government can affix viability tests for who is human and who is not.

b. Government can not only affix, but can also, modify, alter and/or repeal these tests to suit popular demand or prevailing political opinion.

What are these ‘viability’ tests for humanhood? Who defines the tests? Can even fully grown adults pass them? In Spartan society of ancient Greece male infants were the virtual property of the state from birth when state inspectors would examine them for any signs of weakness or defects. All babies judged unlikely to be able to serve as healthy soldiers or fit mothers were left to die on nearby Mt. Taygetus.

The viability tests for human fetal person hood are patently absurd. Your grandmother couldn’t pass them if she can’t survive on her own. They might as well add ‘able to skateboard’ to the every expanding list of fetal ‘viability’ tests. The imbecility of these tests reveals the underlying propellant for abortion in the first place; “I want to kill the baby inside me so I can live the way I want to”. This is the same predicate for war. "I want to kill you so I can live the way I want to." If that’s the way you think, then a case can almost be made you are doing the baby a favor sparing it from you’re dysfunctional motherhood. Almost. The baby’s life is not yours to kill.

The ‘viability’ test was invented out of thin air by the SCOTUS Roe v. Wade decision as reported on Salon.com in May of 1997:

"Viability" has become the focus of the abortion debate. Last week, the Senate rejected Majority Leader Tom Daschle's bill banning the abortion of "viable fetuses." But William Bennett and William Safire hailed Daschle's bill as the great compromise that might settle a quarter century of arguments about abortion. Forty-one states already restrict the abortion of viable fetuses. What is a viable fetus? How is the concept of viability relevant to the moral and legal issues of abortion?

Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 case legalizing abortion, made fetal viability an important legal concept. The Supreme Court ruled that states cannot put the interests of a fetus ahead of the interests of the pregnant woman until the fetus is "viable." The court defined viable to mean capable of prolonged life outside the mother's womb. It said this included fetuses that doctors expected to be sustained by respirators. The court accepted the conventional medical wisdom that a fetus becomes viable at the start of the last third of a pregnancy, the third trimester, sometime between the 24^th and 28^th week (a pregnancy usually lasts 38 weeks). Because the point of viability varies, the court ruled, it could only be determined case by case and by the woman's own doctor. Even if the fetus is viable, the court said, states could not outlaw an abortion if the woman's life or health was at stake.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued in a 1983 decision that Roe was on a "collision course with itself." She said that improvements in technology would continually push the point of fetal viability closer to the beginning of the pregnancy, allowing states greater opportunity to regulate the right to an abortion. And this seems to be the case--up to a point. Doctors now believe a fetus can become viable during the 23^rd week--a week earlier than was thought 24 years ago. Most hospitals will only perform abortions through the 22^nd week of pregnancy. (source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/1997/05/fetal_viability.html )

If the morality of abortion rests on arbitrary and capricious standards, then abortion is linked to war in the following way. If the definition of human life is subject to whim, bias, caprice, convenience, and selfishness, at the hands of fickle court justices, then human life is negotiable as a commodity or any piece of property. If it’s morally acceptable to kill a baby in the womb for arbitrary and capricious reasons, then no human life is sacred. If no human life is sacred, then war is morally permissible for any arbitrary or capricious reason. Abortion is war on un-born babies. Abortion enables all other forms of war.

It’s somewhat bemusing to hear otherwise rational people slobber over themselves trading morality quotes from Saint Mother Teresa until they come to her views on the moral connection between war and abortion. Here are just a few.

So, if a child in the womb is merely negotiable property, then hey, just give me back my sperm.

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