BY PETER FLEMING
June 2022
At the time of writing, it has only been twenty-four hours since the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Roe v Wade determination of 1973, and two predictable consequences have come to pass.
Firstly, the mainstream media have chosen, as expected, to report on outrage by the pro-abortionists but not report on the joy that pro-life activists have in the potential of the decision to save the lives of millions of unborn babies.
It is as if there is only one possible reaction to the decision. As far as the media is concerned, the alternative viewpoint is, and must be, obliterated from public view.
Why? That will be discussed in a moment.
The shock of the pro-abortionists comes from the view that the right of women – no, sorry, ‘people’ (the ABC reported that the right of ‘people’) – to have an abortion has been taken away. The appeal is to the Western (and Christian) notion of human rights – not that some of the pro-abortionists would necessarily realise such.
In the immediate future, in some states, this is true under law. States will need to legislate. Voters will need to vote for administrations which will deliver laws permitting abortions. The will of the people will now have to be relied upon – such a pity in a democracy!
Whether such a ‘right’ exists, of course, in natural law is another matter. It is not clear that a ‘right’ exists to take another human’s life. Such a ‘right’ sounds very strange to the ear, and the mind and heart recoils when put that way.
Extreme circumstances are rushed to the fore: this person interviewed was raped, that person interviewed had a child deemed disabled.
These two examples from the media coverage are disturbing for different reasons. The first, of the person who was raped, is disturbing at that level from the start. The worst possible situation would be to have to bring to term a child conceived from an act of violation. It is a horrible situation. Our hearts reach out immediately. It could well be argued that the mental anguish risks the mother’s life; there is an argument for a terrible choice to be made concerning the baby’s life because another life, and one upon which the baby depends in the womb, could be seriously at risk.
But, according to statistics published at abort73.com (a pro-life website) but taken from surveys by the Guttmacher Institute (a pro-abortion website), rape as a reason for abortion accounts for 0.5% of all stated reasons. A terrible number to be sure, but a minute one compared to other reasons for abortion.
According to the same source, the overwhelming reasons (amounting to approximately 70%) are: ‘not ready for a child’ (20%), ‘can’t afford a baby’ (23%), ‘finished having children’ (19%) and ‘don’t want to be a single mother’ (8%). These, collectively, could be described broadly as lifestyle reasons, not matters of the mother’s life or death. Some of the reasons mentioned may point towards mental or economic stress, but hardship is no reason to take a life. A thief needing money is not excused for killing the victim of his or her robbery.
No, overwhelmingly the pro-abortionists protesting the court’s decision are claiming a right to have a life of convenience, by killing a life that is inconvenient.
And the results are devastating: 930,160 abortions in America in 2020 alone; similar numbers, between 800,000 and 900,000 each year in preceding years.
This is a picture not of a desperate clutching at life-saving human rights, but rather of the assault of the powerful – the born – upon the powerless – the unborn. Nothing more, nothing less.
The second disturbing response of the pro-abortionists reinforces this picture, namely the reflex action, after the court’s decision, of naming types of children who do not have the right to be born! For in a CNN interview on the day of the decision, an American woman in favour of abortion complained that several of her family members had been born autistic or with Down’s syndrome, and she wept that now more could be born that way.
It puts me in mind of the day the hospital told my wife and me, after an ultrasound, of the possibility our son might be born with Down’s syndrome, and left us to contemplate whether we wanted a test done to confirm a diagnosis in order to determine grounds for an abortion. We were naturally disgusted, but then this is the modern attitude and the requirement of our institutions supposedly dedicated to life, namely, to provide opportunities to dispense death. (Our son was born without the condition, but we never for a moment would have contemplated killing a child because of it!)
This is an even darker aspect of the pro-abortionist reaction, because it undermines the very foundations of human rights themselves – it posits that there are acceptable and unacceptable humans, two or more tiers of humanity, those with the right to exist and those who do not. Based on medical conditions!
As usual, in their unimaginative, narrow, selfish fury, the self-satisfied powerful seek to obliterate the very notion of human rights that their protests are allegedly based upon. Blindly and recklessly, they stumble towards a return to the irrational paganism that said that might is right, and damn anybody who gets in their way.
The moment we accept that human rights depend upon a principle of mere convenience is the moment our civilisation loses every ethical foundation, and the great gains of the past two thousand years will be in danger of being swept away completely.