The success of the contemporary pro-abortion-rights movement depends on at three two things: (1) retaining their reign within the most visible, powerful, and effective means of public communication (education, media, and the courts); (2) downplaying the ghastly nature of what they are really advocating; and (3) denying the logical outcome of their view that those with power are able to eliminate those who are weaker.
Princeton University’s Robert P. George recently addressed these last two points in a Facebook post:
Have you ever noticed that when an abortion is being performed and the baby emerges alive, we call it an “attempted” abortion, or a “botched” abortion, or a “failed” abortion.
That tells us something.
Abortion is not properly or adequately described or defined as “terminating a pregnancy,” as it is so often described or defined in pro-abortion apologetics (and by the majority in Roe v. Wade). After all, the delivery of the child, alive or dead, terminates the pregnancy. So terminating the pregnancy cannot be the proper description of the abortionist’s act. And that’s because “terminating the pregnancy” is not the abortionist’s precise objective.
To identify and state his precise objective (aim, purpose, goal) you need to bring someone else into the discussion, namely, the child in the womb (fetus, unborn baby, call her what you will).
An abortion is successful—and not merely attempted—when and only when the child is killed—made dead. If she emerges alive, the abortionist has failed, we have a botched abortion.
So to claim that there is a right to abortion is not merely to say that a woman has the right to “terminate the pregnancy” (or even “control her own body”); it is to claim that she is entitled to order the killing of the baby—to order the performance of an act on the child’s body (dismembering her, burning her with saline) to end her life, to make her dead.
Of course, clearheaded and candid abortion advocates acknowledge this. They admit that the “right” they believe in is no mere right to be free of an unwanted pregnancy. It is the right not to be a mother, not to have a living child out there in the world—the right, to state the matter bluntly, to a dead fetus.
But if that’s true, then of course it is impossible to say why there is anything wrong with killing the child post-partum.
And so the logic takes them to where the Democratic Party finds itself today.
It was in the cards all along.
