Doing Lines

Where is the line that separates abortion from infanticide?  A rather remarkable video has been making the rounds in which a Planned Parenthood representative argues for the legality of post-birth abortion at a Florida legislative hearing.  The question is whether abortionists should be required to provide medical care to unexpected abortion survivors.

And so, as the grisly reality of abortion in Philadelphia is slowly finding its way into the public consciousness (despite the best efforts of major news outlets), we must also consider the ongoing efforts to keep shifting that all-sanitizing line between abortion and infanticide a little bit further out.

Now, it is entirely understandable (which is not to say reasonable) that a woman who undergoes a botched abortion would want to finish the job.  She walks into an abortion clinic afraid or indignant or repulsed at the thought of raising a child, but also expecting the unpleasant and unwanted circumstance to finally be terminated.  And then, simply because a doctor screws up, all of the sudden, some cold and clinical figure is explaining to her that she is now a mother and that her child has somehow became sick or injured & requires treatment.

How could such a thing be?  It’s quite absurd that the subject of an abortion suddenly becomes off-limits simply by virtue of having moved a few feet.  It’s absurd that a procedure that prevents motherhood should suddenly and without warning actually make someone a mother.  Why should such absurdities be allowed to stand?  Who wouldn’t want a do-over in such circumstances?  Even our President doesn’t want her to be punished with a baby.  So why shouldn’t the mother and her physician be able to decide to make good on their original plan to murder her child prevent an unwanted motherhood?

And so Planned Parenthood and others try to nudge that line a little bit further out so that post-birth murders can be called “abortions” just like pre-birth murders already are.  If we can just make a few adjustments, they think, then these absurdities can be resolved and women will no longer have to suffer them.

But that line, wherever it may be placed, doesn’t distinguish between an innocent human being and something else.  It doesn’t distinguish between a child and a tumor.  Indeed, it’s so blurry and difficult to find as it flickers from one place to the next that it cannot help distinguish anything at all.  It’s sole purpose is as a salve to the consciences of the murderers, the mothers who hire them, and the lobbyists who earn their blood-money at hearings.  It doesn’t need to be visible to do that; it just needs to be located a little bit off to their left so that they can tell others they’re on the right side.  And if nobody else can see the line or tell where it is?   Well, that just makes it easier to exclaim how they are properly placed in relation to it.

But in the end, situations like these are not absurd because the line needs to be adjusted.  They are absurd because abortion doesn’t prevent women from becoming mothers–it’s merely one bloody way in which mothers deal with the children they already have.  The reality is that the line on which their peace of mind depends doesn’t actually exist.  Christ have mercy on us all.