Hillary Clinton recently reprimanded the Canadian government for their lack of attentiveness to the fact that “maternal health requires reproductive choice.” Ironically, particularly in light of the recently passed health-care law, she insists that “government should [not] be involved in these decisions” – demonstrating once again that abortion is not simply a medical procedure for those who think like Hillary, but an act that undergirds a whole ideology of untrammeled self-determination without ends or limits.
Kate Michelman’s recent essay, when placed alongside Hillary’s speech, demonstrates some of the fundamental incoherence of the movement: we want government out of abortion, except to pay for it.
Related posts:
- Abortion and American Federalism Devon, PA.… Joe Carter, over at the First Things web...
- Same-Sex Marriage, Abortion, and the Limits of Localism Kearneysville, WV.… Last week I published a piece suggesting ten...
- Health Subsidiarity, or Solidarity, or Socialism (Take Your Pick) [Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS… The debate over...
- Can Health Care Be Local? [Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS… Over the past...
- Evidence Gone Missing Who is following in Susan B. Anthony's footsteps: Connie Schultz...
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Several months ago I caught a completely new horror in the attitudes toward this issue. It was an interview on “Fresh Air” (NPR, Terry Gross hosting) with a woman talking about her abortion. That in itself is a horror, but nothing new or unusual. But she was also talking about her generation’s superiority to her mother’s generation. After all, their had to convince themselves that the child was just a mass of “tissue” in order to justify killing it. But this new generation (the author said) was fully aware that the baby was fully human. Nevertheless, the felt entitled to kill it. Horrible, to be sure, but not nearly the worst of what she would say. Her last pregnancy (the subject of her book) occasioned a test which indicated that the child had a slight chance of a certain disease which would affect its mental capabilities. The author then went into a long and self-indulgent tirade about how she and her husband discussed the issue, with the usual quota of liberal soul-searching, the major issue for their “souls” in this case (as in every case) being how it would impact their “life-style.” Finally, her husband declared that their marriage might not survive a mentally impaired child (so much for professions of love) and so they “reluctantly” got an abortion.
It is horrible to contemplate the attitude that makes the being of a person dependent upon the convenience of somebody else. But we are use to that; that is not the horror I speak of. Here it is: in the course of the interview, the author suddenly remembered that this was not her first abortion. She had one as a freshman in college. But, she said, that since that one was at six weeks gestation, she had no emotional attachment to the child, so it really wasn’t important.
I do not think the woman was smart enough to know what she had said. Certainly, she was so self-absorbed that any other person could only be a utility for some end. But her “reasonable” discussion of her mental states, the only issue that counted, was beyond bizarre. Her assertion of superiority to her own mother, because the one had to lie to herself to commit a homicide, while the “new feminist” was comfortable with homicide as a convenience. Further, the whole thing was given a surrealistic air by the fact that he interviewer has such a lilting and pleasant voice. It was as if the holocaust was set to pleasant music, as if the slaughterhouse were landscaped with tulips and painted in pastels. In 40 years of listening to debate on this issue, this was the most horrible things I have heard. Hillary on her best day would never be able to match this. And thank God for that.
Whoops! I kind of got off track here for a combox discussion and went into a rant. But I guess this one has been bothering me ever since I heard it.
John, an horrific story indeed. And, to think that our tax dollars are helping fund PBS.
As we “progress,” it seems we become less and less human. May God have mercy on us all.
John you should just be thankful you don’t live in Britain or Australia like I have done. To be pro-life here is to be in an extreme minority and be looked at as very strange, if not evil.
Responding to John M.’s comment:
That’s got to be the most chilling–and honest–explanation given by a woman who chose to abort her baby. I’ve read some of the stories on the Planned Parenthood website detailing the reasons why this or that woman chose to have an abortion, and most of them give the same, “This required lots of soul-searching…” and “I really believed this was the best thing for our family (whether or not the unborn baby was included in that family)…” This is the first story I’ve read of a mother who honestly said she killed her baby (whose humanness she never disputed–though she never actually called him a person, did she?) because his continued existence would be an inconvenience to her and to her husband–who as much as threatened to leave her if she carried the baby to term and he happened to have some form of mental retardation. Any mother worthy of the name would have kept the baby and let the putz of a husband leave if he wasn’t man enough to handle it. But this woman obviously doesn’t have a clue what it really means to be a mother.
It’s both laughable and scary that this woman actually considers herself–by virtue of her callous selfishness–to be superior to her mother and other mothers of the preceding generation, simply because “those” women (“less-evolved feminists,” I guess) couldn’t bring themselves to have an abortion until they could convince themselves that the child in their wombs was just a “blob of tissue.” The new feminist has no problem with killing her young, if she considers them inconvenient–someone who might get in the way of what she wants for herself (and what her husband wants). I wonder how many women think along the same lines and how many of them are as open about it as this woman?
How did we get to the point where people can argue with a straight face that “women’s health” depends on their protected right to kill their own children–and the government funding to help her to do it?
And it’s actually worse in Australia and Britain?