by Rod D. Martin
January 22, 2000

It’s been a generation since Americans started killing their young.

True, we had abortions before Roe v. Wade. But we didn’t have the explosion, to one and a half million a year, all U.S.-approved. We didn’t have the casual disregard of life we have today, either: feminists used to call abortion “child murder”; and middle-aged doctors promoting abortion and euthanasia today studied textbooks which demanded swift punishment for anyone who performed such beastly acts.

We also didn’t have the arrogant government dictum that “it’s only a life if we say it is,” frighteningly reminiscent of Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. If one group of humans may be killed because they’re “inconvenient”, what’s to stop your group from being next? This is an increasingly urgent question for America’s elderly.

Post-Roe America isn’t pretty. Forty million dead children, not counting the recent spate of teenagers giving birth in motels and at proms and then killing their offspring, applying the not-so-demented legal theory of “other than cost, what’s the difference?” The promotion of cloning as a means to harvest organs, or at least tissue or specific cells, from the fully-human victim. A Constitutional theory that debases life, guts the Declaration of Independence (“unalienable rights” and all that) and destroys federalism.

Millions of mothers who have to deal with the guilt, if not the shame.

Some respond that this is all nonsense, because the fetus (ironically, Latin for “baby”) isn’t even human. Presumably these people think that the child in the womb at least has the potential to be born a fish or a chimp; their position is ludicrous on its face.

Others claim that life only begins at birth. This, of course, is news to the abortionist: no one needs to abort a baby that’s already dead.

Some modern feminists claim, in opposition to their own pro-life heritage, that the baby is merely a parasite: it is just a lump of tissue, part of the mother’s body much like a cancer, and she may do with it whatever she pleases. They don’t like to be reminded that this “lump” has it’s own DNA, half of which came from elsewhere, and it often has it’s own blood type even in the womb. And in that womb today, medical technology will show you that “lump” sucking its thumb.

The Supreme Court invented the issue of “viability” out of thin air, and it has provided a lot of cover for the pro-abort crowd; but it’s a red herring. Certainly a week old fetus would not live long outside the nurture of its mother’s womb (at least until medical science advances just a tad more, as it always does), but see how long the same baby two years after birth will live if its mother abandons it in the woods. For that matter, see how long I would live if you abandoned me in the woods (I was a terrible Boy Scout).

“Viability” is just a cover: we are all dependent on others to some degree. The fact that a tiny baby is more dependent is a reason to protect and cherish it, not to kill it.

In short, science has laid to rest all the abortionists’ claims: it is human babies they kill. And not only that, but it is a very ugly, slippery slope down which the left treads: will the logic which gave us Roe next accept a woman’s right to kill her two-year old? There’s nothing far-fetched about it: the two-year old is not viable if left totally on her own, may well be a reminder of an unpleasant relationship, and is much more likely to cause economic hardship after birth than before. This is certainly the logic behind the move for euthanasia.

And what may the woman abort next? Her teenager (a parasite if there ever were one)? Her husband? (“Well, he lost his job, so he just wasn’t viable anymore. . . .”) What liberal is prepared to say that it should be “a woman’s right to choose” to murder whoever is financially inconvenient to her (her banker?), whoever causes her embarrassment at an inopportune time (her ex-boyfriend?), whoever gets in her way? No one is prepared to say this. But the logic is exactly the same, and makes just as much sense.

The fact is that the American left has aligned itself with the butchers of history in saying “we will kill whomever we please.” Inconvenient children are first in line because they can’t fight back. But as the darkness falls, don’t expect them to be the only ones in line. It’s never worked that way, and it never will.