June 27, 2023

There’s a lot of loud noise on both sides of the aisle on the abortion question. Let’s start with the Left.

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Put bluntly, the Left is demanding abortion on demand at any point in gestation. In Virginia, the former governor, a pediatrician(!), famously said that if a child was born alive, it was just fine for the mother to set it aside on a counter and have a prolonged discussion with her doctor about whether to let it die. His intellectual compatriots stated that “the whole world would end if children lived.”

Let it die.

In other words, the Left is just fine with killing babies. Forget about doing it before they are visible to the outside world. It’s fine if the parents decide that this child just isn’t good enough to live while that one is.

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This is only one small step away from Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, in which he satirically stated that “a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” If we proceed reductio ad absurdum, it is not difficult to show that most children, and even young adults, are not viable and thus appropriate to be aborted for the stewpot.

Image: Pregnant woman by freekpik.

This fact is memorialized in the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that children under the age of 26 are eligible for inclusion in their parents’ health insurance plans. This is only necessary because they cannot take care of themselves. Right?

But no one actually believes that, do they?

Of course, this little exercise demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s original discussion of the “threshold of viability” is, at best, fraught. And that puts the Pro-Life crowd into a corner. Unless they declare that children, at any stage of development, are made as images of God, any logical argument they make becomes self-refuting.

This points out that the Pro-Life position is inherently religious. That then runs afoul of the First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion. By these lights, Pro-Life laws inherently establish a religion. What’s a mother to do?

Lest we despair that this is a new dilemma, consider what Clement of Alexandria, one of the early Church fathers, wrote in the late second century.