A Terrible Coarsening
The now-ubiquitous terms “reproductive health” and “reproductive freedom” have contributed mightily to a slaughter of the innocents in these United States. The death toll from that massacre is now greater than the estimated 60 million civilian lives erased by area bombing, genocide, starvation, and disease during World War II. If the victor of D-Day, Dwight D. Eisenhower, could write of that bloodletting that “the loss of lives that could have been creatively lived scars the mind of the modern world,” what would Ike say about 65 million would-be Americans deliberately killed before they were born?
“Reproductive health” and “reproductive freedom” (a usage coined by the recently deceased Gloria Steinem) were, are, and always will be euphemisms deployed to hide the truth of what happens in an abortion. Such prevarication has led to a terrible coarsening of American culture and American public life, as demonstrated recently by the Reproductive Health Access Project in a recent “Fact Sheet” [on] How to Use Abortion Pills for 14-20 weeks”. As my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Mary Rice Hasson noted when drawing my attention to this horror, the “fact sheet” is “diabolically cold and heartless.” But that was perhaps an understatement. Here is what the “fact sheet” has to say while advising its readers to “keep using misoprostol every 3 hours until you pass both the fetus and the placenta”:
WHAT WILL I SEE? You will pass blood, clots, a fetus, and a placenta. It is okay not to look. The fetus will be several inches long, and you may see a head, arms, and legs … You may be able to feel the umbilical cord attached to the placenta. If so, you should not pull on the umbilical cord. WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THE CONTENTS THAT PASS? This depends on where you live and what you prefer. If everything is small enough to flush down the toilet, you may do that. If you are around 15-16 weeks or later, the pregnancy may be too big. To lower legal risk, you can wrap it in many layers of plastic and place it in the garbage with other household waste.
I apologize for the tawdriness — indeed, the stomach-churning inhumanity — of this. It is important, however, for thoughtful citizens to recognize what the anti-culture of euphemism has done to our country, to the point where it is deemed publicly acceptable to describe a twenty-week-old pre-born child as “household waste” to be thrown into a garbage can after a Do It Yourself abortion.
Which brings us to the Commonwealth of Virginia, where a proposed constitutional amendment is on the ballot in November.
Its promoters describe it as an effort to safeguard a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” As another EPPC colleague, Ed Whelan, wrote, however, “Amendment 1 would make abortion freely available throughout the third trimester of pregnancy, all the way up to birth; abolish the rights of parents to be consulted on, and to consent to, abortions sought by their young daughters; and enable anyone to perform an abortion and to escape legal responsibility for botching an abortion.”
Then, after noting the part of the amendment that reads, "The Commonwealth shall not penalize, prosecute, or otherwise take adverse action against any individual for aiding or assisting another individual in exercising such other individual's right to reproductive freedom with such other individual's voluntary consent," Mr. Whelan, one of the country’s most eminent constitutional commentators, drew out the implications of this attempt to constitutionally embed a spurious “right:”
Say that a girl's boyfriend illegally obtains abortion pills and encourages the girl to take them without visiting a doctor. The girl voluntarily agrees to do so. It turns out she has an ectopic pregnancy or is beyond the weeks of gestation when the pills are safe for her to take. She dies as a result. No matter how egregious the boyfriend's conduct, Virginia could not take any adverse action against him.
The late, great historian Christopher Dawson taught that “a society is only as great as its spiritual aspirations.” Perhaps I might extend Dawson’s insight to propose that a society is only as great as its moral self-understanding. And if a society accepts as a self-evident truth that freedom is sheer willfulness, to the point where the deliberate aborting of an unborn child at any stage of pregnancy is constitutionally protected, then that society has lost its moral bearings and is wandering in a wilderness of lethal confusion.
Virginian voters in November should take note: their Commonwealth was, after all, the home of the man who inscribed the unalienable right to life into America’s birth certificate, 250 years ago.
