The Coercive Freedom of Choice

First Things ^ | May 3, 2013 | Wesley J. Smith

[rhema]

We are becoming a society in which “choice” and self-defined identities trump once-common values and traditional beliefs. But contrary to the rhetoric of its defenders, this shift is not a simple advance for freedom. The privileging of “choice” above all else in fact requires re-engineering the human person and society as a whole, and this will inevitably involve a great deal of coercion.

This shift, if it didn’t begin with Roe v. Wade, could be said to have been dramatically accelerated by it. Despite continuing opposition by over 50 percent of the American people, abortion is now universally available, in some places through the ninth month. Two states have legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill—once strictly prohibited by the Hippocratic Oath. Now, some doctors actively collaborate in lethally overdosing their patients.

Advocacy for legalizing “after birth” abortion—e.g., infanticide—as a natural extension of the abortion right is growing more prominent, and not just among acolytes of Princeton’s Peter Singer. A Florida Planned Parenthood representative, opposing a bill that would require medical treatment for an infant who survives abortion, said the choice to care for the child should be a private one made between a mother and her doctor. The President of the United States expressed similar views while an Illinois state senator. The blind eye demonstrated by the media on the Kermit Gosnell murder trial—in which he is charged with snipping the spines of newborn babies and keeping fetal body parts in jars—has convinced some observers that “post-birth abortion” is no big deal among many on the “choice” left.

More futuristically, transhumanists urge society to devote its intellectual and financial resources to expensive research aimed at enabling individuals to radically redesign themselves in their own image. The ultimate goal of transhumanism is designing a “post-human” species in which everyone

[Daveinyork]

It’s not choice that is destructive. It’s choice with no responsibility for the outcome that is destructive.

[Pollster1]

I’m pro-choice on several issues. Many good people own and will continue to own AR-15s, high-capacity magazines, and multiple handguns, and I approve of their right to make that choice. Are leftists only pro-choice when a baby dies?

[cradle of freedom]

Here in Massachusetts we are treated to the spectacle of seeing the candidates trying to out *pro-choice* each other. The one who is most *pro-choice* wins. It is disgusting and difficult to understand but I think I am begining to see how this came to be. While listening to Ed Markey crow about how *pro-choice* he is, I began to see that Markey, Kennedy and all the Massachusetts Dems have loudly and proudly proclaimed that they are *pro-choice* for over thiry years, this creates a mind set in people that the *pro-choice* view must be the correct view, this is the view that all right thinking people must have.

Over thirty years, the Dems have miseducated the people by championing abortion—excuse me *pro-choice*—as being the only correct view. This has shaped the peoples’ thinking on abortion so that anyone who is pro-life is made to feel on the defensive. How to get the *pro-choice* Dems on the defensive? When they proclaim that they are so proudly *pro-choice*, the pro-life candidate should simply say...50 million abortions since 1973. We have to let people know what the actual numbers are and then let them decide if they want to be *pr-choice* or not.