Conservative commentator and pro-life advocate Ben Shapiro said, in a recent podcast episode, that he’s stumped about why Democrats voted overwhelmingly against passage of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
“I’ve literally been trying all night and this morning…I’ve been trying to find why exactly Democrats object to this bill,” he said. “What in the world does women’s health have to do with a baby that’s born alive?” he asked with regard to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s tweet on the bill. “That’s fully crazy.”
Shapiro’s focus is on how propaganda from abortion advocates doesn’t match up with reality. While this is important to point out, he seems to be taking them at their word, as if what they say is what they truly believe. But this arc of thought will fly right over the truth, because abortion propaganda was always meant to obscure the reality of abortion, not justify it.
All Abortions Are Elective
To get to the real rationale behind the abortion entitlement, one must first consider the fact that there is legitimately no medical reason, ever, to have an abortion. There are reasons to separate the baby from the mother through early delivery, and those early deliveries sometimes result in the baby’s death, but “women’s health” is never a legitimate medical reason to deliberately kill a preborn baby.
This means all abortions are elective. All of them. As I wrote recently at The Federalist:
[The abortion entitlement] was never about a woman’s right to ‘choose what to do with her own body,’ or even about her ability to use lethal force against an ‘intruder’ in her body. As Zupan noted, ‘If this was about bodily autonomy there’d be some concern about viable babies.’ Yet there is zero distinction under Vermont law between a 6-week post-conception baby and a 40-week post-conception baby.
…The resistance of Democrats to the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, as well as Virginia Gov. Northam’s now-infamous comments about would-be aborted babies born alive, is further evidence that ‘the party of science’ wants to guarantee women the right to kill their own children simply because they are unwanted, not that they want to guarantee their access to ‘health care.’
Abortion is a pregnant woman employing lethal means to terminate her responsibilities as a mother. It is not an effort to protect “women’s autonomy” or “women’s health.” This is the entitlement leftists are cowing the rest of their party into supporting unconditionally.
Again, if a mother is dangerously ill because of her pregnancy, the baby can be delivered. If a mother can’t bear the responsibility of parenting, she can carry her baby to term then allow her to be adopted. Gestating a baby is not a violation of autonomy, but a natural possible outcome of sex, an act between autonomous and consenting individuals.
The only time one can say pregnancy violates autonomy is if a woman becomes pregnant by rape––but even then, the child is innocent in the matter. As a human being, he is endowed by his Creator with a right to not be murdered, and that natural right supersedes the loss of autonomy for nine months. Moreover, abortions in cases of rape are estimated to constitute about 0.54 percent of all abortions and can’t be used to justify the other 99.46 percent of abortions that leftists staunchly support.
Given that the standard pro-abortion propaganda bears maybe a 0.5 percent resemblance to reality, why did Democrats vote overwhelmingly against a bill that would require infants born alive after abortion to be treated as any other infant born at that gestational age? Because abortion is the right to destroy one’s own child, and if a woman chose to kill her baby, to the left it would seem a violation of her so-called right to choose for doctors to try to save that baby.
Further evidence that this is the real reason can be found in the left’s growing fear of artificial womb technology, which may at some point in the future push back significantly viability outside the natural womb. “My body, my choice,” or the right to not be a “gestational parent,” would no longer automatically conflated with the right to not be “a legal or genetic parent.”
The facade is crumbling, and abortion advocates worry the public might realize that abortion and infanticide are essentially the same. After all, the “magic birth canal” was never a serious belief among true believers in the abortion entitlement. As one newspaper editor said years ago when rebuking a reporter for stating that late-term abortionists “crush skulls and bones,” “As far as I’m concerned, until that thing is born, it is really no different from a kidney; it is part of the woman’s body.”
To speak accurately and precisely about what happens in late-term abortions, he said, “is really to distort the issue.”
The Tacit Endorsement of Infanticide
Make no mistake: getting hung up on what is clearly dissemblance is exactly what spins non-leftists in circles when confronted with the tacit endorsement of infanticide. The left has, until recently, largely upheld this false distinction between a baby in the womb and a baby in the open air to make others more comfortable with the abortion agenda, to give some assurance beyond their word that legal abortion won’t lead to legal infanticide. If “the line” isn’t at birth, where does one draw it? Who can’t be killed?
We swallowed this nasty bit of philosophizing and now its purveyors, or the ideological offspring of its purveyors, are shamelessly going back on their word. If we cling to this distinction as if it were meant sincerely, we won’t be able to address our newly unveiled reality.
I say “unveiled,” because the idea that unwanted children can be murdered or left to die is thousands of years old. Citizens of ancient Rome would leave an unwanted child out to die by exposure, but crude forms of abortion were in practice, too. They stemmed from the same wicked belief that a parent has the right to kill his offspring, whether due to deformity, uncertain paternity, or even because the child might have been more of a drain on the household than a help.
The Twelve Tables of Roman Law contained the command that, “A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed.” Aristotle wrote that, “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared,” and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, too, thought that it was reasonable to drown “weakly” children.
Leftists like Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, the Vermont state representatives who just passed the nation’s most permissive abortion law, or Sen. Patty Murray and the other Democrats who voted against protecting aborted infants born alive, are simply carrying on a millennia-long tradition of depriving children of their rights as human beings and image bearers of God.
Here’s your answer, Shapiro: In the womb or out, the far left believes it’s the mother’s decision whether to allow her own child, her helpless and dependent flesh-and-blood offspring, to live. Expect to see more obstruction of protections for live infants, because Democrats don’t believe in their own propaganda. They believe something far, far more terrible.