Today is the 41st anniversary of the worst Supreme Court decision in history. Many will brave the bitter cold and march to wake a soporific nation from its self-satisfied moral slumber.
As for my reason for marching – suffice it to say that if not for the bravery of my parents, I would have been just another statistic, along with more than fifty million other aborted children in America alone since 1973.
Each year on January 22, I write on abortion’s connection with a related societal trend. This year, I have news that is simultaneously heartening and tragic. First the good news: the claim that a fetus is merely a “clump of cells” is rapidly going the way of the dodo bird. But the far worse notion that a fetus is a parasite (unless, of course, the mother wants to keep the child, in which case he or she magically becomes a little bundle of joy) is spreading like cancer across the deluded modern world.
This sad excuse for argument has arisen more frequently in recent years. One version recently appeared in the article “No Libertarian Case for Abortion?” which asserts: “If a woman has a property right in her body, she might allow a fetus to take up residence in it or not. If she chooses not to, it’s fundamentally the same as not allowing someone to take up residence in her home. Abortion, then, is not murder but really eviction. If your tenant is not viable outside of your home does that mean you have to live with him forever? Clearly that would be ridiculous. So why is it so difficult to apply the same principles to a fetus that we would to an adult?” Of course, this assertion rests on the assumption that the fetus is not a child. I doubt even libertarians would support the right of a single mother to “evict” her unwanted five year old child from her home, on the grounds that she did not want it. (Of course, this right may depend on the whim of the individual libertarian, but I digress.)
The vicious assertion of the parasitic nature of the unborn is a relatively new development. Before the advent of advanced ultrasound technology, pro-abortion supporters could simply claim that unborn children were just clumps of cells and let ignorance do the rest. But since science proved that self-proclaimed “defenders of science” were scientifically lacking, new and dumber justifications had to be invented to prop up the sagging cause of abortion. Hence the notion that the unborn child (or fetus) is parasitic; an “unwanted” (read: unexpected) child becomes a dehumanized burden to be borne or disposed of at will.
On a purely evolutionary level, the equation of fetuses with parasites is absurd, since the point of sex, at least from a biological point of view, is reproduction. Human attraction drives man and woman to reproduce; sex is designed (or evolved, if you prefer) for parents to pass their one’s genetic lines to offspring, so that the human race can a) survive and b) adapt. And the more children one has, the more chances one has to influence the bloodline of future generations. Biologically speaking, abortion and contraception are forms of Darwinian suicide.
Parasites, by definition, harm their hosts, taking resources from their carriers without giving anything in return. But hosts do not produce their own parasites! (Or perhaps we should just kill all newborns or ungrateful teenagers as parasites.) Besides, research has shown that cells from the unborn child can actually help heal the mother from illnesses. It would be a rather spectacular biological development for God to create or the universe to evolve a species that would create its own (healing) parasites!
The eternal, seemingly insoluble problem of abortion remains very simple: if what is in the womb is indeed a human, then abortion is murder and should be outlawed. If what remains in the womb is not human, then abortion is not murder and should be permissible. If unknown: well, all bets are off, but prudent men and women should err on the side of life.
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Only in a morally corrupt universe, where the only purpose of sex is passing pleasure, could the notion that abortion equals pest control take root. And as the slightly less sane arguments for abortion wither due to their own lack of logic, the darker excuses are being brought forth: the ones that reveal the flagrant contempt for humanity of the “pro-choice” movement.
LifeNews Note: Paul Wilson, a blogger living in the DC area, is the founder and editor of Gray Matters. You can follow him on Twitter at @PaulWilson34.
