Dying To Kill

One of the favourite lies of pro-abortionists is that before abortion was widely legalized, women were dying in droves during illegal abortions. The pro-aborts love to trot this argument out whenever any abortion restriction, no matter how minor, is suggested. Not terribly long ago, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, a prominent Democrat, claimed that a hypothetical reversal of Roe v. Wade would mean that "a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die."

These numbers get cited frequently, and were in fact instrumental in getting Roe v. Wade passed in the first place. Pro-abortion advocates testified that abortion had to legalized, with absolutely no limits of any kind, to save thousands of lives every year.

The logical problem there is obvious: someone dies every time an abortion is (successfully) performed. In some even more tragic cases, two people do. The one who dies every time doesn't seem to count, though. Maybe it's because those victims don't vote, pay taxes, recycle, or buy Indigo Girls albums. For purposes of this discussion we'll (mostly) ignore those deaths, much as it pains me to do so.

There are a couple of other problems with the whole "illegal abortions kill huge numbers of women" argument, though.

First and foremost is that the numbers are trumped up. Made of whole cloth. Pulled from a bodily orifice. In a word, lies.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the architects of current U.S. abortion policy (i.e., "kill 'em all and let God, if there is one, sort 'em out") has admitted as much. So has everyone else who's got even the slightest shred of integrity.

(Dr. Nathanson has since repented of his earlier position and is now a pro-life activist. Like many who have turned from evil to good, he's found that it's much harder to put a lie to rest than to put it into play in the first place.)

Second - and I'll warn you now, this will sound harsh - is that women who die during illegal abortions (or legal ones, for that matter) die in part due to their own actions.

I deliberately and explicitly stop short of saying that it's their own fault. I take absolutely no pleasure in any of these deaths. Each one is a tragedy (Lifenews.com just reported on one such awful case, which is what prompted this entry).

However, I believe in personal responsibility. People have to take some degree of responsibility for their situation if they develop cancer after smoking, get in a car accident while driving drunk, or get punched out for mouthing off in a bar. Sometimes people wind up suffering, even dying, at least in part because of their poor choices.

Whenever I hear of a woman dying during an abortion – especially an illegal abortion – my main reaction is pity for both victims (the child who didn't make it to birth, and the mother.)

Mainly, though, I mourn that some poor woman was so desperate to kill her child, so selfish, so unfeeling, so hateful (which I think is an appropriate term for this level of coldness), that she was willing to lay her own life on the line as long as the goal of killing her child was achieved.

I feel sorry for anyone who has given themselves over so completely to evil.

Of course, the recurring theme of the Gospel, and (I hope) of this blog, is that there is hope even for those people.

Another recurring theme is that we're all one of those people sometimes. The difficult part is recognizing when.


Enough rambling. Here's another picture of a chain-link fence in closeup.