My pro-choice friends kill me sometimes with their kindness and compassion. In return, I try to kill them with sarcasm. However, a recent comment made to me by a self-proclaimed liberal was so calloused it deserves a serious response. I will paraphrase the remark, which is one most pro-lifers have heard at some point in their lives:
“I would rather have hundreds of my tax dollars used to abort an unwanted child now than have hundreds of thousands used for public assistance later.”
In case you did not grasp the obvious, that comment is not an example of liberalism. It is an example of eugenics, plain and simple. Furthermore, it is unbecoming of an educated person to even consider such a justification for the taking of innocent life. If you are not completely appalled by that remark then you probably did not grasp its ramifications. Hence, it may be time to dissect it with a little thought experiment. So try to imagine the following:
Ronald Rump is running for president. Some see him as the reincarnation of Reagan. Others see him as a horse’s ass. Regardless, he has developed a reputation for making charged comments on the campaign trail. He says illegal immigrants are rapists. He also expresses a desire to ban Muslims from entering the country. Predictably, media leftists start foaming at the mouth and doing everything they can to stop him. Then he drops this bombshell in response to a question about what can be done to reduce the welfare rolls saying, “I think we should just kill everyone who is on welfare.”
First of all, don’t take the thought experiment literally. No presidential candidate of either major party would ever make such a suggestion. But it is a thought experiment. So take a moment to think about what would happen if Ronnie Rump really did make such a statement. Would anyone seriously expect his candidacy to survive? Could anything possibly be more offensive than proposing a reduction in the welfare rolls by the simple expedient of killing everyone who is on welfare?
Actually, there is at least one suggestion that is slightly more offensive. In fact, my “liberal” friend already proffered it. Put simply, killing someone who you merely suspect might one day wind up on welfare – and who hasn’t done anything wrong yet - is about as offensive as it gets. If you still are not appalled then rethink the ramifications with the help of another brief thought experiment. Imagine the following:
A man suspects his wife is about to leave him. He does not want her to stay because he is having an affair. But he knows that the divorce will be expensive. He will likely be paying alimony for years unless and until his future ex-wife remarries. So he hires a hit man to kill her. He succeeds and is later caught and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. He is also charged with murder in the first degree because the conspiracy was actually carried into effect.
Now stop and imagine that you have been called in to serve on the jury. Would you vote to convict if the evidence established guilt? Or would you acquit by nullifying the evidence on the basis of a broad moral claim that the killing was justified for reasons of economic expediency?
I should think that no decent person would vote to nullify the evidence under these circumstances. The man’s wife may have been unwanted but that’s not her fault. She may have posed a potential and undetermined financial burden on him but that’s not her fault either. What could possibly be more calloused than deliberately forking over money to have her exterminated simply to ease a potential financial burden?
Let me answer the question I just posed. As offensive as nullification of the guilty verdict of the hit-man-hiring husband might be, it pales by comparison to what my “liberal” friend would have us do as a matter of public policy. The husband in the thought experiment seeks to fund a one-time killing. My “liberal” friend seeks to justify the existence of a permanent fund used to repeat the same atrocity hundreds if not thousands of times over. There is no evidence that she does not want the funding of financially expedient abortions to continue in perpetuity. Without any sense of irony, she calls it liberalism and tries to justify it on the basis of avoiding perceived potential future financial hardship.
We are living in dark times in America. The pessimism is so great that some of my leftist colleagues have even suggested that another Third Reich could eventually occur here in America. On that point we agree. We should not dismiss the prospect that such a regime could be established here in America. But the party trying to ban abortions won’t ever establish it.
Indeed, if fascism ever comes to America it will be at the hands of self-appointed Utopians who are incapable of grasping their own arguments, unwilling to learn from history, yet utterly convinced they have a monopoly on compassion.
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