America’s Great Debate Turns Forty Years Old

Today marks the observance of one of the most remarkable of the many Supreme Court’s supreme examples of judicial overreach in its decision on Roe v Wade, i.e., the legalization of abortion in the U.S.A.

I am told by Europeans that such a demonstration couldn’t take place in Europe because there the question is “settled”. How sad. There wasn’t enough death in the two world wars; they’ve had to continue the killing by other means.

Well, that’s American “exceptionalism”’ for you. Despite being suppressed by our betters, we continue to argue the moral questions. They are anything but settled here.

As the years have gone on, the terms of what qualifies as a legal abortion have stretched to include viable births that land on the table and are killed anyway… or perhaps more passively left to die in the extreme exigencies of new life needing help to survive. Whatever. The Romans simply left them out in the wilds to let nature take its course.

“Late-term abortion” is just one more paving brick on the ever-widening road to perdition that the Left is determined to walk, dragging the rest of us with them. It’s extremely frustrating to our betters when we refuse to follow behind. Ask them and they, like the Europeans, will tell you the issue is “settled”.

Except that it’s not settled at all, and it never will be because of the methods used to impose this law on others. Parents whose young girls become pregnant often have no input into what should be done if their child conceives a child. In many cases the parents never know.

Young girls too ignorant to know the risk for later manifestations of an aggressive form of breast cancer (for those who inherit the BRCA gene[s]) are left to the untender mercies of Planned Parenthood “counselors”. Often the counselor tells them little beyond assurances that this simple procedure can take care of everything. They do not inform them of the possible complications — incomplete abortions and subsequent illness, perforation of the uterus, etc. This is the only surgical procedure in the country where the patient often receives no information. The girls are no safer than their grandmothers were back in the day when they had to find the name of a doctor who did “those things”.

Years later, the unfortunate woman who didn’t know the risks finds herself in the prime of her adulthood faced with a double mastectomy and a race against time to find all the metastases traveling from breast tissue to organs and bones all over her body. This unspeakable tragedy for her and her family, including her young children only ends when she finally dies, exhausted and defeated by a malignant foe.
This happened to a young friend of mine. She was defeated the day she walked into that clinic, telling no one, and going back to school the next day. I didn’t know until some months later, and at the time I didn’t know about the possible risk she faced. By the time I learned of it, she was happily married and had several children.

At the funeral of probably the kindest, liveliest girl I ever knew, her son was walking behind the casket holding his father’s hand as they left the church. Selfish in the way only very young children can be, he looked up to his father and said, “So, Daddy, when do we go get our new mommy?”

I’ve thought about his question many times and figure that with each hospitalization, his loving and lovely mother would say “Don’t worry. Soon I’ll be good as new. You’ll have your new mommy.” Now he was simply asking for the fulfillment of that promise, not having plunged yet into the irrevocable loss of that unique, beautiful woman who was his mother. The one who wore bells on her ankles because he loved the sound.

The politics of the abortion lobby is powerful and as aggressive as my friend’s cancer. While sweeping this inconvenient truth under the carpet, the profiteers institute massive campaigns to prove the issue is “settled”; they pass out those tacky pink ribbons that the unwitting wear to show how knowledgeable they are. Not.

Like the junk science of global warming climate change, the realities of the abortion business are just as murky, just as potentially harmful. Those who refuse to go along with questionable procedures or poor clinical practices with seriously compromised care of young women are labeled as extremists or fundamentalists, etc. With the casual calumny that has become what passes for robust argument on the Left, people who dare to question the settled argument are subjected to the usual totalitarian invective.

Despite the huge push against those who refuse to go along, the numbers of people who believe in unlimited abortion hasn’t increased. As was the case forty years ago, about forty-five percent of Americans don’t approve of abortion. They aren’t doctrinaire about it, though. Most of them will tell you that for them abortion is wrong. And it has nothing to do with reproductive “rights”.

The issue exists at one of the borderline places in life and each case deserves careful consideration, especially when it comes to life-and-death decisions by young women, some of them not old enough to drive or to vote. Adults who care about them and who know them should be consulted. We don’t live in a vacuum, but in a web of complicated family ties. This potential new member should be pondered carefully by everyone involved, particularly those adults who will have to help the girl pick up the pieces later, no matter what she decides.

In the ongoing conflict about the legal recognition by the state of gay marriage we are seeing the echoes of that long-ago Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision. The laws and referenda keep being defeated because people remember what happened after Margaret Sanger’s protégés got their way. Our culture abandoned a very old rule and families suffered as a result.

Now people are less willing to believe in the simple efficacy of the state to make wise decisions for individuals. As a result of Roe v. Wade it may be that gay marriage will never get by those who saw what happened forty years ago on the question of abortion. It has been a long battle, seemingly won by the forces of modern enlightenment in favor of women’s rights. But in the long run, the truth may turn out to be more complicated than that.

Did you notice how many young people showed up among those half a million marchers in Washington? They have noticed with some concern the holes in their cohort. It’s much smaller, with so many who could have been with them long ago washed down the drain.

10 thoughts on “America’s Great Debate Turns Forty Years Old

  1. The issue is “settled” in places outside the US partly because it was voted on directly by the people or indirectly by their representatives. In the US it was made law of the land by our betters who wear silly black robes.

  2. Freedom is alive and well in America – but only amongst the people, like Europe, as far as the political/social establishment is concerned, America is a post-freedom society.

  3. It’s sickening to see things like the “pro-choice movement”. Choosing on whether to terminate a life which does not belong to them. Some choice! As if the life being actually terminated had any saying in the whole business.
    I understand the would-be justification of someone knowing that the fetus would be born with malformations, some sort of congenital deficiency and the like or a 666 branding on the scalp… but abortion just because you couldn’t bother to be responsible about your proclivities (if that’s even possible), because you see this thing as a matter of “choice” (as if you were choosing between Coke and Pepsi), it’s not just morally reprehensible, it’s totally psychopathic.
    It IS murder, no matter how you “slice it”. All the rhetoric, laws and social engineering in the world won’t change it.

  4. Excellent piece Dymphna! Loved the “new mommy” reference, threw me for a moment but you picked me back up quickly…

  5. I am glad that at least in the United States there are people who take a stand against abortion. Abortions in many countries are performed on a catastrophic scale. In fact, it is our own holocaust, with unborn babies for Jews. In Nazi Germany most people preferred not to notice that their Jewish neighbours were exterminated and some rejoiced in it. We now witness the same picture in supposedly free and democratic countries. And, unlike Germans in the 1940s, we are not in danger of concentration camp if we protest against this slaughter. By keeping silence about it we assume part of responsibility.

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