First, a salute to the servicemen who stormed the beach on D-Day 80 years ago, and a prayer for those who gave their lives. We will never see their like again.
Before I tee off today, I want to keep a watch on the 51-odd former intelligence and military chiefs who wrote a letter to the public in the fall of 2020 that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation plot. Since the laptop is now Exhibit Number 1 in Hotmess Biden’s trial, someone should have the decency to say he or she was wrong for foisting a deliberate lie on the public during a presidential election season. It would not have changed the outcome, but where, oh where, is the integrity? Or the professional judgment? Did they all go along because a political operative told them to?
Okay, now to Getting the Message Right.
The Republicans can’t formulate a message that is reasonable and the Democrats can’t stop lying about pro-life intentions.
The Republicans will probably lose the House and Senate this year because they can’t message abortion with any level of integrity. They can’t call out Democrat lies or drown out the screamers who can’t be reasoned with. It is the anecdote on abortion, not the morality or the facts, that embraces the public discussion and will lead to a much less perfect union.
If we can’t make ourselves better, how could we make society better… to strive for a “more perfect union?” Remember that canard from the preamble to the US Constitution?
We can have two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. Abortion is morally wrong but a legal right. We must be adult about the consequences of our actions. Legal standards are low standards. Moral standards are much higher. You may choose to lead a perfectly legal life and still be a pariah. We appreciate and laud those who strive for a higher moral plane, for a “more perfect union.”
If the mother’s self-interest is the only priority, then the killing of the child is an accepted practice. But what happens when someone else has a self-interest that permits the killing of the mother? Where does the right, the self-interest, stop?
For the most part, choice is made with unprotected sex and pregnancy itself. Abortion is not a choice. It is an irrevocable act. Abortion is a moral wrong in virtually every instance. The gross exceptions of a woman who has her life on the line and there’s a deformed child who can’t survive and the earth will swallow them up if they don’t get it done right now or the girl is 10 years old and abused by her father and uncle are all absurd, but emotional and horrifying, and should be treated as the infinitesimally small exceptions they are. Go ahead and abort. Your body.
We should avoid moral neutrality by positioning ourselves to a low legal standard of Roe. With a mighty heart we should seek a higher standard, a higher hope. Morally we should oppose abortion but that door will never close again. Legally we should find middle ground, the kind of middle ground that affords enough moral spine while preserving the abominable “right” of abortion.
Seek one truth and share the dissatisfaction. It is the kind of compromise our nation was founded on.
Acknowledging abortion is ugly and wrong is truth. Acknowledging it will never be completely illegal (or completely legal) and that reasonable restrictions would support the public interest, our “higher spirit,” sustains a moral standard the nation can disagree on but explain to children with some measure of dignity.
The responsible political thing is to compromise. Exceptions for health and welfare of the mother, restrictions on gestation terms and moral reasoning, there are many compromises. Does anyone think that sex selection is a legitimate ethical reason for an abortion? Whole nations have this as a policy. It’s a thing. Look it up. And that is rationalized here, individually, in the USA. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of girl power.
Should providers be forced to perform the procedure? (No.) Should tax dollars go to killing children, or to abortion mills like Planned Parenthood? (No.) Conversely, should single mothers and those in crisis pregnancies be given every last nickel in our pockets to raise a child? (Yes.) Why can’t all mothers who have a need be subsidized? (Yes.)
A compromise here reminds me of a quote from HL Mencken almost a century ago: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.”
Yes, we will compromise on abortion, eventually. That is the plausible and wrong part, sad but true. Nevertheless compromise is not as wrong as the act of killing a baby in utero for any damn reason. Abortion is a terrible wrong. It will always be a right, but that doesn’t make it right.
Abortion rights is not about sex only, but about how we love and be lovable. Not lovable like a Teddy Bear, but lovable that makes you worthy of another person’s true, deep, and abiding respect, a person that another would sacrifice anything for to keep that love alive. Are we worthy? Would anyone sacrifice themselves, even with a small “s” for you? Do we squander love—the way an undergrad wastes a higher level education, the kind parents sacrificed for, the parents who had ambitions for your success and happiness – do we squander that opportunity for a higher level of thought, of consciousness, of making ourselves a better soul through the covenant of love?
Are we proud of the callousness of treating a woman’s love like a commodity, or the act of love itself and the single element of the act that creates life as an inconvenience, or a problem to be killed?
I saw a social media post that was striking in its clarity. A synopsis: Satan can’t kill God, so he has gaslighted humans to think that abortion is okay, a right, and to hell with the unborn. Abortion is Satan’s sacrament. God sent His only son, Jesus, to mankind first as a baby in the womb. There is irony in the mantra of Planned Parenthood, “this is my body.” It mocks the consecration of the Catholic mass, the ultimate memorial of the Last Supper. “This is my body.”
Yes, it is your body. I will not tell you what to do with it. I can both privately condemn and publicly sympathize with a mother in crisis who opts for abortion. These decisions can’t be easy, can’t be done in a cavalier fashion, and probably are not made in a vacuum. Women in crisis are there for several reasons, but what is done is done, and the abortion does not undo the fact that an innocent baby is being killed.
There is a larger interest than self-interest. We Americans should aspire to the higher ethical standard, honorably, justly, conscientiously, decently. Teach our children the fundamentals of right and wrong. Life is right. Abortion is wrong. Reasonable restrictions and compromises are right. Scorched earth abortion for any reason at all is wrong.
Our rights are sacrosanct until they collide with others’ rights. We scream about “rights” but never about our responsibility. Rights are like laws – low standards are met. Responsibility implies a decent standard, a higher plane, a conscious attitude of honor.
If men did not act in only their self-interest in pursuit of women abortion would not exist. The man who wants to get laid or keep getting sex brays loudly about a woman’s right to abortion (her choice!) is a coward. He has taken the beauty, the lovableness, of a woman and abandoned her love when she needed it most. The woman who treats her lovableness, her worthy soul, as a cheap commodity has lost how to love herself. If it ends in abortion she has irretrievably altered her soul for her lifetime and can only take the long road to forgiveness of herself, by herself. Because her man is a coward.
I am not a prude. People get it on without thinking of the consequences and the pair might not even like each other very much. That is why it is so important that people are certain… certain of the potential to alter lives or end a life. Gotta be sure.
It is beyond me how anyone could get pregnant (absent a crime) without knowing that cheap and readily available contraceptives are just a phone call away.
When we Americans list our rights from the most impressive (and flawed) political document ever produced, the United States Constitution, do start with speech? Religion? Assembly? Is anyone proudly pointing to abortion? Should we? A woman will always have the ability to terminate her pregnancy. Shouting it is more than sad.
The USSC will likely see to it that abortion “pills” are left alone. But the democrats will lie openly that contraceptives will be outlawed by Republicans if you don’t vote for their candidates. If the right to abortion is the single issue that motivates a person to vote, I weep for our national discourse.
Eighty years ago the most important event of the 20th century took place, costing tens of thousands of Allied and Free French lives. The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and sacrificed their lives were heroes who never saw another sunrise, who died alone and afraid. Real flesh and blood heroes.
Women are heroes, too. Every day. They nurture society, raise families, and give birth willingly, and that act of birth is more painful than anything a man could ever endure. Yet women do it again and again, sometimes in less than optimal circumstances of commitment, finances, or personal ambition.
But they have babies anyway, knowing that their self-interest will take a backseat for the rest of their lives. Because women are heroes.
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