whose right to choose?

[fpb]

Believe it or not, I do not like to post about abortion. The subject itself makes me sick, and there is nothing to be gained by posting about it except the opposition and often the hate of those who are committed to it, and more rows and more fights.

However, a story I have stumbled upon is significant both because of itself and as a kind of strange, bitter comment to my articles on the Massachusetts mass pregnancy. There is a man in Kansas called George Tiller, who is a hate figure to anyone who opposes abortion. He has built a vast fortune on his willingness to abort anyone who asks, at any time; anti-abortionists call him "Tiller the Killer", both because of his eagerness to destroy viable babies in the last few months of pregnancy, and because the sloppy conditions in his clinics are said to be a real threat to the health of the mothers. However, Tiller is very politically active, and has made large donations to many leading political figures in the state. It is certain that he has Kansas' Governor, Kathleen Sebelius, in his pocket: she has fought an unprincipled fight that has lasted for years against a State prosecutor who had tried to apply existing Kansas law to Tiller's clinics, not only sacking him, but packing the state Supreme Court with cronies against him. (Whatever I may think of George Tiller, I loathe Kathleen Sebelius. I regard her as a female version of John Kerry, a repulsive, glass-smooth hypocrite who tries to use her supposed Catholic identity as an electoral asset while breaking every Church law she pleases, and whose use of power is as ruthless as it is heartless. Unfortunately, she is said to be a favourite for Barrack Obama's VP.)

Now the story has broken that Tiller's clinic has aborted the baby of an unwilling sixteen-year-old girl who had been dragged there by her mother. The details aren't clear, but it seems that both the girl and her boyfriend - also sixteen - wanted to keep the baby, and the girl's mother was the only one who wanted it dead. She used her power as brutally as Governor Sebelius, and dragged her daughter to Tiller's slaughterhouse; the father got there too late to prevent the killing.

Any pro-abortionist who objects to this is a hypocrite. Anyone who has studied abortion knows that a large share of abortions are "chosen" not by the mother but by her family, or even by her employers, as a matter of convenience. Things are rarely so cold and so brutal, but it comes to the same thing. However, the conscious resistance of mother and father and the fact that it was only an older person who wanted the abortion seems as though it might share something with what I read in the Massachusetts mass pregnancy.

Comments

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

well, I do not believe in God, but I find great wisdom in that prayer:

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

It says it all really, sometimes you just have to accept you don't always get the choice and sometimes you've got to try and make courageous decisions.
And, well, because courage does not come naturally to me, I've got to work on it: that's one way of trying to prepare for life.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that prayer is not one of the classic and authorized Christian prayers at all, and it embodies an attitude I disagree with. It was actually invented by an American theologian in the last century, and it is typical of the twentieth century in imagining that the greatast act of righteousness is to change things around us, that change is - at least when willed by someone - always a good thing, that leaving things alone is the same as leaving evil alone. I find all these notions - they do not have the dignity of doctrines or ideas - foolish and mistaken, and they lead to the terrible condition of modern politics, when politicians feel that their existence is not justified unless they continuously produce new initiatives, ideas and laws, whether needed or not. As Tacitus said, where the State is corrupt, laws are abundant. In France, the champions of Change are now aching to reduce or dismantle the social state that has served France and other European countries well for a century or more, merely because it is out of date. Lord, give me the commonsense to oppose change except when necessary, the courage to tell the change-mongers when they are wrong, and the wisdom to be able to tell when they are wrong.

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

yeah, I know it was written by this Reinhold Niebuhr guy, but I think it's pretty wise because precisely it doesn't say you should change everything.
Admittedly, it doesn't spell out that there are things you can change and should not change, but I always assumed it was implicit.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is the trap. When you hear - to take a song I see as thoroughly poisonous - John Lennon's Imagine, you are always stimulated to contribute your own civilizing factors; but in the original work there are none. Lennon really does say that there should be no possessions - not just no wealth, but no possession whatever; not so much as your old teddy bear. (My flat, by the way, is decorated with stuffed toys.) He says there should be "nothing to kill or die for"; do you want a world with nothing in it worth dying for? I do not, and what is more, it is not possible, since if nothing else a man should be ready to die for those he loves. The content of the song is thoroughly disgusting, and the music not only cradles you into accepting it, not only cradles you into accepting the author's own completely wrong self-image as an idealist, but it also encourages you to make your own excuses for the ghastly "idealism" involved. Sorry, one of the points of having a God-given reason is, as the Gospel says, to "test everything and hold fast to what is good". Assumptions are among our enemies.