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

[geno0823.livejournal.com]

Sure, why not? Everyone dies eventually anyway.

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

To be consistant, then anyone who agrees with that should simply kill themselves-- and leave others to do so or fail on their own.

[geno0823.livejournal.com]

But why would I want to deny myself the pleasure of a world devoid of humans?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As long as you're in it, it won't be. Or don't they have mirrors where you live?

[geno0823.livejournal.com]

I don't consider myself to be human.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What you consider yourself to be is not an argument. I don't think the local cat is quite sure she is a cat, either.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

...said in a ringing chorus Adolf Hitler, Al Capone, Henry VIII and the mugger down the street. And Cain added: "What am I supposed to be, my brother's keeper?"

[geno0823.livejournal.com]

Their killings were based on prejudice and the lust for power, which is bad. (Or, in the case of the mugger, poverty and desperation, which is caused by prejudice and the lust for power in many cases.) I'm not like them; I'm not prejudiced and I don't want power. (I am poor, but I'm not about to mug anybody.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. They were based on Cain's belief that a human being is something for which you have no responsibility; that you are NOT supposed to be your brother's keeper. Because once you admit that, in fact, you are, then every other excuse not only for murder but for theft, violence, fraud and every other sin against another person becomes so obviously wrong that not even Joe Stalin or Lucky Luciano could argue for it.