Slouching Toward Gosnell

This week, Chicago was gripped by the Polar Vortex, a jet stream of frigid air and wind that descended from Canada, plunging temperatures into the minus 20’s with midday highs not reaching zero.  For a couple of days, the city was nearly paralyzed.  Many businesses and institutions closed.  The trains ran on  reduced schedules and the rail companies set fire to tracks to warm them.  At the moment of contact, the frigid cold took your breath away.

But the Polar Vortex wasn’t the only thing that took my breath away this week.  Following on the heels of New York’s new abortion law, Virginia delegate Kathy Tran introduced a similar measure in that state that would permit an abortion until birth.  The video of her defense of the bill went viral and was as stunning as the blast of Chicago’s winter wind off the river and is available on YouTube:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0kC1B__CJ4)

Later, Virginia governor, Ralph Northam defended Tran and her bill in a radio interview and goes much further, suggesting that there may be instances where infanticide is permissible:

"When we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way. [the proposed VA statute would reduce it to one]  And it's done in cases were there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that's nonviable.  So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor I can tell you exactly what would happen.  The infant would be delivered.  The infant would be kept comfortable.  The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.  So I think this was really blown out of proportion."

For most of my adult life, I have been "uncomfortably pro-choice."  In college, and a little bit beyond, I was pro-life.  Bernard Nathanson’s anti-abortion polemic, Aborting America, published in 1979 had a strong influence on me, and by my mid-twenties, I had known perhaps a half-dozen women that had had abortions and all but one had expressed deep regrets about having one.  But as I moved into my mid-twenties, I began to shift into libertarianism.   The basic problem was that I could never convince myself with any certainty that I knew the answer to the question of “when does life begin?”  My liberal friends seemed to know with certainty that life did not begin at conception and that it began somewhere down the path to birth.  My conservative friends knew with certainty that life began at conception.  I could never reach certainty in my mind in either direction.  My pro-life inclinations  conflicted with my libertarian instincts and libertarianism for the most part prevailed.   I bought into the “safe, legal, and rare” argument and the “our bodies, our choice” argument, and the libertarian view that “if you are anti-abortion, don’t get one.”

But I vastly underestimated Leftist Incrementalism.

But over the past few years, I also have spent a great deal of time and effort understanding the Holocaust, how it happened, who did it and how the world permitted such a thing.  I have attended several programs at the Illinois Holocaust Museum.  I have read Laurence Rees’s masterpiece, The Holocaust: A New History.   Some of my most widely read blog posts concerned the Holocaust or were film reviews of Holocaust related films (e.g. Son of Saul and Austerlitz).  Last year, I wrote an impassioned blog opposing the proposed Polish law which would have prohibited the use of the term “Polish Holocaust.” (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2018/03/polish-folly.html)  I began to understand the dehumanization of the Jews and other “undesirables” that the Nazis undertook that led to mass killings.  And they started with the mentally infirmed.

My shift in views have not come from my Catholic upbringing but rather my understanding of the Holocaust and from the New Left itself.   And now I understand how incorrect my position has been.

Until recently, the Left was careful to camouflage itself.  It covered itself in innocuous and libertarian language- "women's health " "women's choice," "safe, legal and rare."  It lured us in with the 3% Lie of Planned Parenthood. And it got people like me to take the bait.  How can a libertarian be against women's choice?

But the New Left has been exposed for where it is really going and what really goes on and the abject hideousness and inhumanity of it. There was the film of the National Abortion Federation with abortionists yukking it up about rolling eyeballs.  There was Michelle Wolfe sickly joking at the National Correspondents dinner with her liberal audience laughing and clapping like a bunch of trained seals, "He [Mike Pence] thinks abortion is murder.  Which first of all, don't knock it 'til you try it---and when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you've got to get that baby out of there."   There were the films of Planned Parenthood staff bargaining over the sale of baby parts.   There was Gosnell and now NY passing its law permitting abortion until birth and then cheering this “accomplishment” and celebrating it in the city with pink lights.

We began with "choice" and we ended with Michelle Wolfe,  rolling eyeballs and auctioning body parts.

If you want more to read on how dehumanization works, please see the films Austerlitz (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/04/austerlitz.html) and Son of Saul (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2016/02/son-of-saul.html) , both of which affected me greatly.  In Son of Saul, the Nazis referred to the corpses as "pieces" to disguise the ghastliness of what was actually going on.

My libertarian stance did not take into account the evils of Leftist Incrementalism.   First trimester and Safe, Legal and Rare were only the jumping off points.  And here we are now- up to the moment of  birth—and cheering about it.   Bet that the New York statute isn't the end point either.  It never is.  There is always a new frontier and new boundaries to push.  Now, under the proposed Virginia statute, I’m not certain that you could get a conviction on Kermit Gosnell.

So now it’s out in the open.  The same folks that abandoned anytime, anywhere inspections for the Iranian nuclear program have embraced anytime, anywhere abortions.  And the governor is on record suggesting that a post-birth abortion might also be an option.

If you like your baby, you can keep your baby.  But if you don’t, the Left is ok with that, too.

Just remember, the Nazi regime did not start with the ovens.