From our friend Fr. Tad’s column, “Making Sense out of Bioethics”.
July 2009. Many influential people and institutions in our society, including Hollywood and the mass media, strongly support abortion. To justify their position, however, they must adeptly defy logic and ignore certain obvious facts.
One example of this side-stepping is the oft-repeated argument for abortion that it’s all about a woman’s body. As actress Amy Brenneman, who starred in the TV show Judging Amy, once put it, “Unless a woman really has sovereignty over her own body we really haven’t come that far.”
The obvious flaw in this argument was cleverly exposed a few years back by supermodel Kathy Ireland (who used to favor abortion) during a televised interview: “Some people say, ‘Well it’s a woman’s body; it should be her choice. There’s a 50% chance the baby she’s carrying is a male child, and he would have a penis. Women don’t have penises. So it’s residing in her body; it is not a part of her body.” While it should go without saying that babies have their own bodies, abortion advocates seem all too ready to tiptoe around the obvious to promote their agenda.
That tiptoeing is also evident whenever a breaking news story about the murder of an abortionist grabs the headlines. After someone recently gunned down Dr. George Tiller, the late-term abortionist in Kansas, almost every major media outlet extolled the genuine tragedy of his death, while tiptoeing past the tragedy of the 60,000 deaths that Tiller himself had coordinated within his clinics.
Several TV commentators, however, immediately perceived this double standard. Ann Coulter, for example, satiricallymentioned, “…This one random nut who shot Tiller … I don’t really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203 rd trimester.” She then argued: “I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don’t want to impose my moral values on others.” Coulter also couldn’t resist exposing the faulty moral logic behind so much pro-abortion rhetoric and sloganeering, as in: “If you don’t believe in abortion, then don’t have one,” to which she replied: “If you don’t believe in shooting abortionists, then don’t shoot abortionists.” Perhaps no one has so clearly summarized the deadly logic of the pro-abortion position as Mother Teresa, when she declared in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “ …If a mother can kill her own child – what is left for me to kill you and you kill me – there is nothing between.”
Read the rest of Fr. Tad’s column here.
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