The Reactionary Utopian
                     April 26, 2007


DEFENDING THE "PROCEDURE"
by Joe Sobran

     Guess what this is about: Ruth Marcus, a pundit for 
the WASHINGTON POST, uses the abstract word "procedure" 
eleven times in a single column. She doesn't use the word 
"kill" even once!

     If you guessed that she is writing about abortion, 
you are correct. More specifically, she's defending 
gruesome late-term abortions against a recent ruling of 
the U.S. Supreme Court.

     No good progressive-minded liberal feminist would 
refer to a "procedure" in which the child's skull is 
crushed and its brains sucked out as "killing." It's not 
as if someone winds up dead, is it?

     The liberal conscience must rank among the wonders 
of the modern world. How do you defend a "procedure" so 
hideous that even most abortionists refuse to perform it? 
Ms. Marcus doesn't defend it directly. Instead, she heaps 
angry sarcasm on Justice Anthony Kennedy's recent 
majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding state 
laws that outlaw this grim "procedure."

     With cutting wit, she refers to Kennedy as a "poor 
dear," adding, "And I thought women were the ones who 
were supposed to be bad at science.... Indeed, Kennedy 
seems to be as weak at math as he is at science." Oof! 
Take that, Kennedy!

     Actually, Ms. Marcus doesn't show that Kennedy is 
weak at either math or science, nor does she explain how 
she would know (or why it would be relevant) if he were; 
she just keeps piling on the catty wisecracks, proving 
only that she is irritable and, more important, morally 
callous. As for qualms about the deadly practice in 
question, Ms. Marcus dismisses these as "the moral whims 
of the majority."

     "Moral whims"? Most people would be sickened if they 
witnessed what Ms. Marcus is pleased to call this 
"procedure." "Killing," with its suggestion of blood and 
pain, sounds so abrupt. That's why abortion advocates 
always try to muffle the plain facts in Orwellian 
euphemisms about "terminating pregnancies." You don't 
want to watch. And they don't want you to see, even in 
your mind's eye.

     When you listen to liberals discussing abortion, you 
wonder how on earth they ever managed to get the public 
to confuse liberalism with compassion. I suppose it's a 
sort of trick, like the stage magician's misdirection. 
They keep you watching one thing so you don't notice the 
other.

     Stereotypes help, of course. In the case of 
abortion, the trick is to keep our minds on poor black 
inner-city girls, unmarried and pregnant, while diverting 
our attention from the real subject: the poor little 
shavers who, ineligible for liberal pity, are to be 
destroyed by the, er, procedure.

     This has the added advantage of appealing, ever so 
subtly, to the sort of race and class prejudices liberals 
profess to deplore. Do we really want to encourage "those 
people" to breed? This angle emerges when we hear the 
cost/benefit argument for state-subsidized abortion: It's 
cheaper than welfare!

     From this point of view, a quick, timely, low-cost 
abortion today saves the taxpayer thousands of welfare 
dollars over the next two decades. Calculation, as well 
as "compassion," argues for encouraging the poor to abort 
their children -- and for having the state pick up the 
tab for the, er, procedure.

     I have never, ever heard of poor inner-city blacks 
demanding subsidized abortions for themselves. So I can 
only wonder why so many affluent suburban whites, 
including liberals, are so eager to provide them. I 
suppose humanitarianism may explain it. In the case of 
Ms. Marcus, compassion seems to have run amok.

     According to Jean-Paul Sartre, hell is other people; 
and I suspect that many of us secretly agree with this 
candidly misanthropic credo. (That's what I like about 
the French: they don't bother to hide their feelings, not 
even their nasty ones.)

     Abortion is one way of controlling all those "other 
people," who tend to reproduce with such annoying 
fertility; and I guess it takes a compassionate American 
like Ms. Marcus to say she favors aborting children for 
their own good.

     We speak freely of "killing" some things, such as 
crabgrass, cancerous cells, and the germs that cause bad 
breath; but when we do away with kids in their mothers' 
wombs, it's just a "procedure."

     In this age of candor and explicitness, why such 
anomalous delicacy? Maybe it deserves a special name. I 
wonder what Adolf Hitler would call it. "Abortion 
denial"?

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