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Defending the “Procedure”
 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 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.
![[Breaker quote for 'Defending the "Procedure": What would Hitler call it?']](2007breakers/070426.gif) 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”?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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