Reality Check 101

            What is less reprehensible, terminating an obscure possibly unnamed third trimester child or terminating a well-known adult?  What is less immoral, killing a soon-to-be-born baby because he or she is a complication for the host parent or killing an adult who scars the life of the host parent?  What is less justified, aborting a child who has only racked up six months on the calendar since conception or aborting an adult who has racked up 67 years on the calendar since conception?

            There is no difference in any of these cases.  In all six scenarios the perpetrators have by definition murdered.  There is no moral justification, outside of saving a mother’s life, for any of the acts and no ethical justification for society to ignore, tolerate or minimize any of them.

            Yet, in spite of the horrendous nature of forcibly ending lives of both the very very young and the somewhat old, Americans have been fed a almost exclusive media diet of post-mortem Dr. George Tiller heroism and loss of potential.  Conspicuously absent has been any of the same sentiment for any of Tiller’s estimated sixty thousand victims.  A majority of Americans probably think it rather callous of the supposed media guardians of the nation’s conscience to so easily ignore sixty thousand people purposely starved, poisoned or torn limb from limb while grieving the wrongful execution of a famous abortionist.

            There is an interesting phenomenon though.  In a nation that is over fifty percent pro-life and eighty percent against late term abortions, five abortionist have tragically been murdered since Roe v. Wade nullified even the most liberal abortion laws.  Every person responsible for those crimes has been prosecuted.  In the last thirty-six years over forty-nine million five hundred thousand pre-born children’s lives have been intentionally snuffed.  For that unprecedented genocidal level of death and suffering there have been almost no legal consequences except in the cases of injury to the mother and outrage comes from only select interest groups.

            Dr. Tiller’s slaying also raises the issue of rights, both civil and human.  Clearly, killing someone violates rights, the most basic of which is their human right to life.  If Tiller was a living human being he possessed a sacred right to continue living.  The only forfeiture of that right, outside of the separate question of involvement in armed conflict, would occur if he were guilty of pre-meditated murder.  Even in that situation God has sanctioned only government as executioner and then only after exhaustive due process.

            Unborn children possess the same human right to life as Dr. Tiller and to a no lesser degree.  If it could be shown that the pre-born are non-human and non-living, it would be a manifestly different scenario.  But just as with George Tiller, the people he killed bore all the hallmarks of life and were from the moment of conception human beings in process.  They could be nothing else.  The greater question must be posed again; where is the revulsion for human rights violations against all those lost teachers, doctors, trades people, business people, scientists and future families?

            Civil rights apply in the same fashion.  Dr. Tiller depended on others in order to acquire shelter, warmth, nourishment and the ability to better his condition.  Various levels of civil law protected his rights as a legal citizen of theUnited Statesto pursue those needs.

            Unborn children exercise all those same prerogatives.  The only difference is in their place of residence and level of dependence.  Yet Dr. Tiller was more than willing to deny his victims their civil liberties simply because they couldn’t walk the floors of the clinic or were less independent than their parents or were too young to speak for themselves.  To allow such a practice in a nation which so diligently battles child abuse is at the minimum nonsensical.

            Of course Americans are getting used to tolerating nonsense.  It is nonsense to teach women that unwanted pregnancies are bad and that their only choices are abortion or, as President Obama put it, being punished with a child.  It is nonsense to elevate the power of choice above the power life.  It is nonsense to then attack the choices of anti-abortion medical professionals, pharmacists. and citizen activists.  It is most assuredly nonsense to mourn the loss of one adult murder victim without mourning the loss of his victims.