So What If Abortion Ends Life: A Response

[ 2 ] January 30, 2013 AD |

Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote a piece last week for Salon.com entitled, “So what if abortion ends life?”  Ms. Williams explains how she can believe that life begins at conception while still clinging to her pro-choice position.  It is a sobering read but one that I would recommend.  I would suggest grabbing a sweater and a nice hot cup of tea first; her words will chill you to the bone.  Ms. Williams has the skill of recognizing the need for truth in the only way the pro-choice ideology allows–in the advancement of the diabolical.

In this liberal blueprint for the culture of death, she unapologetically advocates for a concept of what she labels as “unequal life”–life not worthy of protection.  It is shocking to read such an honest articulation of a position that any civilized society would find completely repulsive.  I have to wonder if she would be the same, outspoken advocate if our society decided to treat writers for Salon.com the same way she so comfortably treats unborn children.

For Ms. Williams, it all boils down to autonomy, her own, not the baby’s.  She actually advocates favoring autonomy over the valuing of the life of a child.

She sets forth the classic “might makes right” argument declaring at one point in her article, “I’m the boss.”   I’m not sure whether she is deserving of my anger or my pity, but she is definitely deserving of my prayers as she reminds me of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz–in desperate need of a heart.

Just when you think she can’t possibly degrade any further, she finds a way to take us to even lower ground.  The author calmly writes about the very little difference between a child in the womb and a newborn sucking his thumb, about first trimester abortions and late trimester abortions.  What most people would find to be compelling pro-life arguments, Ms. Williams is able to coolly discard.  In fact, she ends the article by acknowledging that a fetus is indeed a life but a “life worth sacrificing”.

What kind of society advocates for the killing of its own children in such cold blood?

Although Ms. Williams is able to proclaim this with chilling ease, she ignores some fundamental questions that are critical in order to put her “beautiful” ideology into practice.  Questions like: Who decides whose autonomy is worthy of protection and how do we even know that autonomy is the greatest good?  These seemingly fundamental questions are curiously ignored.

I am willing to bet that Ms. Williams doesn’t have the answers to these questions.  She perfectly embodies the schizophrenic mentality embraced by so many in our society: a mentality that says I will assert my beliefs over matters of life and death with boldness, completely unburdened by any semblance of logic, reason, truth, or consistency.  They assert such ideas because they can and they’re okay with that.  People afflicted with this mentality live to serve a common good of one–their own.

But what is truly ironic about her argument is that in her zeal to safeguard and protect her precious autonomy, in her blindness, she advocates the killing of the very thing needed to secure it in the first place–its prerequisite–life itself.  It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that you can’t be autonomous if you’re dead.

Ms. Williams paints the picture of a very ugly culture; a narcissistic, selfish culture in love with itself and its beloved autonomy.   In stark contrast stands the vision of the Catholic Church.   As Catholics, we know we’re made in the image and likeness of our Creator.  Every life has inherent worth and dignity, no matter how small, no matter the degree of autonomy.  We don’t believe in lives worth sacrificing but, rather, in lives worth sacrificing for.  We believe that vulnerability and weakness cry out for protection, never for termination.  The Catholic vision calls us to a higher love, a more perfect love, an eternal love.  For all of us know, we were created for love.

We’ve seen the destruction and the oppression that inevitably comes when we endorse the kind of disordered love of autonomy that Ms. Williams so perfectly illustrates and I can tell you, as a female of Jewish descent, it doesn’t end well.

Many tyrants throughout history were able to do the inconceivable: dehumanizing people to the point of massacring millions of innocents, garnering little, if any, public outrage.  Not that long ago, African-

Americans were deemed property under the law, and Jews were seen as nothing more than garbage to be incinerated.  But for a tyrant to brutalize her victims, and society to tolerate such, she must first demonize and dehumanize her victims successfully deeming them to be “lives worth sacrificing.”

Herein lies the difficulty that has always existed for the pro-choice movement: How do you dehumanize and demonize a tiny, innocent, little baby?

Perhaps that is what I found to be the most disturbing about Ms. Williams’ article.  She doesn’t even bother to try.

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Category: Bioethics

About the Author ()

Miriam Fightlin Brower is happily married and lives in Montana. Although she holds a B.A. in Criminology she has primarily worked in the financial industry and utilizes this background and experience to assist her husband, Matthew, in his solo law practice. She also has experience working for a very large Catholic media company and has enjoyed sharing the faith with others as a catechist and mentor through local RCIA programs. Her particular interests are focused on the New Feminism and how she can bring her pro-life activism to a new generation of women. Her blog is The Hand That Rocks The Credo. Click here to follow Miriam on Twitter.
  • http://www.theguidingstarproject.com Leah Jacobson

    Frightening. Thank you for pointing me to the Salon.com article. I had not seen it, but am not really surprised to see this thinking in writing. I hear it behind many excuses given for abortion, its just that most try to disguise their rationale with flowery “quality of life” assumptions. You bust through them with great clarity.

    Well written Miriam! Glad to see you here at Ignitum.

  • Douglas Kraeger

    I think pity would be the better feeling. The writer you refer to is apparently well down the road of believing there is no God, therefore no source of God-given “Rights” and is emboldened by all those around her who support this god-less mentality. I wonder what she would say if someone could ask her:
    If it is absolutely, morally evil for a person to kill by poison everyone in a city (or any other unquestionable evil act that does not effect her personnally); What is the source that makes it absolutely, morally evil if not an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing Creator God who is the creator of all space and time and everything?
    How many people would listen to anything more she had to say If she was consistant and they knew she said that such an act was not absolutely, morally evil in her mind?
    Is it possible she has never really asked herself that sort of question? We are amazed at the shallowness of thinking that others show. I am a farmer and I just shake my head when I hear stories of “city” kids who do not know that ham stakes come from pigs and the pigs have to die for us to eat the stakes. People do not think deeply. they are so involved in “their world”, moving from one distraction to another; it is sad. But, there, except by the grace of God, go I.
    Maybe their lack of deeper thinking is not all their fault. Perhaps we will find at our personnal judgement all the times that we are guilty of lack of charity when we only shook our heads at what other people thought and did nothing to share the light we have been blessed with inspite of our sins of commission and omission.
    No, we should not be “in their faces”, but cring and humble, trying to cooperate with the Holy Spirit Who wants to speak to them nfinitely more than we do.
    My opinion is that the best way is to through prayer, try to find a question so worded that there are only two answers. One is God’s answer, the other is unacceptable to anyone who stops and thinks about it. If we can ask such a question and then leave them for a while to seek their answer, we have perhaps opened the door for the Holy Spirit to enter. Even if they slam the door shut when they see the truthful answer; they will have seen the truth and now they are culpable and we have done what we could.
    People see so many “grey” issues that they do not focus on the black and white.
    There is one undisputable Fact to start with: Either there is an absolute, objective moral law and therefore an absolute moral lawmaker, God OR there is no absolute moral law and no act is morally evil, anything goes if you can get away with it, nothing matters because there is no god to give meaning to creation or anything in it, hopelessness, emptiness, meaninglessness (these feelings in themselves shout out in the heart “this is not as it should be, It is sad, not as it should be to feel as if all is hopelessness, emptiness, meaninglessness and if there is a should or should not: then there must be a God.)
    But if there is a God who has shown us that there are some things that are absolutely, morally right and good and there are actions that are always morally evil and wrong then this God wants us to want to know more, He must want us to seek the truth He has established.
    Perhaps the woman who said “so what if a baby has to die” needs to have someone ask her the right question, a question that might open the door for the Holy spirit to enter. Maybe she will slam the door in His face, maybe not. Should we keep trying? Will we be held accountable if we say, “I do not care to try even if God could give me the right question?”

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