From the October issue of First Things, Richard John Neuhaus’ “While We’re At It.” There are the ignorant and the nave:
“Happy children don’t grow up to build concentration camps, Dr. Henry Morgentaler told a University of Western Ontario convocation yesterday, as he argued that abortion has helped radically reduce hate and violent crime in Canada,” reports the Toronto Star. Morgentaler is Canada’s foremost champion of the unlimited abortion licence. Many protested his getting an honorary degree from Western Ontario, including the board of governors, which does not have authority over the committee that made the choice. While he is all for nipping in the bud, so to speak, the potentially hateful and violent, Morgentaler says he is not an advocate of eugenics. The reduction in crime is “an unintended, if happy, consequence” of choices made by women, he says. Rosie Dimanno, a Star columnist, says she is for “the absolute right to reproductive freedom,” but is uncomfortable with Morgentaler’s argument. “Abortion as social corrective that’s spared us a bunch of felonious misfits is offensive. Let’s not go there, Dr. Morgentaler,” she writes. Sorry, ma’am, you are already there (p. 81).
[of course, the HACs (seriously! well, it stands for Humanist Association of Canada, but I prefer the acronym) have (had) a petition here in support of the good doctor–anyone who’s a holocaust survivor can’t be bad! Funny, the ad above this post is for a pro-life group.]
And the shocking and heart-rending:
The quandaries created by the regime of Roe v. Wade. In Lufkin, Texas, sixteen-year-old Erica had been trying by various measures to kill the twin babies with whom she was four-months pregnant. She finally asked her boyfriend Gerardo to stomp on her stomach, which he did, and the babies died. Gerardo, but not Erica, is charged with murder. The Associated Press reports, “The case has attorneys on both sides questioning the fairness of a statute that considers one person’s crime another person’s constitutional right.” According to Roe, Gerardo was helping Erica exercise her constitutional right to kill her babies. Unlike other abortionists, of course, he was practicing without a license, which is against the law in Texas (p. 87).
[World had it here–how did I miss it?]
Balaam's Ass 