The Missing Link | 27 June 2022
A mere decade ago, I can remember pro-choice advocates who were willing to engage in robust intellectual debate about the ethics and permissibility of abortion—talks that demanded pro-lifers sharpen their arguments or perish with the children they sought to defend.
These days, the most common arguments I hear for abortion have been reduced to silly questions like, “Have you ever taken a biology course?” or dismissive comments like “No ovaries, no opinion,” or even worse, they just scream at you from a puffy, vagina-shaped costume, say they don’t talk to fascists, and go screeching into the night.
In other words, the new pro-choice arguments are not really arguments at all; they are performances of raw emotion that prove one is really angry but do not prove the validity of the position they hold. When it comes to determining the value of what is inside the womb, you better come prepared to prove the validity of the latter.
I don’t mean to make fun of these folks; I’m just a little shocked the debate broke down so quickly and so epically. And now that Roe v. Wade, decided by an all-male court, has been overturned by a gender-diverse court, I wonder, what happened to the pro-choice movement?
Like a McDonald’s ice cream machine, I think the pro-choice movement was designed to fail as soon as it came off the assembly line. The bugs are a feature, beginning with the Roe decision itself.
The Roe decision shockingly relied on ancient, pre-scientific notions to defend abortion’s acceptability, citing ideas about how it was fine to abort until the fetus showed some movement in utero—known as “the quickening.”
It pointed to lax laws on abortion during Greek and Roman times, those paragons of morality, yet includes striking passages about how Soranos, “often described as the greatest of the ancient gynecologists, appears to have been generally opposed to Rome’s prevailing free-abortion practices” except when the mother’s life was at risk.
Well, Soranos’ abortion policy was precisely the Texas law that Roe struck down.
Moreover, Roe cites the Hippocratic Oath, saying that “in any translation the content is clear: ‘I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.’ ”
It cites the ancient Pythagoreans, for whom “the embryo was animate from the moment of conception, and abortion meant destruction of a living being.”
From the moment Roe was handed down, it was a tortured document that raised more ethical and moral questions than it answered, and it has become a relic of pseudo-science that fails to persuade on the most important point: the constitutionality of abortion. Pro-choice advocates would have done well to listen to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose Struck v. Secretary of Defense case would have made a better test case and made the SCOTUS decision stronger, even if ultimately wrong.
Famously, Jane Roe in the case, whose real name is Norma McCorvey, later became a staunch pro-life advocate. McCorvey may be dead, but the fact that the star plaintiff made a 180 years later remains a massive black eye for the pro-choice side. It was reported recently that she had made a deathbed confession that she had flip-flopped just for the money, but the family that helped her out when she became a Christian and ministered to her the rest of her life strongly refuted the claim.
Another fly in the ointment is that the pro-choice position is too important of a campaign fundraising platform to be fully enshrined in law. Pro-choice advocates with a memory of the Obama years lament the legislative supermajority once enjoyed by the Democrats and their ultimate failure to make Roe a piece of actual federal legislation.
The same day Roe was overturned by Dobbs, Nancy Pelosi proved the point by sending a letter to her constituents fundraising off the decision. “Chip in $15,” she insists, so that they can finally “codify reproductive rights into law.”
Nancy Pelosi just sent out her first email fundraising off the decision overturning Roe v. Wade. pic.twitter.com/i85Yfxeyuv
— Gravel Institute (@GravelInstitute) June 24, 2022
The same fundraising grift could be said of Republicans and the pro-life side, but the court has at least delivered, even if it took ages to do so.
When I think of the failure of the pro-choice movement, I think of how the mask of “safe, legal, and rare” gradually receded from the conversation, exposing a kind of termination fanaticism. This is due in part by the fact that wanting abortion to be “rare” speaks too strongly to the idea that there may be something morally problematic with the act. So, they had to double down.
Nowadays you get advocates proposing legislation which says there ought to be no restriction on abortion up to the moment of delivery, which shocked many on both sides of the debate…
You now have state legislatures cheering on virtually unrestricted abortion laws…
Abortion advocates may have no reservations about any of this, but for the general public that thought abortions were supposed to be rare and remained blissfully unaware of the process, videos like these sent a powerful shockwave through the system.
Likewise, the specter (and knowledge) of fetal tissue harvesting has only grown as pro-choice advocates felt constrained by the liberality of their position and decided that if there was no problem with evacuating a clump of cells, in their words, then what was the real issue with harvesting those cells/organs for experimentation? Moreover, if the more complete the sample the better, what was to prevent a partial-birth harvesting operation from burgeoning among willing providers?
The University of Pittsburgh had already been collecting human fetal tissue for a decade when documents were released in 2021 that showed the University made a proposal to DHHS to become a multi-million-dollar “tissue hub” for human fetal tissue experimentation and “develop a pipeline to the acquisition, quality control and distribution of human genitourinary samples obtained throughout development,” that is, anywhere from 6 to 42 weeks gestation.
As part of a NIAID-funded study at Pittsburgh, 5-month-old aborted babies were scalped and their tissue sewed onto lab mice for the sake of science. The University seeks more aborted fetuses from black women than the proportion that those women represent in the population.
In an amicus brief for the Dobbs case, the outcome of DaVinci Biosciences and DV Biologics is recounted. In 2015, the organizations “admitted guilt for illegally selling human fetal tissue for valuable consideration from abortions at Planned Parenthood in southern California and were shut down in a $7.8 million settlement with the Orange County District Attorney.”
The brief also provides chilling quotes from abortion providers going on about their business. Here’s one:
“If we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, we can make it part of the budget that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this, that’s—it’s all just a matter of line items.”
—Melissa Farrell, Director of Research, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast
Former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam infamously told radio hosts that babies could be delivered and kept comfortable until the mothers decided what to do with them. No amount of “fact checks” could unring this bell…
In my opinion, the pro-choice side was made deeply vulnerable if not obsolete by advocates who vocalized their belief that abortion did in fact kill children and that it was no big deal…
“For millennia, those of us who have helped a friend terminate a pregnancy—be it with herbal abortifacients, progesterone blockers and ulcer tablets, or vacuum extraction devices—are well situated to understand that something is killed during a uterine evacuation, much as a flower dies when it is plucked. [. . .] When ‘pro-life’ forces agitate against feticide on the basis that it is killing, pro-abortion feminists should be able to acknowledge, without shame, that yes, of course it is.”
And here…
“I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.”
And this…
“It was grief. I’d had so many miscarriages. I say the following with the caveat that I am steadfast in being pro-choice. I was on a fertility journey at 44. The smallest cell was weighted with the expectation of life. A zygote was a baby, just on potential alone. When one of my eggs was examined, that was a baby. When Dwyane got a sperm analysis, that was a baby. Every swimmer was our baby. But when I miscarried in the first trimester, I never thought I had lost a baby baby. I had never let it count. Looking at the screen, I understood how many potential babies I had lost. That’s why I was crying. A floodgate of grief and sorrow overcame me, threatened to drown me.”
And finally…
“Dutifully, I went through the task of reassembling the fetal parts in the metal tray. It is an odd ritual that abortion providers perform – required as a clinical safety measure to ensure that nothing is left behind in the uterus to cause a complication – but it also permits us in an odd way to pay respect to the fetus (feelings of awe are not uncommon when looking at miniature fingers and fingernails, heart, intestines, kidneys, adrenal glands), even as we simultaneously have complete disregard for it.”
Those who argue that there are certain cases such as incest, rape, and medical emergencies that would justify abortion and subsequently point the finger at pro-life people for being a scourge in the fight to uphold these rare, perhaps reasonable procedures, simply do not have the grounds to point that finger. Rather, the arguments for the legitimacy of those rare procedures were disastrously harmed by the fact that the vast majority of America’s 60 million approved terminations were not a product of those rare conditions but rather of convenience.
By all means, let us reason together in light of those rare circumstances, but let’s be clear about why the pro-life side of the debate has extreme reservations in light of the unrestrained feticide/infanticide that has occurred in this country for five decades.
As the internet made historical information more widely available and pro-life arguments became more pointed, the industrial abortion provider Planned Parenthood had to wrestle with its brutal roots in racism and human rights abuses that cannot be easily distinguished from the act of abortion itself, regardless of the modern circumstance in which abortion takes place or by what reasoning it is justified.
Planned Parenthood finally decided to confront the fact that its founder, Margaret Sanger, “believed in eugenics — an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children.”
“Sanger’s belief in eugenics undermined reproductive freedom and caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and many others.” —Planned Parenthood
Sanger famously wrote in a letter to Clarence Gamble (the heir of Procter and Gamble and a member of the eugenics organization the Human Betterment League), “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
American media has fought tooth and nail to defend that statement, but even the most charitable reader must wrestle with the racial condescension it was written in and most importantly, why Sanger believed someone would raise such an objection in the first place. Indeed, why would anyone in the “Negro population” raise the objection that Sanger’s efforts were about extermination if they were so obviously not?
That, again, is the charitable reading.
According to Planned Parenthood, Sanger supported the SCOTUS decision handed down in Buck v. Bell that allowed the state to sterilize undesirables at will, resulting in the sterilization of 60,000 people in the 20th century, most of whom were black, brown, indigenous, and poor. In the 1970s, a quarter of all Native American women were sterilized within a six-year period.
In 1974, a D.C. district court found that 100,000 to 150,000 “low-income persons” had been sterilized annually using federal funds, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. It states:
“Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis, there is uncontroverted evidence in the record that minors and other incompetents have been sterilized with federal funds and that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization.”
This is Sanger’s legacy, one of racist and ableist population control that is the very foundation of the abortion movement. And while forced sterilization using federal funds has purportedly ended, state governments have continued forced sterilization into the 21st century.
Regarding the Buck decision, there was a previous SCOTUS decision regarding coerced vaccination that provided a line of reasoning for Buck. The Embryo Project Encyclopedia entry, funded by the National Science Foundation and Arizona State University, states:
“The Court ruled that the principle of compulsory vaccination, validated under Jacobson v. Massachusetts, was broad enough to allow for a woman’s Fallopian tubes to be cut. Holmes’s decision stated that,
‘Instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ ” (Those are actual words from the SCOTUS decision.)
The Buck and Jacobson decisions reflect the same rationale/world view undergirding the pro-choice movement and its astonishing arguments for mandatory and coerced injections during the COVID-19 pandemic. It shocked many to hear pro-choice advocates arguing for mandatory injections of experimental vaccine-like technology developed with the help of DARPA and produced by organizations like Pfizer who falsified data and violated patient safety protocols during the trials, as detailed in the British Medical Journal.
Being pro-choice and pro-coerced-vaccination, as it turns out, is on the surface a seeming inconsistency that, upon closer inspection, is historically consistent.
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
Today, modern arguments for abortion have descended into the worst kind of circular reasoning; that is, they became circular arguments dressed up in Ivy League sophistry. Take this short video featuring actor James Franco and a professor from Princeton several years ago that delivered a crippling blow to pro-choice intellectual credibility.
The pro-choice movement has seen better philosophical days, that is, that pro-choice philosophers once put forth well-reasoned arguments that if abortion were permissible on the basis that a fetus could not exercise a desire to live, then the same must be said of a baby up to some age.
“. . .it seems very difficult to formulate a completely satisfactory liberal position on abortion without coming to grips with the infanticide issue.” —Michael Tooley, arguing for the permissibility of abortion/infanticide in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1972
Of course, the argument also provides an obvious template for pro-life advocacy, and has led to many converting to a secular pro-life position because the logical outcome is unconscionable killing of babies. The more one considers and investigates arguments like these, the more one finds that fetuses in the womb and babies outside of the womb are just too much alike. Namely, they are both human beings.
The pro-choice movement will continue to inflict irreparable damage on itself due to its various state law propositions. Take California, which is now pushing barbaric, sub-human lines of reasoning to their logical conclusion by introducing legislation to prevent coroners from examining babies that died after they were delivered. In other words, up to an unspecified perinatal moment, any baby that dies due to “causes that occurred in utero” will not be subject to a coroner’s examination.
This law effectively legalizes infanticide because a coroner is not required to examine whether or not that baby actually died from causes that occurred in utero. Thus, far from being a matter of women’s health — which many will look back on as perhaps the most Orwellian doublespeak this country has ever come up with — the matter of abortion turns into what it has always been, a euphemism for uninhibited human oblation. Only, we are the gods this time.
Lest we forget, the practice and defense of abortion has become part and parcel of The Satanic Temple’s stomach-turning ritual practices.
Now, we may live in a world full of evil and blind rebellion against God, but most people regardless of individual immorality tend to get that sinking feeling that Satanism generally isn’t the way to go, even if it’s couched in assurances that the modern version is just a kind of atheist’s parody organization or a legal tactic used to co-opt religious freedom claims.
Even if it turned out abortion were good, moral, and right (despite all evidence, science, and natural reasoning demonstrating the contrary), an alignment with Satanism was never going to win hearts and minds in a country that prints money that says “In God We Trust.” The pro-choice movement’s fate was sealed from the beginning.
For the sake of all that is truly good, moral, and right in this world, Dobbs couldn’t have come soon enough.
“And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb.” —Luke 1:41
