“It is shameful and
disgraceful that this measure should be before Congress” – U.S. Senator
Dick Blumenthal
Even on a contentious issue such as abortion, it may be
possible for people to draw proper distinctions between health care and
abortion. Those who confuse the two ought to be asked to furnish four instances
in which an abortion not performed to save the physical life of a mother improves the
“health care” of the mother. Abortions performed after 20 weeks of a pregnancy
-- the point at which, scientists tell us, the fetus feels pain -- certainly do nothing to improve the heath care of an aborted baby.
Some argue that the fetus is not a person until it emerges
from the womb and is wanted by the mother. But personhood is a legal not a
scientific term, and legal terms are decided by legislators and lawyers and
judges. In 1857, the highest court in the land decided that Dred Scott, a slave
who had resided in a Free State and territory where slavery was prohibited, was
not a person in the eyes of the law but the property of his owner. There are
only two kinds of law: those affecting persons and those affecting property. The
question whether a slave was a person, Blumenthal might agree, was by no means
settled in 1857. The question the court decided in 1857 was definitively settled,
oceans of spilled blood later, by the sword.
Today, Planned Parenthood argues that the fetus, at all
stages of a pregnancy, is the property of the woman in whose body it
resides. A woman who wishes to give birth to a fetus beyond the third
trimester commonly – and correctly -- refers to her baby as “my baby.” Planned
Parenthood and Blumenthal, not unfriendly to restrictions when he was
Attorney General in Connecticut, may wish to abort all restrictions touching
abortion. We ought not to wonder at this: abortion is, for Planned Parenthood,
a profitable enterprise. However, neither Planned Parenthood nor Blumenthal,
its white-hatted defender in the Senate, owns the English language, and long
after the issue whether a fetus feels pain after 20 weeks is settled
– hopefully by science rather than the sword – pregnant mothers will continue
to refer to the fruit of their wombs as babies.
A hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton remarked, “What
is quaintly called Birth Control… is in fact, of course, a scheme for
preventing birth in order to escape control.”
Chesterton considered language important; distortions in the
social sphere usually begin with a gross distortion of language. That is the
central message of George Orwell in “1984.” Chesterton did not stop there. He
thought the pro–abortionists of his day were excessively sentimental. “We can
always convict such people of sentimentalism by their weakness for euphemism.
The phrase they use is always softened and suited for journalistic appeals.
They talk of free love when they mean something quite different, better defined
as free lust. But being sentimentalists they feel bound to simper and coo over
the word ‘love.’ They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less
birth and no control. We could smash them to atoms, if we could be as indecent
in our language as they are immoral in their conclusions.”
Chesterton’s attack on abortion was an off-shoot of his
attack on eugenics. When challenged, people less energetic than Chesterton produce
arguments. Chesterton produced books. Some people consider Chesterton’s book “Eugenics
and Other Evils,” to be prophetic.
Eugenics and abortion were then, and are now, intimately
connected. Margaret Sanger, the secular deity behind Planned Parenthood, was a
member of the American Eugenics Society AND the editor of the Birth Control
Review. Her guiding faith was displayed prominently on the cover of the Birth
Control Review: “More Children for the Fit. Less for the Unfit.” The unfit
were “Hebrews, Slavs, Catholics, and Negroes.” She set up her Birth Control
clinics only in the neighborhoods of those to be eliminated. She thought such
people should apply for official permission to have babies “as immigrants have
to apply for visas.”
It’s quite understandable why Blumenthal would wish to vote
against a bill that restricted abortion to 20 weeks, the point at which, reputable
scientists say, an unborn child feels pain. Blumenthal is sensitive enough to
feel everyone’s pain, but there are limits, even to compassion. It is less
understandable why Blumenthal should feel “It is shameful and disgraceful that
this measure should be before Congress.” The
bill rejected by Connecticut two US Senators would have been accepted in nearly
all prominent European counties. Apparently, Blumenthal is unaware that in most advanced European countries
Is it possible Blumenthal does not wish his vote against
such a bill to appear on his legislative record because it might, at some
future date, shame him?
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