National Day of Prayer and Fasting
I decidednot to eat today. It is not a difficult decision, seeing as how what is being voted on in the halls of power in my nation could turn the stomach of even an indifferent man.
Today they are voting, among other things, whether or not to fund aborticide with my tax dollars. Those dollars represent hours and days of my life I have spent doing useful work, hours I would have rather spent doing something else. They are taking those little bits and pieces of my life work and devoting them to convincing mothers to kill off their own babies in the womb.
Now, I am sure at this point someone is objecting: "But small organisms of the genus homo sapiens growing in the womb are not really people! Not ‘people’ people. A person is only ‘people’ if I say so! If I say otherwise, then they are Untermenschen, merely niggers, not people like us. I mean, in the later stages of development, they might look like babies and do things like feel pain and so on, but they are merely animals. Babies are vermin. Babies are parasites. No mother is supposed to love her child! Mother must destroy their children, and the smaller and more helpless the child is, the more important it is to have the little creature killed! At all costs, the mother must not make an informed decision, and must not see any ultrasound images of the baby growing in her, or else she may form an irrational emotional attachment to what we Brights know to be merely a cluster of cells in motion!"
Well, whether this argument has merit or not, the simple fact of the matter is that in a free country based on toleration of religion it is not desirable to provoke the majority by committing crimes and abominations using public funds that offend their deeply-held and ancient religious beliefs. Would we force Hindus in India to pony up tax dollars to kill their sacred cows? Or use public tax money taken from Mohammedans to fund a program to wipe pig feces on copies of the sacred Koran, lavishly illustrated by pictures of Mohammad? No? We Christians are not shown the same deference this government shows to practitioners of Witchcraft or worshipers of UFO people. Our taxes are being used to pay for killing something (or someone) growing in his mothers womb we (rightly or wrongly) regard to be made in the image and likeness of God.
I have noticed children, when they see a pregnant woman on the street, ask to go up and touch her belly where her baby is, and they smile and giggle as if they are touching something sacred and beautiful. I have overheard the grown-ups nearby ask the mother if she knows the sex of the baby. I have never once heard a child ask to touch the belly of a woman where a ‘fetus’ is growing. I have never once heard a grown up ask the mother if she knows the sex of her ‘fetus.’ No one outside of rhetorical argument uses this term to refer to the baby: properly speaking, the term ‘fetus’ refers to the stage of growth of an organism, not to the species or genus of the organism. The language is fundamentally dishonest, as if we were to claim that an adolescent human being was not a human being because he was a ‘teen.’
I have never understood how a growing organism could have a sex (from the moment of conception, the organism has either XX or XY chromosomes) but somehow lacks membership in Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, or Species. The male or female offspring of a homo sapiens is male or female, animal father than vegetable, and from the genes one can determine he or she is mammalian, primate, and so on, but humanity is something the mother decides?
Is the argument that the child is utterly dependent on the mother, and therefore in the mother’s power, ergo the mother has the right to use that power to help or harm the child as she sees fit? The same argument could be made about any prisoner in a camp under the control ofa sadistic guard. Merely having the power to kill does not grant the right to kill.
Or is the argument merely that undeveloped or unintelligent humans, humans who cannot talk and walk upright, are weak and therefore easy prey? Or perhaps the argument is that in the early stages they don’t look enough like us to be human? I could say the same thing about my toothless old grandfather, and if he is senile and bedridden, I could make the same argument about his humanity. A senile old man in a sick bed cannot do a quadratic equation in his head, ergo I can kill him for the inheritance, yes?
The arguments along these lines are too demented to merit serious refutation. Merely repeating what they say, but saying it in honest, non-misleading words, is sufficient to show its true ugliness and inhumanity.
The Church has asked all her loyal sons and daughters to spend this day and prayer and fasting to pray for the opposition of public funding for abortion. The Church makes no comment on the wisdom of using public funds for preempting the health insurance industry: that is a prudential matter left to the conscience of the individual. But abortion, like genocide and eugenics of our parents’ day, like the slavery of our grandparent’s day, is a profound moral issue, where all Christians of any denomination, and all men of good will of any faith, and all honest men whatsoever, must join to oppose with an absolute opposition, or else stand condemned in the eyes of history.
Future generations looking back will condemn us as we condemn the Nazi sympathizers from the 1930’s, who were lulled by a vision of the human race bred like dogs to produce the supermen into cooperating, albeit they did not know, with genocide; or, more apt, as we condemn the Aztecs, whose cruel superstitions stained the stepped pyramids of Mexico with the smoking blood of countless human sacrifices.
Even those of you who hate Christianity, if you love freedom, are invited to join us. The Good Book says that there are some dark spirits that only can be expelled with fasting and prayer: Moloch, who demands the sacrifice of innocent children, is one of them. Even if Moloch is a fable, the spirit, the frame of mind, that regards pregnancy as an expendable nuisance, is not.
If you have the stomach for it, you can behold what it is we are actually talking about here.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
