The True Extremists

Image from Planned Parenthood's Website

 

Joshua Tree, CA – After the recent videos which surfaced purportedly showing Planned Parenthood members talking and joking about the killing of unborn infants and selling their body parts, because, in the words of one apparent Planned Parenthood employee, she wanted to buy a Lamborghini, Planned Parenthood temporarily shut down its website, leaving up a screenshot saying that “due to an attack by extremists" they were forced to pull the website from the internet. (The image has since been pulled.)

One is left wondering how we ever got to this. Throughout the sixties thousands marched and sat-in and stood out and protested and yelled and begged and pleaded for the civil rights movement. And it really seemed that we were moving towards rights for all. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed, reaffirming the principles in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. But just less than a decade after that, in one sweeping blow the Supreme Court of the United States, in the 1973 case Roe V. Wade stole the rights of an entire class of humans, who could now be killed legally without any redress to the courts. The unborn child, in its first twenty weeks, could now be “aborted” as if it were some experiment gone wrong.

In America, the extremists are supposed to be those who deny people rights. The racists, the bigots, the sexists. So how did we get to calling those who want to protect the unborn as extremists? Perhaps it is because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument. It has been painted this way: anyone who tries to legislate to protect the unborn fetus is taking away a woman’s basic right to control her body, and thus continuing the war on women.

But what they are forgetting or simply ignoring is that they are killing a child. When a child comes out of the womb, when it is born on the day we call its birthday, it is no doubt a human being. And of course, three seconds before that time it was also a human being, and three seconds before that, and before that. The only time, the “breaking point” in the existence of a human life must be at conception, there is no other time you can say it is not alive. And so yes, pro-lifers believe in the right to privacy just as much as the next person. However there is a much more sacred and fundamental right and that is the right to life. And speaking of a war on women, little, precious baby girls and aborted every day.

The argument made by those who are pro-choice today reminds one of another argument, that of the slave owners, in the 1850s. They believed that they had a right to their “property” (i.e. slaves) because they had purchased them. But they were ignoring that there is a far more fundamental right, as listed in the Declaration of Independence, and that is of liberty. So in the same way liberty must trump any phony arguments about “property,” there can be no consideration which trumps that of the life of a human being. Not even that of “privacy.”

(There must certainly be the consideration of the life of a mother, and of course, under the best medical advice, no mainstream pro-life advocates would not agree that there are circumstances when painful but necessary actions must be taken, but again they are in the cause of saving a human life, in this case the mother’s, from imminent danger.)

So indeed, Planned Parenthood seems to have the wrong extremists. The Founding Fathers penned a document on which they staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors. In 1901, in Cotting v. Godard, the Supreme Court declared that the Constitution itself must be read in the spirit of that document, the Declaration of Independence. And this document states that “all men are created equal, are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these rights is life…”

A new generation, much like the slave owners of the 1850s or the racists of the 1960s seems to have appeared. And they have fine sounding arguments about why they can kill the unborn, but of course they are as wrong as were those other two groups, and, like those who tried to halt progress in the past, and allow black, Asians, Hispanics, etc. to lose their rights, those who try to deprive unborn children of theirs are on the wrong side of history. Indeed in a thousand years mankind will look back at this time and perhaps shudder with horror at what so called “civilized folks” allowed to happen within their own neighborhoods.

In every generation there are those who come along and try to say that for some reason or other, someone should not have the full rights of a human being. But they are always, in the west at least, defeated, and these people will also go the way of all the others. And when the history books are written of this time, a tale will be told of those who sought to destroy life for profit, for votes, or simply out of ignorance, or fear. And in that day it will be said of these people “they were extremists.”

Andrew C. Abbott