Thursday, October 06, 2022

Elective Abortion has Nothing to Do with Reproductive Health Care

(Bolles Harbor, Monroe)
(I'm keeping this ball in play.)

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, 
as though by instinct, 
at the threshold of any dangerous thought. 
It includes the power of not grasping analogies, 
of failing to perceive logical errors, 
of misunderstanding the simplest arguments 
if they are inimical to *Ingsoc, 
and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought 
which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. 
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

George Orwell
1984
P. 132

For example:
Abortion is Reproductive Health. 

Princeton jurisprudential professor Robert P. George, in Conscience and Its Enemies, argues that abortion has nothing to do with "reproductive health." So, the Reproductive Health Act, in an Orwellian move, is misnamed and, as such, misleading.

George writes:

"The question at issue in abortion is not “reproductive health” or health of any kind, precisely because direct abortions are not procedures designed to make sick people healthy or to protect them against disease or injury. Again, pregnancy is not a disease. The goal of direct abortions is to cause the death of a child because a woman believes that her life will be better without the child’s existing than it would be with the child’s existing. In itself, a direct (or elective) abortion—deliberately bringing about the death of a child in utero—does nothing to advance maternal health (though sometimes the death of the child is an unavoidable side effect of a procedure, such as the removal of a cancerous womb, that is designed to combat a grave threat to the mother’s health). That’s why it is wrong to depict elective abortion as health care." (Kindle Location 2777; emphasis mine)

Elsewhere George writes:

“A huge irony: The NY law authorizing the killing of babies in the third trimester PROVES that the aim of the abortion lobby is NOT the protection of maternal health in circumstances of hazardous pregnancy, but is rather the right to destroy an unwanted child whose existence poses no risk to maternal health (in any sense of the term ‘health’ that amounts to anything other than a rationalization for killing unwanted babies). The only reason to kill rather than deliver a child in the third trimester of pregnancy and gestation is that the woman (or someone who is pressuring her to abort) wants the child to be dead rather than alive. It's the child's *existence*, not the pregnancy, which poses the alleged, ‘health’ risk. The pregnancy can be ended (‘terminated’) by delivering the baby alive, rather than killing him or her. So do you see the see the sophistry in the argument for abortion here? It's glaring.”

In other words, if the mother's health is at risk, and the third-trimester child is **"viable" outside the womb, why not deliver the child rather than kill it? 

Because...   this baby is unwanted.

_____

* "Ingsoc" - The English Socialist Party, better known as Ingsoc, is the fictional political party of the totalitarian government of Oceania in Orwell's 1984.

** I see no good reason to accept "viability" as the tipping point for determining human value. "Viability" is another example of Orwellian "newspeak," meeting the ideological requirements of a secular political culture.