By John F. Di Leo -
Reflections as the abortion lobby reaches its ultimate logical conclusion…
There’s a moment I recall from childhood… long ago… when I reacted in shock at some horrible story in the newspaper (The Today? The Daily News? I don’t recall. Chicago had more newspapers then)… only to see my mother unexpectedly shake her head in resignation, as if to say it wasn’t that unusual at all, and she said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
In some areas, of course, the goal is indeed for there to be something new… inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, problem-solvers all hope to come up with something new, rather than repeating what has come before. But by contrast, the sort of things that make it into a big city paper are generally things that you don’t want more of; you want less of them.
Every day, you hope not to become more jaded, more depressed, or more sickened by another story that brought a new twist to government overspending, to regulatory overreach, to family tragedies, to the urban crime that never seems to let up.
Every day, we see the reports, and we pray that the evils of the past will end for good… and we pray that we won’t be shocked by another mass murder, another terrorist attack, another sellout by members of government, another infringement upon our liberties by the very people hired to protect them.
Tragically, however, some of the things we think were gone for good do indeed return with a vengeance, too often because of conscious policy choices by a severely misguided government agency or political faction.
Measles, polio, and tuberculosis were ended in America… then we threw open the borders and threw out the old health checks for immigrants. All of a sudden, there are cases of these diseases and more, brought in by Third World immigrants – both legal and illegal – and spread through classrooms and playgrounds to innocent children who did nothing wrong but to live in a country that invites diseases in, wholesale. On purpose.
Crime was dropping, even as the nation grew – an unexpected statistical change – thanks to the modernization of criminal justice methods, with computer databases and longer, surer sentences…. But not in our biggest cities, where sanctuary city status invites illegal alien drug gangs in, and lenient big city systems release known criminals far sooner than they should, pouring the violence right back into the neighborhoods from which the criminals came. On purpose.
Bigotry even – the family of irrational skin-color prejudices as old as the hills – was slowly being conquered in America, until a music industry without morals, and a political class without honor, chose to consciously foment division. They now do their best to separate America along lines of rich and poor, black and white, Hispanic and Asian. Today we are more divided than we’ve been in a century, largely thanks to race hustlers with 300 cable channels and countless radio stations at their disposal. On purpose.
So, no, “nothing is new under the sun.” We solve problems, then we invite them back in.
Perhaps there are some in society with short memories? People who haven’t read their history, so they just don’t know? Or perhaps there are some who like such problems, because they give a meddlesome government even more to do?
Learning from History
Studies of recent history tell us what socialist governments did to children in the 20th century.
The National Socialists of Germany – the Third Reich, as they called it – took children by the busload and trainload to their camps, to wipe them out by the thousands.
Under Chairman and Madame Mao, Mainland China mandated a “one child policy,” in which the government didn’t necessarily kill your kid, but if you had more than one, you were encouraged to leave your newborn outside to die of exposure, rather than to offend the Politburo in far off Beijing by violating policy.
Whether one by one, or in mass production by the thousands, the socialists who won control of so many countries in the last century gained quite a reputation as caretakers of the public weal. Sometimes, it takes a village to kill a child.
But even socialists and their thirst for human blood isn’t new; intentional murder of the innocents has a long pedigree in the annals of human history.
When news came to the Roman vassal Herod that a Messiah might indeed have been born, Herod gave an order that all boys under two were to be killed immediately.
Earlier, when the Romans needed to build a case for war against their rival Carthage, they shared the tales of the horrible child sacrifice practiced by Carthage’s ghastly religion: marching babies and toddlers into the mouth of “Baal of the Furnace.” We still don’t know how widespread the practice was, but we know from the archeological record that it happened, and even the Romans were horrified enough by the practice to wipe Carthage off the face of the earth.
And earlier still, the ancient Greeks – in far more limited quantity – practiced – when they thought necessary – the concept of leaving an unwanted or somehow “cursed” child outside in the elements, to die of exposure.
The theory there – with the ancient Greco-Romans – was that the parent didn’t really kill his child; he just left him outside, in the hands of the gods. If the gods wanted the child to live, they could take care of him; if the child died, it was the gods who didn’t help, so it must have been their will. “They had their chance.“ Strangely contorted logic, to our eyes, perhaps, but that’s how they thought about it.
One could not be blamed for thinking that such concepts were conquered long ago. This rhetorical stretch – “I didn’t kill him, I just didn’t help him” – is one that would never stand up in a modern age of educated, sensible people, would it?
We know what children need, and for that matter, we know what all people need: nutritious nourishment, clean air, food and shelter – and for helpless, innocent newborns, it’s the job of one’s parents to provide such necessities. And it’s a crime if they don’t.
Obvious, right?
The Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act
This week, the United States Senate sank to a new low, when Senator Ben Sasse’s bill, the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” was defeated, essentially on party lines.
The bill was a reaction to a growing trend by the abortion lobby to push the end-date of legal abortion ever further along. When abortion was first encouraged, generations ago, it was only encouraged in the first few months of pregnancy. People could force themselves to believe that “it’s not really a person yet” when that early “lump of cells” doesn’t yet look like a human being.
The pro-life movement warned of the slippery slope argument – that they may only be trying for early term now, but they’ll be back for more, wait and see. It’s easy for partisans to dismiss such an argument as fearmongering, but it has happened indeed, as the abortion lobby has pushed for all restrictions to be lifted, and for abortion to be legal at any time, for any reason.
For a long time, the abortion lobby argued that the child didn’t merit full rights until “viability” – that moment when a premature birth could occur and the child would be able to survive outside the womb. But even this argument was proven to be weak, as improvements in technology enable us to save children born ever earlier… once, a child would not have been viable until seven or eight months… then, five or six… today, children can be saved if delivered even earlier. It turns out that “viability” isn’t a measure of the child at all, but a measure of our hospital’s technology. Not a fair way to calculate the rights of an innocent child, is it?
And now, in 2019, we have seen an effort – successfully in some jurisdictions, to our undying shame – to legalize a practice in which an abortion is attempted, but the child is delivered still alive. Surely in such a case, once the child emerges from the womb, the law must kick in and protect that child, right?
Surely, once a child is born alive, the law would require the parents and doctors to care for the child. All that fiction about the kid not being a human must go out the window once the child is born. That’s what we’ve always been promised.
But no, as we have learned from investigative journalists in recent years, there are cases in which children of “botched abortions” survive, and the abortionists want to kill them, and usually do… either by continuing the ghastly processes outside the womb that they usually do inside the womb, “under the cover of night” so to speak… or by simply leaving the child out, to die of exposure on a shelf.
So the abortion lobby asked their legislative allies for preemptive legal protection, and there are now laws – such as the newest one in New York state – allowing the abortionist to kill a newborn child, just because abortion was, after all, the intent, so the difference between pre-born and already-born shouldn’t make a difference. Today, in New York, you can kill an innocent child. It’s the ultimate proof that the slippery slope argument was never an exaggeration, but was right all along.
Senator Sasse therefore reintroduced his federal bill, The Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, and a sufficient portion of the Senate defeated it in the cloture roll call, by order of Planned Parenthood and their affiliated lobbyists, on February 25, 2019.
For a long time, we couldn’t protect a child before he or she was born… on the premise that there was some magical difference between a moment before birth and a moment after. But this is jarring: the USA can no longer even pass a bill that protects a newborn child from the abortionist’s tools.
Let us never again question the arguments of the slippery slope. Every law is indeed a potential foundation for future expansion; we need to think carefully about every policy choice, before setting it in motion. Abortion in hard cases paved the way, first, to abortion on demand for any reason, and now even to an act which can only be called infanticide.
We rightly attack the Nazis for their gas chambers, the Khmer Rouge for their killing fields, the Soviets for their dekulakization. We rightly hate the memories of Bloody Ban Tarleton for executing surrendering colonial soldiers in the 18th century, and the Czarist pogroms for murdering innocent Jews in the 19th and 20th.
But we have truly lost our moral compass, if we refuse to protect the most innocent among us, our newborn children, from being killed by people who profess to be doctors.
They can use a scalpel, or a chemical, or even just a table, and leave the newborn on a shelf to die of exposure, and in some states, there’s nothing we can do about it. The newest instrument of the abortionist is the oldest murder weapon of all – exposure.
The United States of America were never perfect, but we always strove for improvement. We always tried to be the embodiment of the libertarian philosophy of the Enlightenment, the culmination of Western Civilization. Our goal was to spread freedom and opportunity to all Americans, rich and poor, black and white. We didn’t start out that way, but we did start out with the Founders’ goals of ever moving in that direction.
With this one heart-rending change – the virtual legalization of infanticide – we step backwards into barbarism… returning to those days, thousands of years ago, when the most innocent among us could be killed without fear of reprisal. The abortion movement has finally reached its logical conclusion, and America is no longer the America that it was meant to be.
Copyright 2019 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based Customs broker, trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
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