Black is white! Up is down! Pro-life = abortions!
While checking my hotmail account, a link to this Slate article came up on the MSN home page.
The article/post/column by Timothy Noah is something of a metacommentary/book review (see all the choices I'm giving you by using slashes--very pro-choice), exhorting people to go read T.R. Reid's The Healing of America.
Nash gives the book high praise, explaining how if pro-lifers were really interested in curbing abortion rather than meddling in other people's lives, they would embrace the current health care reform bill as the best means of reducing abortions.
The brilliant simplicity of Reid's argument, according to Noah, is the following:
That sounds great, doesn't it?
If we give women better health care, they are statistically less likely to have abortions.
Fewer abortions means more life, right?
If the country follows the pro-life argument, then Noah rather bluntly argues
I can't help but think that Noah sounds a bit like Yoda pontificating faulty syllogisms in the Jedi Council scene of The Phantom Menace (Fear leads to Anger...Anger leads to Hate...Hate leads to Suffering).
Of course, there's a significant problem Noah seems to be overlooking.
Pro-life people don't want to be complicit in abortions through government health care.
Noah's logic also sounds like another film character -- the Joker from The Dark Knight. He's setting up a scenario where Americans either have to be complicit in a horrid atrocity and cut their losses or take a moral stand against evil and let even more people die. Either you can press the detonator that blows up the ship with the convicted felons...or let innocent people die when the felons decide to blow up the other ship first. Kill these babies with your own tax dollars as a means of preventing people from killing babies they would keep if you didn't fork over cash.
Actually, if you put it that way, Noah is essentially holding the nation's youth for a ransom of a health care bill.
Don't you see, America!?!? You have to pay the ransom now or the abortionists will kill even MORE babies! So just pay the ransom, and a minimal number of innocent lives will be slaughtered! Surrender to the Democrats demands, or even more babies will get it, see?
We'd balk at this kind of argument if it were coming out of the mouth of a terrorist...but somehow we are supposed to see the wisdom of adhering to it when it comes from the left?
What Noah seems to miss...as do all pro-choice advocates...is that pro-lifers view abortion as murder. You can't compromise on murder. You can't ask someone to be complicit in a certain number of murders as a lesser of two evils. You can't say, "Here, why don't you damn yourself twelve times over in order to prevent a million people from damning themselves one time each."
That's not how morality works...certainly not for any pro-lifer who is faithful. Which is, I suppose, the other major point that pro-choice advocates forget. While the pro-life argument can be made on grounds of natural law, human reason, and science, the individual pro-lifer still has religious convictions.
The pro-lifer has more at stake in life than merely preserving it.
If pro-lifers were all materialist-atheists, then Noah's argument would make perfect sense. It would, perhaps, be the greater good for the world as such.
But what would it gain a pro-lifer to save the world at the cost of his soul?
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Posted by: Ahmad | April 10, 2010 at 03:19 AM