Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Texas’ recently enacted abortion ban, S.B. 8. The law—which was (wrongly) enjoined by a federal district court in Texas on Wednesday—outlaws abortion after six weeks. It also authorizes private citizens to file a lawsuit against any person who provides an abortion or against any person who “aids or abets” such an abortion (including by paying for it), regardless of whether that person knows the abortion is prohibited or even intends to engage in such conduct. If the action is successful, S.B. 8 authorizes $10,000 in damages to be awarded to the plaintiff.
S.B. 8 has been slandered as a “vigilante law” (but this is an oxymoron; vigilantism is when someone acts outside the law to secure some end that they perceive the law should be securing but isn’t—think Batman) and as promoting “bounty hunting,” which is Very Bad (but this is a hypocritically self-serving attack because private enforcement of laws is not at all foreign to the Western legal tradition; indeed, California itself, certainly not a conservative paradise, shows that such a scheme is not unprecedented, as it’s had a law on the books for years—the “Private Attorneys General Act”—which authorizes aggrieved employees to file lawsuits to recover civil penalties on behalf of themselves, other employees, and the State of California for Labor Code violations).
Because there’s plainly no issue with the form of the law, it’s clear that the hair-on-fire hyperventilating about S.B. 8 is substantive. S.B. 8 effectively ends the practice of contract-killing unborn children in the Lone Star State. Such horrific acts (euphemistically called “abortions”) are a “positive social good.” Therefore, for progressives of all stripes, S.B. 8 is the height of liberty-denying wickedness. Q.E.D.
Two things about the hearings are worth flagging because they show just how unmoored from reality and common sense we have become on this issue, something that’s been helped along by transgenderism.
Normalizing abortion requires linguistic rape
At the hearing before the House, abortionist Ghazaleh Moayedi stated, “I know firsthand that abortion saves lives, for the thousands of people I’ve cared for abortion is a blessing, abortion is an act of love, abortion is freedom” (emphasis added). It’s nearly impossible to overstate how insane that statement is. Let’s examine it.
Every single time an abortion is performed successfully, a baby dies. Without exception. Abortion is by definition not a life-saving act. Only pure sophistry, and a world it has taken hostage, could seriously think otherwise.
Moreover, a blessing is a gift from God, something good in the eyes of God. No sound understanding of God can countenance the idea that He sanctions the slaughter of vulnerable, powerless innocents, let alone blesses the practice. To call abortion a “blessing” is to do severe violence both to the English language and to honest thought. It is to rationalize barbarism for the sake of convenience.
Love is “willing the good of the other” (or, perhaps even more fundamentally, “the conformity of the heart to some good”). One cannot will the good of someone they plot to kill. To conform one’s heart to abortion is to conform it to murder, which is self-evidently a wicked, not a good, thing. Abortion is not loving. It is selfish, which is just another way of saying it’s satanic.
Finally, freedom is not the power to do whatever one pleases but the ability to do what one ought. Freedom is not aimless; rather, it is ordered to the good, both personal and common. Freedom is not negative, the mere absence of constraint; instead, it is positive, virtue in action. On this view, it is impossible to think that violently removing an unborn child from the world is an expression of freedom. In reality, it’s an expression of slavery, of tyranny—rule for private gain. It is to exercise arbitrary power over the life of another unique human person, created free and equal by Almighty God.
Abortion is a blessing. Abortion is an act of love. Abortion is freedom.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
1984, anyone?
Abortion isn’t even a “women’s issue” anymore
If you can believe it, this situation actually gets even more ridiculous. This raging dumpster fire gets gasoline poured on it in the form of gender theory, resulting in the near-instant acceleration of this insanity. How so?
Well, I’ll let pro-abortion activist Maleeha Aziz explain. She slams crisis pregnancy centers, hoping that they “all shut down because they exist to manipulate and prey on vulnerable pregnant --”
Ok. Surely she must say “women”—“pregnant women,” right?
Oh, you poor, naïve reader. Let Ms. Aziz—who has a favorite “abortion movie” and advice for good snacks to munch on while contemplating the existence of the yawning void in your now-empty womb—educate you:
I just wanted to acknowledge that a lot of people are being left out of this conversation today because as we know, people get pregnant and not just women. But I hear people over and over and over again say, “Women get pregnant.” But that’s excluding people that should be a part of this conversation.
Wowza.
Back in the simpler days of 2020, some people wanted doctors to have full license to use whatever medical instruments were necessary to “evacuate products of conception.” Clinical, clean. Only a misogynistic bigot could oppose that. Others, however, insisted that it hit(wo)men who happen to have MDs should not be legally permitted to use their training to deploy forceps, clamps, suctions, and saline shots to destroy unborn babies—and that to insist otherwise was actually the real anti-woman position.
In 2021, though?
We can’t even agree that we’re dealing with women and women alone. Because . . . men can get pregnant!
There aren’t even words for this level of madness. It’s utterly, insanely brazen. It’s like a taunt to a normal person, daring him to waste his time refuting it. But, of course, someone who believes men can get pregnant is beyond the help of rational debate; they’re lost to ideology. The best we can do is pray to God, that He might see fit to call them back to the realm of truth.
In a way, however, this is a supremely fitting penultimate phase a nearly-50-years-old regime of legalized, ritualistic child sacrifice on the altar of the idol of #girlbossery. Abortion was always and obviously an assault on the clearest possible expression of femininity: pregnant motherhood. That we can no longer even say that we’re dealing uniquely with women anymore when we talk about abortion is a testament to the wild success of pro-abortion position.
It’s very clear that overturning Roe v. Wade is just the first step, albeit a necessary one, in this struggle for justice.
We have an entire culture to save.
I don't know whether to be aghast that the ACLU is changing the words of virulent right-winger Ruth Bader Ginsburg to meet the new linguistic standards or to be happy that my lack of a uterus is no longer an obstacle to my having an opinion on abortion.
In all seriousness, I agree completely. What we are dealing with truly is an absurdity at this point. Men cannot get pregnant. No man ever has been pregnant. For men to insist that we can become pregnant (or do or be any of the other things that are distinctly a province of the female sex) is, at this point, approaching the levels of offensiveness normally seen only in a minstrel show.
Of course, the other linguistic lies you describe are also absurd, and you do a good thing in calling them out. I hope that, as the abortion movement leaves behind "safe, legal, and rare" in favor of "blessed, life-saving, and liberating," people see more evidently the need to take a stand against this atrocity. But I fear that, instead, they will successfully shift the overton window such that the old "yes, abortion is bad but it is also necessary, so let's keep it around for that reason" becomes the other pole in the debate, and pro-lifers are recast as extremists not worthy of consideration. Either way, the answer to lies is always truth, and the answer to violence is acts of life-saving love, both in the crisis pregnancy center and in the legislature.
Bravo, Deion! I know there's a long tradition in Catholicism of "natural law". Seems to me that the leftist position on abortion is based on...the exact opposite of natural law, whatever that is. Do you Papists (said with love) have a word for that?