Mercy Killing Five-Year-Olds
She tried the “Where do you draw the line?” argument. A young Facebook friend reported that she’d just got home from a college class that had taken up abortion. Most students treated it as self-evidently good.
If aborting an unborn child is all right, she asked them, what about killing a five-year-old? Classmates argued that yes, if a mother found her five-year-old too difficult to raise, killing him would be “more humane.” More humane, apparently, than letting him live with imperfect parenting. Or giving him to a family who wanted him.
They Saw the Trap
I’ve heard similar stories from younger friends and from those who talk a lot about abortion to other people. Years ago when I and others used that argument, the pro-choice people saw the trap below their feet and swerved away.
They agreed that we can’t kill newborns. That would be wrong. No one at the time would even have thought of suggesting five-year-olds as the example, because no one was that barbaric. Even the most ardent pro-choicer would have thought that the kind of thing only Nazis or Communists did.
But they didn’t think that through. If we can’t kill five-year-olds, we can’t kill newborns. If we can’t kill newborns, we—this is the logical conclusion they desperately wanted to avoid—can’t kill children just before birth, and we can’t kill them even weeks or months earlier when they could survive outside the womb. And if we can’t kill them then, how can we kill them before they can survive on their own? Why is that the line? And if being able to survive on their own is the line, why can’t we kill the disabled and others who can’t survive on their own?
The pro-choicer can’t win this argument. When I used it, they wisely didn’t try. They tried to redirect attention. Some denied the humanity of the unborn, most famously through the crude claim that the child was only a “clump of cells.” Others insisted on the mother’s right to bodily autonomy or self-determination, refusing to notice the child at all. The majority of the Supreme Court tried to distinguish the unborn by the trimester they’d reached.
The pro-choicers all tried to avoid the question of the continuity of the child’s humanity from his conception through his birth. They knew how decisively that undermined their claims.
Now They Admit It
Now, a couple decades later, judging from observation and the stories people more involved in public arguments tell, many pro-choice people don’t bother questioning the continuity. Formed by the generation who tried to deny it but failed, and by decades of legal abortion and the sexual culture it enables, many admit the baby not yet born shares the same humanity as the born baby. And conclude that therefore the born baby may be killed.
Some academics have argued this directly. Peter Singer notoriously, but others also, and they get a respectful hearing. A few years ago, two Australian bioethicists argued this in the Journal of Medical Ethics, one of the world’s major journals of its sort.
The two concluded that “If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the foetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the foetus and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.” They added, to avoid having to work out their argument’s grim implications, “we do not put forward any claim about the moment at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible.”
Comfortable with Infanticide
Seeing the continuity doesn’t make these people rethink abortion. It makes them comfortable with infanticide, and in at least one college class, the “mercy killing” of five-year-olds. They don’t move the moral line that they think justifies killing backwards, they move it forwards.
Most of them, I think, would refuse to apply their logic to any five-year-old they knew. They speak inhumanly because they don’t have living human beings in mind. And good. Still, they say what no one I spoke to years ago would have said. They accept the killing of children as a thing their theory of life approves. Why would this be? How could this be?
My guess is that we human beings can’t not see the humanity of other human beings. We know they’re the same kind of creature we are. After a certain point fairly early in pregnancy the unborn look like us. We remember that we were once as they are now. When we think about the matter at all, we follow or at least intuit the chain that connects the five-year-old with the newborn with the almost born with the fetus with the embryo with the zygote.
We have to work to deny it. Denying it requires blinding ourselves to something we see. Look at the struggle of the old apologists for slavery and the later apologists for segregation to make the distinction between races. Their arguments look comically (and tragically) implausible now. Even accounting for inherited prejudice and cultural blindness, at some level they must have known better.
If you see the continuity, and know you see it, yet approve of aborting the unborn, you will feel free to disregard the morally arbitrary lines of viability or birth or even childhood. You will not privilege anyone simply because she happened to be born and live a few years, if you have what you think a “humane” reason to kill her.
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I’d like to commend the new #MeStillMe movement began by Nicole Rowley. As Stephen Beale explains in the National Catholic Register: The movement tries to convey “the simple yet profound truth behind the pro-life movement in a way that philosophical and scientific arguments about personhood do not: the newborn infant outside the womb is the same person as the one depicted in the ultrasound, regardless of stage of development.”
Why draw the line at five years old? With this logic, anyone could kill anyone else if it was the convenient way to solve a problem. God help us!
In other words, by accepting the murder of the born as much as the unborn, they open the door to the murder of anyone being justifiable as “choice,” at least so long as you have a big enough posse behind you to keep you from the prison cell.
It sounds like our country is taking the breath before the plunge into complete lawlessness.
There really is no arguing with people who have decided that infanticide is okay. Reason is no longer a part of the mindset. All we can do now is hope for a government that will treat them like the murderers that they are. It is a shame that killing your child has to be re-criminalized.
I would not call them pro-choicers, even though that may be their word of choice, because they’re anti-choicers. They are against choosing life. They are pro-abortion,and some are pro-infanticide, pro-euthanasia, pro-death.
One abortion mill, (aka “clinic”), nurse once asked me, a pro-life sidewalk counselor, if any of the women who chose life for their babies had put their children up for adoption. I asked why she asked me that question. She said that her friend could not have children and wanted to adopt, but could not find babies to adopt. I asked her why she works helping to kill children, when there are many people who want to adopt them. Instantly defensive, she shot back, “It’s the woman’s body!”! I looked her in her eyes and said, “You know better than that! You’re a nurse. You know those babies in the wombs have separate DNA from their mothers!” I told her that I like to ask men questions out in front of the abortion mill. I ask the man making excuses for abortion, if he was his mother when he was inside her womb. I told her that, of course, the men get all upset and say, “No!”! The child is a separate human being with its own DNA, fingerprints, etc. After a few minutes of conversation, the abortion mill nurse said, “That’s one thing we agree on. It’s a child.” So I said, “Well, then, DON’T KILL IT!”! Pathetically, she went back inside the abortion mill to help with the killing again. Such convoluted thinking goes on all of the time by those working in the culture of death. It seems that a lot, if not all of the abortion mill workers, know somewhere deep down inside that what they are doing is very wrong, so they seem to disassociate with the truth and avoid all solid reasoning. They have to rationalize and make excuses and even make themselves champions of the cause for “women’s rights” or “saving the planet from a (false) population explosion problem”, since they are committing such terrible evil.
Often, they keep up a false front, for example telling people that it’s only a “blob of cells” or only an “unviable embryo or fetus”, etc. However, one abortion mill escort was annoyed with my presence and my work to try to save babies and help pregnant women that she told me I should go (away) to the IVF clinics to work. I asked her why she said that. She said, “Because, they kill babies, too!”!!! She knew exactly what or whom she was killing! Babies! She was killing babies and she admitted it out loud to me. She also, told me that I was going to Hell. She is a very mixed up individual. She must have killed or numbed her conscience years ago, since she did not seem bothered in the least by her work in helping to get women into the abortion mill to kill their babies. Many of the abortion mill escorts are wiccan/witches and despite their claim to do no harm, they do great harm since they help to get women inside to kill their babies. It’s very sick and very sad and they’re very brainwashed or spiritually confused. Please, pray for conversions of all those who are pro-abortion/pro-death. They are really the ones who are anti-choice, since they never give the babies a choice to live and the only choice they really want the mothers to make is killing. They make lots of money from the killing. They don’t even want to give the pregnant woman a choice to hear the pro-lifers talk or counsel. Pro-lifers like to call them out on their lack of allowing the pregnant women the choice to hear the other side and make a different decision, other than killing. Thank you for your interesting article.
The word abortion is a euphamism for infanticide, we should stop using the word and start labeling it acurately.: pre-term infanticide.
Pristine reason is beautiful to the soul and the intellect. Unfortunately logic is no longer taught because there is no more classical education in the governmemt schools, but rather PC emotionalism, feelings, are allowed in what passes for debate now.
To root out the issue, we need to walk it back before abortion to contraception. Contraception’s empty promise of “no unwanted children” hid the subtle evil that children are unwanted. Once we accept that premise, if we are logically consistent, eventually we are killing 5 year olds.
Spot on. Thank you David for being a voice of reason.
And the mainstream media, Hollywood, and other degenerate voters accuse Trump of being Hitler! Words cannot express my disgust at the appalling self-deception and hypocrisy of the social justice warriors who scream at us the current president is the bad guy, or worse, these are not political concerns. The Communist party coined the phrase “social justice” making it a political term.
“And if we can’t kill them then, how can we kill them before they can survive on their own?”
Good article, but there is a falsity assumed in the phrase above, and that falsity is that newborns CAN survive on their own. In fact, there is no decreased dependency possessed by a newborn over a pre-born child. The only difference is that the newborn may possibly be dependent on another than his/her mother.
An infant is no better able to survive “on its own” than is a pre-born baby.
The sentence refers to the unborn before they can survive outside the womb.
Father Pavone came to this conclusion many years ago. May God Bless Priests for Life.
Enough talk. It’s time to expose the true horrors of abortion. Billboards should be covered with aborted fetuses! There should be pamphlets mailed to every household informing the detailed murder of the unborn. Schools should be required to show an actual abortion procedure. The lies are working because all we are doing is talking. Seeing is believing!
The Moabites did it!!! and the Aztec indians.
Now citizens of the USA are doing it!!!
After all God has done for this country!!! What a betrayal!!!
I hate to think of what chastisement God is going to bring on us.
This is a series of concentric social standards. Once a single initial standard of “justifiable killing” becomes accepted, it just becomes a series of broader standards, one at a time, and a series of concentrically smaller circles of who is inside the circle of “safety”. And as each standard becomes the new norm, another broadened “acceptable” group is added, and the next smaller “safe circle” is drawn. This continues until there is no safe zone at all, and lawlessness reaches its logical conclusion.
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