We’ve been trying to make sense of the controversy over a Canadian doctor’s proposal that doctors be prohibited from telling parents the gender of their children until 30 weeks into a pregnancy.  Editorial by Dr. Rajendra Kale here.  Coverage from here and here.  Favorable commentary in the Calgary Herald here; opposition in the Ottawa Citizen here.

According to Dr. Kale, who is from India, “Female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male-to-female ratio in some ethnic groups.”

Reaction has been mixed, but a narrative is beginning to emerge:

1. It’s a perfectly acceptable choice to abort your baby if the child might be poor, might delay the attainment of educational goals, is incompatible with the parent’s chosen lifestyles,  might be handicapped, etc.  In fact, for any reason or for no reason at all.
2. Abortion to kill a baby because the parents wanted a different gender is “abhorrent” and “deplorable” and “repugnant.”
3. Abortion should be an absolute right, except when it shouldn’t.  Articulated here.  Supported by polling here.

They hypocrisy of this narrative is so obvious, we struggle to see how it can be advanced, outside a Saturday Night Live (SNL) parody or an MSNBC editorial.  (Note: SNL, no doubt, would be offended by our grouping them with MSNBC, so let us stop to reassure SNL that we recognize the difference between comedy and folly.)

Anyway, this all has to make sense.  One might have to stand on his head to see all the pieces line up, but they do line up.  But how?

Under the Judeo/Christian/Western (JCW) ethic, each of us is a created being, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights.  In this hemisphere, we created a collective (i.e., the good ole US of A) for the primary purpose of protecting the rights of each and every human person.

We are held accountable by our Creator to protect the rights of others.  Not because of any good that might accrue to the collective or to ourselves, but because each person is created with value equal to our own.  Hence, depending on whose rights are in jeopardy at the moment, white people are required to advocate for black slaves, men to advocate for women, born people to advocate for the preborn, etc.  To the JCW like us, abortion is wrong because each abortion destroys an individual person.

But under the Darwinist/Marxist/Leftist (DML) worldview, we are not created.  We are evolved.  We are simply a reformulated extention of primordial organic soup.  We have no claims to individual liberty, any more than dogs or rocks.  As individuals, our only identity is our membership the collective (e.g., the “human race” or perhaps the “life energy of the cosmos” or whatever).  We get more rights than dogs only because we can.

However, what we do have is an instinct for survival.  (We can’t justify why our survival is important, only that our instinct for it must have evolved into existence and therefore must be accommodated.)  So we make laws that protect ourselves and other members of our collective.  But these laws are an expression of our instinct for personal protection; they are not based on the notion that every human being has intrinsic valuable.

For the DML, abortion is OK because, first of all, it does not threaten the DML himself.  He is already born.  Unlike other forms of murder, he isn’t threatened by it, even if it is conducted on a large scale.  Nor does he believe it to threaten his collective.  It only threatens other individuals (who have no intrinsic value).

If that were all there was to it, the DML would remain neutral about whether abortion should be legal or not.  But there is more.  He is selfish.  He likes sex and he demands to have it without responsibility.  (We know about selfishness, because our sin problem is just as big as his.)  Therefore, in his mind, unlimited abortion must be a “right.”

But wait a minute, the good Canadian doctor has alerted us to a form of abortion that threatens our own society.  When we imagine a culture in which young men outnumber young women by 10 to 20%, we reel in horror.  “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” Mara Hvistendahl wrote in her book, Unnatural Selection.  “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”

The DMLs don’t want to live in such a place, so their instinct for self-preservation kicks in.  The abortions that lead to this horror are, unlike every other kind of abortion they can imagine, “deplorable” and must be prohibited.

But the DMLs won’t want to think about this for very long.  They won’t want to defend the hypocrisy that some children may be killed and some may not.  Or that the “reproductive rights” of some women are inviolate, but the rights of others women (i.e., Indian, Korean, and Chinese minorities living in Canada) must be trampled upon.

When they see how big and ugly this hypocrisy truly is, they will quit talking about it.  They will reason that sex-selective abortions threaten somebody else’s collective, not their own, so they will let this dog go back to sleep.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2012 at 8:10 pm and is filed under National Politics, Pro Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.