Responding to an article by Ms. Erin McCann that appeared in The Maine Campus earlier this week, I left the following comment:

Ms. McCann’s piece actually illustrates some of the very points we make with our GAP display.

But before getting into that, I should mention that, of course, abortion is not genocide … if.  (Only two letters, but it’s a big word.)

If pre-born children are not living human beings, then abortion does not kill humans and there is no relevant similarity between abortion and genocide. But if pre-born children are living human beings — science tells us they are both alive and human — then abortion kills 1.2 million humans every year in the U.S. If not genocide, what else would we call it?

But back to Ms. McCann and her penchant to demonstrate the very behaviors we cited in the GAP display. If you examine historical episodes of genocide, you find that the perpetrators always frame their arguments in the language of choice. Stephen Douglas, when he debated Abraham Lincoln in 1858, said that the Southern states should have the right to choose whether to be slave states or free states. Individual slave owners were simply exercising their choice on whether to own slaves or not. You can almost them say, “You don’t like slavery, then don’t own one!” For those who perpetrated the Holocaust in Europe, they were simply exercising their choice to have a racially pure state.

Ms. McCann spoke of our Maine Director Leslie Sneddon as a “token.” She should realize that ad hominem attacks and name-calling are no substitutes for reasoned arguments. Yes, our staff is about half men and half women. It is unclear to me how the genders of various CBR staff and volunteers have anything at all to do with the important questions of (a) whether it is ever morally acceptable to kill human beings without justification and (b) what criteria will be used to decide which humans may be killed and which humans must be protected.

Ms. McCann is correct about one thing. She notes that, “Isn’t it interesting how the male can do whatever he pleases, but the female must live with the consequence? Only the female is left with the decision between ‘right and wrong.’” Sadly true. Reminds me of something Mark Crutcher often says, “Abortion is something done by men, to women, for the benefit of men.” So many males — I cannot use the term “men” to describe such people — want sex without responsibility. They use every trick in the book to get it. But when cancer-causing birth-control hormones are passed out, who gets to ingest those? When the worst symptoms of STDs show up, who bears that burden? When somebody gets pregnant, which one is it? It’s always the woman.

His response is often to threaten abandonment. It can be an overt threat or a thinly veiled one, such as, “It’s not my decision, it’s yours … Whatever you want to do.” In other words, “The decision … and especially the guilt that goes with it … are yours alone; I’m going to go hide somewhere until you get it taken care of.” (With testicles like that, you wonder how he could even make sperm.)

Feminist Susan B. Anthony had some words for him: “Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”

As it turns out, “free” sex ain’t so free, and it’s the woman who most often has to pay the price. The sad irony is that every bit of it flies under the banner of “women’s rights.”