Number one is that the entire language
and use of terms associated with the issue is dishonest. You're not
talking about a "right to life" here, if you were the issue would not
exist. What you're really talking about is some sort of a right to the
use of another person's body for 3/4 of a year. In other settings, that
is called kidnapping or slavery, both of which are illegal.
Conservatives love talking about freedom but freedom is the sort of thing
which you either believe in or you don't, and a person who lacks legal control
over his or her own body is simply not free.
The same logic says that I could come
home one day and find a letter in my mailbox from a government agency
informing me that a Mr. John Doe who I had never met needed a kidney
transplant and that the national bio-database showed me being the closest
tissue type matchup in the nation and that I was therefore ordered to report
to Federal Hospital Center #7 five days hence to donate a kidney to Mr. Doe,
because he had a "Right to Life(TM)". I mean, why not? If an
unborn could have a right to life sufficient to compell hardship on the part
of another person, why could a 50-year-old businessman not have auch a
right?
Logically, the issue is an all or
nothing proposition. In other words, our laws do not recognize legal
differences amongst born persons due to the circumstances of their conception
or birth and there is no logical reason why they should recognize such
differences amongst the unborn. That means that if ANY unborn has any
legal sort of a "right to life", then so also does the unborn child of the
rapist. Even the the dopiest conservative or Republican realizes
that one to be political suicide of course, but you actually do see people
espousing that position on hard-core conservative sites like FreeRepublic, and
everybody else should recognize the logical implication.
Pregnancy due to rape is rare, albeit
the original Roe/Wade case involved rape. The real issue amongst the 5%
of abortions which anybody could easily justify is genetic disease or
compromise, the most common such being Down Syndrome, which becomes
increasingly common as people postpone marriage and children until their
thirties. 70 Years ago when families averaged five or six children, a
Down syndrome child was not the end of the world; for too many people living
in today's urban and suburban areas who feel they can only afford 1.7 or 1.8
children, a Down syndrome child particularly as a first child could mean the
end of a family.
Rush Limbaugh recently noted that
he was seeing what he called a visceral hatred of Sarah Palin amongst women
and that included Republican and conservative women, and he noted that the
thing was a mystery to him and that he had no explanation for it. Allow
me to explain it for you Mr. Limbaugh: Those women see Palin as an
existential threat to themselves and to the lives they are trying to
lead. The combination of right-to-life politics and the Down
syndrome baby in her arms is toxic and as Marshall McLuhan famously noted, the
medium is the message. Those women are thinking "God
in heaven, that lunatic could force me to have a retarded child!!"
That's the problem: You're talking about trying to
win a national election while telling all of America's married couples that
they are or should be one bad pregnancy away from being
criminals.
Clearly without legal abortion those people would not have been willing to risk any further attempts at having children and that child would not be alive, but Palin and the right2life crowd would want those two people in prison or at least so it seems.
Assuming Levitt to be even partially
right, which I
view as a safe assumption, there is a question of why conservatives would
have a problem with reducing crime, but there is a vastly larger
problem. Aside from the 50,000,000 missing abortion victims which
conservatives love so much to cry over and whatever percentage of
them might have grown up to be criminals, it is also a fairly safe bet that
the vast majority of them would have grown up to be lifelong democrats.
Minus Roe/Wade, it is highly likely that the last time a Republican ever won
an election for anything in America would have been around
1992.
Freakonomics also describes the horrific
effects of the abortion ban in Ceausescu's Romania and there doesn't
seem to be much room for controversy on that one. The conditions in
which vast numbers of such "right2life orphans" were found after the fall of
the Ceausescu regime were public knowledge and much in the news at the
time.
Elections have consequences and when
Democrats win elections, people die. People are dying in Libya now for
this reason; people were dying in the Balkans in the 1990s for this
reason. This little girl's name was Milica Rakic:
At three years of age when she was
killed by a Clintonista/NATO bomb hundreds of kilometers from anything
remotely resembling a legitimate military target, that is, even if you were to
believe there was such a thing as a legitimate military target in Slick
Clinton's third dog-wagging episode, Milica likely has the dubious distinction
of being Slick Clinton's youngest female victim.
There were five or six real-politik
kinds of reasons for doing Kosovo in 1999 and they did not add up to a case,
the pentagon advised Slick not to do it. Nonetheless, Slick's most major
concern at the time was getting Chinagate and that Juanita Broadrick rape
allegation off the front pages of American newspapers. No Republican president would have done Kosovo. Milica Rakic died
because Republicans failed to win an election and the most major cause of
Republicans failing to win elections since 1973 has been "Right2Life(TM)".
As far as I am concerned, right2lifers
may as well have killed Milica Rakic. Moreover, Milica was a beloved member of
a family which plainly wanted her, and not some meat byproduct of a democrat
sex orgy who democrats would go to war to preserve their right to eliminate
via abortion.
The other picture of Milica which you
see is this:
That means that Milica has been
declared a martyr of the Orthodox church. It means that Slick Clinton, Hillary
Clinton, Albright, Wesley Clark and that whole crowd are going into the
history books on the same page as the dickheads who burned Joan of Ark. It
also means that right2lifers have at least some of the blood of a martyr on
their hands.