Abortion

 

“There have always been abortions” makes no sense, even less so as a tweet

By Luis Zaffirini
I understand that forming a sound argument in favor of abortion is inherently difficult. Twitter’s 140-character constraint only compounds this difficulty. So I should be forgiving of pro-aborts and their itchy Twitter fingers, but some inane tweets deserve parsing. And, in fairness, the tweet was addressed to National Right to Life.
I’ll spare you the author’s name to avoid rewarding that person with added attention. On Twitter yesterday, National Right to Life was asked whether we realize that people in every society and throughout history have sought abortions in response to unplanned pregnancies.
This is not a new idea or excuse.

In Roe v. Wade Justice Harry Blackmun professed to address the history of abortion. He wrote that abortion was attested to in many ancient civilizations and quotes Dr. Ludwig Edelstein as saying that in Greek and Roman society it was practiced “without scruple.”
Blackmun also cites common law going back to 1762 in which he argued that abortions performed before quickening were not an indictable offense.
(I’ll give you a moment to look “quickening” up on Wikipedia. It means when a mother can feel her baby move.)
It is odd, in the extreme, to cite ancient civilizations whose brutality toward unwanted born children as well as unborn children as evidence of….what? That what was acceptable cruelty then is acceptable cruelty now?
Are we supposed to have a sense of camaraderie with our ancestors, a kind of perverse nostalgia? Are we supposed to pine for the time when abortions were performed without full knowledge of the facts of unborn life, with impunity and without compunction, when cruelty towards the powerless was taken as a badge of strength?

Were those the “good old days”?
Blackmun’s history was, to put it politely, selective. In fact, as Susan Wills wrote in her review of Joseph Dellapenna’s masterful “ Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History,” abortion “was not a liberty women were free to enjoy; abortion was in fact a crime under English common law and in ecclesiastical courts in England from at least the 14th century.” But…
Someone who thinks the way the individual who tweeted NRLC must gloss over other moments in history like Dr. Horatio Storer’s “Physicians’ Crusade” against abortion. By 1880, nearly every state in the Union had new legislation that made it a serious crime to induce abortions unless the mother’s life was in danger.

How about 1965, when Lennart Nilsson stunned the world with actual photographs of unborn babies? I mean, that made it into LIFE magazine! But for the abortion proponent, the history of abortion includes only the dim and distant past and a present full of people who imagine that our knowledge about human life in utero has not advanced since Greco-Roman times.
But if that argument still convinces you that abortion is an appropriate response for a modern civilized society, here is a list of other practices from throughout history (until relatively recently): slavery, bloodletting, necromancy, child labor…

So the argument can be summed up as: Abortion is a-okay because everyone has always done it. That not “everyone” had abortions; that not until the nineteenth century did science begin to unlock the mysteries of conception and fetal development; and that (to quote historian Carl Degler), the Physician’s Crusade was “in line with a number of movements [in the 19th century] to reduce cruelty and to expand the concept of the sanctity of life” must be brushed aside.

The point is that people have done terrible things out of ignorance or viciousness is probably not the route to take in trying to persuade people about the value of abortion in society today

Source: NRLC News