How Hillary Reminds Us What the REAL Question Is About Personhood
Donald Trump may have inadvertently helped the Republican cause this year with his stumbling over a hypothetical gotcha question about the abolition of Roe v. Wade.
During an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Trump stated that with abortion illegal, women seeking abortions should face “some form of punishment”. (Why is Trump taking questions from Matthews and ducking Mark Levin? Doesn’t strike me as conservative.) Trump later recanted his initial response and restated his position as only a doctor performing an abortion should face prosecution and not the woman undergoing the procedure.
I can’t begin to fathom how Trump could be so ill-prepared for such a question. He should clearly understand that abortion is part of the Left’s fictitious “war on women” playbook and be ready with a thoughtful response. However, this is another example of his lack of understanding and shallow thinking on many serious issues he should be well prepared for.
Hillary Clinton couldn’t wait to pounce. And pounce she did…and then fell flat on her face.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, Hillary while trying to burnish her image as a champion of women’s rights, managed to give a response that incensed everyone on both sides of the issue.
In responding to Todd’s question about the constitutional rights of the unborn, Clinton stated, “the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.” And with just these seven words, Hillary alienated virtually everyone concerned about the abortion issue, an amazing feat even for the world’s smartest woman.
On the one hand, she is denying constitutional protection to a “real person” and on the other she refers to what abortion promoters call an unviable lump of cells as a “real person”. Wow, what an amazing, non-sensical conflation! I would love to have the commission on all the Republican ads that will be run highlighting her incredible faux pas.
Asserting that the unborn is simply an aggregate of cells like some superfluous tumor is the bedrock of the Left’s justification for ending a pregnancy. There’s nothing of value associated with a rapidly growing fertilized egg. Just get rid of it before it becomes a real inconvenience! Besides, you ladies have the right to choose whether to permit this valueless aggregate of cells to develop into, well, a life.
And that is the question, isn’t it? When does that growing pregnancy transition from worthlessness to pricelessness? Abortion proponents are all over the map on the question. The more reasonable assert that up until the end of the first trimester the growing pregnancy is of no value and can be destroyed. After this, abortions should be prohibited. However, more ardent supporters promote much later term terminations that require gruesome techniques I will not describe here.
There are even others that think termination of babies delivered full term is acceptable. Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, believes parents should be able to kill infants up to thirty days after their birth: “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” Dang, it’s a girl! We have two already, so let’s get rid of her!
So is Singer right that what constitutes life is self-awareness and a sense of time? Or is there a set of biological parameters that instead define personhood? This is the question we as a society must answer.
However, the pro-abortion forces avoid at all costs any kind of definition of what constitutes life and instead deflect the argument to one of women’s rights. They sloganize about a woman’s right to choose and proclaim a woman has a right to decide what she does with her body. Would that mean then that a woman can choose to charge money for the sexual use of her body too? I believe we have laws against that.
The left has controlled the focus and the language of the abortion debate for too long and we must bring it back to where it belongs – when does life begin?
Singer’s assertion that personhood begins with self-awareness and a sense of time could extend well into infancy and clearly leads to state sanctioned infanticide. If we say that life begins at the second trimester, we need to have a set of biological parameters that justify the claim. Just what happens physically at an instant into the second trimester that makes a growing pregnancy life when it wasn’t just prior to that instant?
You see, we can’t answer that question. Therefore, the only way to make sure that we do not take innocent life is to define conception as when life begins.
The Left is staunchly against the death penalty because we could possibly execute an innocent man. Yet they are very cavalier when defining when abortions are permissible. With our lack of understanding when life begins, how do we know that every abortion does not kill an innocent? Isn’t the most enlightened thing we can do is to insure no possibility of innocent life being taken by affirming that life begins at conception? Of course it is.
Hopefully, Hillary’s Freudian slip will help elect a conservative this year, one who will begin rebuilding the Judiciary with solid conservative judges. Then maybe, just maybe, down the road, we can begin to eradicate this stain on our society.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lunarcaustic/2128618333/