Abortion

...We have lost our respect for human life...

...Take, for example, the 300,000 unborn infants who will be killed by abortionists' knives in New York this year...

...An economically rationalized society arrogates its exchequer morality to the sphere of human life, and questions of life and death come to be dictated by what Joseph Shumpeter called "an inarticulate system of cost accounting...

...And old people...

...On the other hand, Women's Lib-which purports to emancipate females from artificial convention-at the same time advocates the most unnatural stance toward human life, favoring artificial contraception and abortion...

...The attack on life is, in short, broad-based and ferocious...

...Charles Rice, The Vanishing Right to Live...

...Brown County, Indiana in autumn, the Mackinac Bridge during deer season, Colonial Williamsburg in the spring and the Astrodome anytime all have something in common: a lot of people won't see them these days...

...Another, and related, explanation is that America's divorce from Christian morality has proceeded so far that convenience, i.e...

...Thus, by this reasoning, life is so bad that it is to be avoided at all costs...

...The same mindset which cringes at the thought of untrammelled breasts bouncing joyously down a campus sidewalk sees something deplorable in earthy, human things...

...We must recognize initially the fact that abortion has become monstrously casual...

...Recent medical research shows, the brief argues, that a distinct and individual life begins at the moment of conception, in that the genetic components determining the characteristics of the person are decisively established...

...Women's Lib, indeed, could be the surreptitious arm of the Puritan auxiliary...

...And socially troublesome minority groups...

...Charles Rice, have brought suit in Indiana court asking the court to hand down the finding that an unborn child is a legal person and entitled to protection of his Constitutional rights--a point still undecided by the higher courts...

...The principle of non serviam, or a desire to evade responsibility for the consequences of one's actions, has been noted before (df...

...Medical authorities are cited to show the fetus has distinctive biological status, and that life processes which make him a separate individual begin almost immediately...

...What we have, in sum then, is a hatred of life in America which springs, implicitly and explicitly, from a convergence of the above-mentioned and diverse factors, and which is translated even into public policy via the claptrap machinery of the democratic political process...

...In this regard, the now-descredited shuck of "population explosion" provided a convenient public-spirited mask for avoiding the natural ends of sex-babies...

...And to identify these consequences, we had better take a look at and attempt, briefly, to tag the reasons...

...How many geniuses have been shovelled into hospital incinerators...

...From whatever combination this loathing of life emerges, it can only be Bad News for Modern Man...

...How many morons, indeed, for they were created by no less a Being than were their precocious counterparts...

...But culpability for the Bad News will not be laid at the feet of any particular political cabal...

...The Nixon Administration presently is pursuing a vigorous anti-life policy (witness the imminent 1.1 billion dollar "birth control" bill, the population commissions, Dr...

...a grotesque perception of the nature of leisure, wills that no children are to be allowed to interfere with carpe diem...

...Those babies, instead of inheriting the privilege of sucking in the crisp fragrance of the first day of winter, will be cut up, injected with saline solution, vacuumed into a bottle, or suffer any number of ingenious methods of killing cooked up by a society gone mad...

...The response to it must of necessity be no less ferocious, and perhaps tactically unconventional...

...And as Lenin's abortion program presaged the later genocidal programs, had we better not contemplate the consequences...

...Now that this particular evasion has been debunked, we look to find, not a "population explosion" but a "copulation explosion," whereby couples freely employ sexual acts as mechanisms of mutual masturbation-indulging in the pleasure (and it is pleasure), but then proceeding to scrap the attendant responsibility...

...Thousands of American women stroll nonchalantly into abortion clinics, have a baby yanked from their insides and then proceed home to cook a delightful meal for their ideal two-child family that evening...

...Conception, babies, sex, all of these are to be run from as the plague because to bring life into a world so preternaturally malevolent would be-by the rationale of today's implicit Calvinists-the highest sin...

...Today devotion to the work ethic, a utilitarian outlook on family life and a tendency to see the world as the repository of all things bad are inherent in what Paul Cole Beach calls the "New Manicheanism...

...If we don't manage to prevent babies, then we kill them in the womb...

...y unconventional...

...i.e., decisions concerning family life-moral decisions-are now being made in America with all the pecuniary concern of shopping for a can of cut-rate peas...

...But Nixon's support in this ghastly endeavor comes from Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals and you name it...

...One explanation advanced with some plausibility for this perfunctory killing is economic...

...Their brief states that the unborn child has a life of his own and is not simply a "part of the mother" - a view held in ancient societies and in our own until the end of the nineteenth century...

...Our Puritan heritage is far from dead...

...A New York hospital's ObGyn section has a cheery receptionist who answers the phone, "Hello, Pregnancy Interruption Service...

...That is to say that even babies are now subjected to fluctuations in supply and demand, and that their lives are literally dependent on the vagaries of the Dow Jones 40 Industrials...

...Roger Egeberg's abortion statements, ad infinitum...

...It is nothing more to them, one suspects, than spending a few desultory hours under their hair dryers...

...Artur Rubenstein and Ludwig von Beethoven were almost aborted...

...This particular heresy-one which becomes more evident in America every day-posits the eternal conflict between spirit and matter-with the bad guys (matter) frequently coming out on top...