Double Talk

In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that state prohibitions against abortion are unlawful because the unborn are not  “persons in the whole sense.”  In other words, the Court concluded that whether the unborn are living human beings or not is irrelevant.  It’s okay to execute them by the millions as long as we tell ourselves they are not really persons. 

This is a textbook example of what George Orwell meant when he wrote that some things are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.  The reality is, this loopy idea that someone can be a “partial-person” or a “non-person” doesn't exist in the real world.  In fact, even the deceased are often called “dead persons.”

When confronted with the reality that the English language does not even have a word for a human being who is not a person, abortion defenders often reply that the unborn are not really human beings but only “potential human life.” 

Of course, for this to be accurate the unborn would have to have the possibility of becoming either a human being or some other form of life.  Perhaps a parrot or a spider. 

The problem is, there's no record of any such thing having ever occurred.  Even though it may be a difficult concept for the pro-choice crowd to grasp, the fact is that every time a human female gives birth, she gives birth to another human being. 

So while it is entirely reasonable to say that a fetus is a potential major league baseball player or a potential schoolteacher, it is idiotic to say that a fetus is a potential human being.  Even Orwell could not have predicted that a time would come when people would actually suggest that the product of human reproduction may or may not be human.  From the moment of conception, the unborn child is a living human being because that is the only thing it can be. 

Another argument we sometimes hear is that the unborn are not really human beings because they are not fully developed.  The flaw in that is that human beings develop for their entire lives.  A fetus is less developed than a newborn just as a five-year-old is less developed than an adult.  However, no one can logically claim that the five-year-old is less human.

In the end, the driving force behind the abortion lobby’s catalogue of rhetorical nonsense is obvious.  Throughout history, whenever one group of people has wanted to justify the extermination of another group of people, they assign their victims labels intended to take away their humanity.  From the beginning of time, this “de-humanizing” process has been the mechanism barbarians have relied upon to make their particular brand of killing seem palatable.  

The good news is, history shows that this sort of deception inevitably unravels.  And that will happen in this case as well.  When this holocaust is over – and one day it will be – it will be universally seen that our enemies were never anything more than cold-blooded serial killers.

They are simply the barbarians du jour.