Alabama state Rep. John Rogers, a Democrat, had a few choice comments last week about abortion — the very sort of comments that abortion’s defenders usually know to keep to themselves.
“I’m not about to be a male telling a woman what to do with her body,” Rogers said in the midst of a debate over a bill that would restrict abortion to cases where it could prevent a serious health risk for the mother. “You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.”
This seems like a bizarre way to describe the value of a child’s life, as if no one has ever risen above oppression, poverty or an unstable family situation to do something great in life. Rogers and the millions who think like him believe implicitly that poor or adopted children must be incapable of happiness just because some grown-ups decided it is so. Not only that, but Rogers seems to think they’re all going to become murderers headed for execution.
It is also surreal to hear Rogers, a prominent black lawmaker for nearly 40 years now, utter the same ugly rationalizations that white liberals use in private to justify the vastly disproportionate abortion of minority children. If not for abortion, there would be as many as 19 million more black people in the United States today — almost 50% more than there are currently. That’s a shocking number.
But then, Rogers was just warming up — after all, there were more people to offend.
“Some parents can’t handle a child with problems,” he went on. “It could be retarded. It might have no arms and no legs.” He also said, with a facetious note, “I may bring a bill to force all men to have vasectomies. That would end this whole debate. There would be no more abortions and eventually no more voters.”
How droll. And Rogers seemed to think himself rather clever, for he later chuckled as he told a local NBC News affiliate that Donald Trump Jr. was “evidently retarded. Or crazy. Donald Trump’s son, I know there is something wrong with that boy. I look at him and can tell something is wrong with him. That’s the best defense I have right there for an abortion — looking at him.”
We would say that abortion opponents and disability advocates were outraged by this, but these arguments aren’t new. They’re just less subtle than usual. The advocates of abortion frequently offer excuses about children being unwanted and lacking a future. These are always very lame excuses requiring foreknowledge that they certainly don’t have. They cite not only poverty and unstable family situations, but also prospective or even known disability as a valid reason for killing a baby to spare her the experience. They play God in this, despite having absolutely no idea what sort of future any child will have.
In the end, whatever the motivations for Rogers’ and others’ views in favor of abortion, they do not stem from concern for children’s well-being. After all, you cannot kill a child to improve his future, any more than you can save a village by burning it down. Any pretense to altruism ends with the Democratic Party’s push this year in Virginia, New York, Rhode Island, and other states to make taxpayers fund abortions and to keep abortion legal right up to and beyond the moment of birth.
Look deep into the abyss, and you’ll find fear — of minorities, of the disabled, of the future — and plain old grown-up selfishness behind it all. Rogers was just kind enough to say the quiet part out loud for everyone to hear.
