Poor, sincere Jim Pouillon was sitting across from a Michigan school holding his posters protesting fetus killing when a car passed by, shots rang out and life fled him as surely as it flees those aborted fetuses he worried about. Some questions come to mind. Will we have commentators suggesting that violence sums up a major portion of a largely maladjusted pro-choice crowd?
Will we have ninnies screeching that we must curb the speech of the overreaching, pro-choice extremists who are forever arguing that women have an unalienable right to exterminate whatever wiggly being has come to life inside them, no matter its stage of development, no matter the circumstances, no matter what techniques are employed?
If turnabout is fair play, why not? After an ungodly, terrible shooting of an abortion doctor a while back, a number of academics, commentators, bloggers and others made it seem as if large numbers of those opposing legalized abortion — maybe even most — had quite a bit to answer for.
Some merely suggested pro-lifers could be more civil, as if pro-choice enthusiasts always were superpolite. Some yelped about inflamed rhetoric causing the bloodletting, with one writer going so far in a national magazine as to assert we had to quell the speech of the anti-abortion loonies, those fools, those imbeciles.
A major portion of the right wing is losing it, we were also told by people who themselves were losing it to the extent of thinking we’d soon have these far-out reactionaries committing 9/11-style terrorism all over the place.
So what do these people say now that we have a self-confessed hater of pro-lifers allegedly killing Pouillon and one other man while searching for a third when apprehended? Do they finally concede it’s possible to find fringe-group and lone-wolf nutcases on all sides of virtually all issues?
Legitimately enough, they can point out that there have been more violent incidents at the hands of those on the anti-abortion side. But the numbers are still small, and that doesn’t let them off the hook for suggesting you can sum up a totality, or even some sizable hunk of it, by reference to some minute fraction of it.
The obvious, undeniable, in-your-face fact is that it is the no-restrictions abortion advocates who rationalize slaughter. You can believe, as I do, that early abortions are sometimes excusable, but how can anyone think it within the realm of acceptable human behavior to kill a fetus that can live outside the womb even when the mother faces no critical health problem, sometimes doing this thing by sucking out its brains?
Don’t ever use the expression “killing babies” to refer to abortion, some of the pro-choice advocates tell us. By any reasonable calculation, however, that is exactly what it is once viability is reached.
The shooting should obviously stop, and so should vitriolic name-calling from all sides, but that doesn’t mean the issue is best addressed through Orwellian euphemism or that President Obama has it right.
Though he correctly wants us to deliberate with each other calmly and coolly on the issue, he is himself unyielding. As best I can tell, he dogmatically opposes any legal inhibitions whatsoever on abortions, which he says can be reduced through extralegal means.
Yes, they can be, but that is a slow, iffy, incremental process. And there are morally sound, perfectly reasonable arguments that some kinds of abortions should be stopped immediately through state enactments of law as allowed under Roe v. Wade and that the court ruling itself is due reconsideration.
Disagreeing with those arguments is fine, but dismissing them as the rants of violence-encouraging wackos is not.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
