Democrats are diving for cover after the recent radical bills in New York and Virginia legalizing third-term abortions under the guise of a single physician’s call that a pregnancy is harmful to the woman’s “health.” But what’s really happening is that the Left is abandoning its prior defenses of abortion and instead clinging to its fatal utilitarianism.
Abandoned are assertions that a “clump of cells” does not constitute a human life, that a fetus is nonsentient, and that it doesn’t have the same moral value as a fully developed human. Instead, the new Democratic Party has embraced the suffering of the few as a positive good so long as it benefits the many.
In an inoffensive and well-reasoned analysis of the disconnect between the radicalism of Democratic leaders and their voter base, Alexandra DeSanctis at the Atlantic correctly notes that not only do the overwhelming majority of the nation oppose abortion after the first trimester, but also that the far-left leadership of the party now “embrace[s] abortion as a woman’s right to end the life of her fetus at any stage — not the right to end her pregnancy.”
This is the horrific truth that mobilized not just the pro-life crowd, but also moderate pro-choicers, in the wake of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s comments that even after birth, “The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
The single most compelling argument in favor of abortion rests on two central tenets: first, that a fetus itself is not a human life, and second, that if it is, it has less of a moral value than a woman’s right over her body. With Northam’s comments and the Democratic Party’s newfound assertiveness on abortion, Democrats have unwisely abandoned these talking points only to reveal the truth. They simply don’t care if an unwanted fetus, or even a living, breathing baby is alive, or human, or a human life. They are now admitting that maybe it is a human being, but it’s an inconvenient human being, and therefore an expendable human being.
Babies are cute by evolutionary design — without that, what use would we have for them? All they do is poop, eat, and cry. Outside of the advent of civilization and modern economics, which require population replacement to advance our common goals, there’s no immediate utilitarian gain in having a baby.
But as every philosophical father of liberalism from Kant to Rawls has recognized, life itself has inherent moral value. There’s historically been a gray area that pro-choice activists have debated within, arguing either that abortion is a necessary evil meant to be minimized as much as possible, or that a fetus in development has less moral value either because it can’t feel pain or that it isn’t yet a life at all.
The emerging Left has abandoned these questions, embracing instead what effectively amounts to human sacrifice.
Jessica Valenti predictably took offense to DeSanctis’ extremely inoffensive article, levying the hackneyed “complete disconnect from the reality of pregnancy, childbirth & family tragedy” critique (Translation: Young, childless, working women can’t comment on the objective science of obstetrics and parenting) against her. But buried in her bitter Twitter thread is the most interesting concession:
It’s quite something already that Valenti could have given birth to a premature infant and yet pretend, merely for the sake of winning an argument, not to believe that it has the same moral value as you or I.
But even more astounding and vile is her belief that physicians can dispense with their Hippocratic Oaths and deny a baby life-saving care for the sake of dollars and cents. As much as leftists love to hate on American healthcare, no doctor in the country can deny immediate life-saving care to anyone in an emergency room, nor alone on a plane or a public place, without violating accepted medical ethics and even federal law. (It’s also worth mentioning that, at least in theory, everyone in the U.S. has to have insurance coverage that includes neonatal care, pregnancy, and childbirth with all its potential complications. It’s the law.)
We’re about half a step away from embracing the full-scale brutality that infanticidal bio-ethicists from Jacob M. Appel to Alberto Giubilini have been teasing for years.
“We propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be,” wrote Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in their eerily prescient “after-birth abortion” article. “Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”
It only takes a few blinks to see how easily “the well-being of the family” translates to the broader definition of collective good, warranting outright murder under the justification of utilitarianism.
The Left has ceased to care about defining where life actually begins because that’s an argument they’re going to lose. And the moment they stopped caring marked the death of centuries of a fundamental understanding of the sanctity of human life within the Democratic Party. Democrats are now the party of abortion, and they are descending into the darkness of utilitarian blood lust.