05 July 2009

What's in a Name?

What’s in a name?
The twaddle over Dr. Tiller’s nickname Tiller the Baby Killer has fermented into a brackish attack on conservatives who report in glaring detail on the issue of abortion. To be sure, Dr. Tiller’s curricular vitae, his alleged crimes and recent murder, have incited liberals to cry hate crime and domestic terrorism from their cul-de-sac. But was the moniker Tiller the Baby Killer in fact truthful?
Every time abortioneers (i.e. abortion advocates) are confronted with the gruesome reality of abortion, its intrinsic evil, the irrefutable biological evidence that these are children – whole, distinct, living human beings – abortioneers dipsy doodle to avoid the gathered facts, softly whimpering nolo contendere.
Scampering away from the ugliness of an actual abortion, the NARAL crowd now boasts of a website to enshrine Dr. Tiller’s memory as the great champion of so-called reproductive rights. The president of NARAL Pro-Choice America Nancy Keenan issued a statement in reaction to Dr. Tiller’s murder:

What happened to Dr. Tiller is part of an ongoing pattern of extreme anti-choice violence and intimidation that seeks, by any means necessary, to deny women access to the safe, legal abortion care they need. This use of inflammatory rhetoric and acts of violence must stop.

Since when has defending life by way of philosophical arguments, massive scientific data, and (dare I say) Christian theological principles for affirming the sanctity of human life, its intrinsic worth and dignity, constitute inflammatory rhetoric? It doesn’t. Nonetheless, abortioneers will not answer the fundamental question: What are the unborn? For Scott Klusendorf president of Life Training Institute, in his new book The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture, it is the one question that trumps all others. That is the crux of the debate. When President Obama was asked when life begins during the primary, he gave his infamous manqué: “answering that question with specificity is above my pay grade.” Orders from Planned Parenthood headquarters have insisted toe the line.

By design, the revelries of liberalism croon the primacy of women’s reproductive healthcare and reproductive rights, yet elective abortion has absolutely nothing in common with healthcare or human rights. Abortion stands for, if words are to signify real concepts or anything at all, damaging mothers both physically and emotionally, forever traumatizing our teens, and abortion is always an act of brutal violence that destroys innocent human persons.
True to form, abortioneers spurt that it’s the name-calling that is the problem, not the millions of dead children or wounded lives damaged by the abortion aftermath. What is consequential is the Big Hate , writes Paul Krugman. In his briny opinion, the real danger is not institutionalized abortion en masse, but rather the “Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.” A concierge for leftist dogma, Krugman smears drek on an assembly of conservatives including Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Jon Voight for their downright meanness. It’s positively gauche to speak about the particulars of such a thing.

To be sure, liberals customarily wag their fingers at those conservative scoundrels who have the impudence to tell it like it is. Ann Coulter sets the record straight – 49 million to five - over the past 36 years since Roe v. Wade. Speaking tongue-in-cheek, Coulter offers her version of lex taliones:

I wouldn't kill an abortionist myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for shooting abortionists. But how will criminalizing men making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the shootings of abortionists?

What is made plain is the moral baby-talk of abortioneers.
Going further, was Dr. George Tiller a killer of babies? Did he have blood on his hands?
Let us establish the truth or falsity of two claims: first, abortion kills the child in the womb ipso facto or the procedure would not be an abortion. It is the only so-called medical procedure in which a living baby means the procedure was botched. I wonder if Dr. Tiller had a refund policy? Dead baby in a toilet, pay five grand; your child lives, you keep your money.
Under Obamacare, this place of darkness, anguish, and death will only extend itself into yet another vast cemetery in disturbing tribute to humanity’s cruelty to the most vulnerable.
Second, it is no stretch at all, when one considers the scientific evidence, that human life is intrinsically valuable, a gift to be welcomed and loved. From a logically coherent argument, Professor Patrick Lee, McAleer Professor of Bioethics, Director of the Institute of Bioethics, Franciscan University of Steubenville sums up in his work Pro Life Arguments from Substantial Identity:
What is intrinsically valuable is what we are.
1. You and I are intrinsically valuable.
2. You and I are intrinsically valuable (in the sense of being subjects of rights) in virtue of what we are.
3. What we are are human physical organisms. (That is: you and I are essentially human physical organisms.)
4. But human physical organisms come to be at conception.
5. So, what we are comes to be at conception. (from 3 and 4) (You and I came to be at conception.
6. So, what is intrinsically valuable (as a subject of rights) comes to be at conception. (from 2 and 5)

Summa contra Tiller: he killed 60,000 human beings in their earliest stages of development, i.e. babies.
But did he have blood on his hands? Keeping in mind that Dr. Tiller the Child Killer specialite de la maison were late-term abortions, Congressman Henry Hyde (D-IL) captured the heart of the discussion when pleading with Congress in 1996 to overturn Clinton’s veto. He exhorted:

That we are even debating this issue, that we have to argue about the legality of an abortionist plunging a pair of scissors into the back of the tiny neck of a little child whose trunk, arms and legs have already been delivered, and then suctioning out his brains only confirms Dostoyevsky's harsh truth (Man can get used to anything the beast).

Congresses’ response was less than enthusiastic. It would be seven more years before a ban on partial-birth abortion became law under President Bush.
In his dissent written for the Stenberg v. Carhart dealing with partial-birth abortions illegal without providing exceptions to the mother, Justice Kennedy describes with vivid clarity the gruesome late abortion procedures:

The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb (reproductive healthcare). ... The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off (reproductive rights). Dr. Carhart agreed that “[w]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let’s say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus, … the fetus [is] alive.” …. Dr. Carhart has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with “extensive parts of the fetus removed,” id., at 64, and testified that mere dismemberment of a limb does not always cause death because he knows of a physician who removed the arm of a fetus only to have the fetus go on to be born “as a living child with one arm.” …. At the conclusion of a D&E abortion no intact fetus remains (reproductive choice). In Dr. Carhart’s words, the abortionist is left with “a tray full of pieces.”

Where is the left’s gibberish about hate speech? Where are the accusations that Justice Kennedy is whipping up violence for abortionists? There aren’t any because it’s an illogical and unjust connection to make; description is not by necessity prescriptive.

Picture introducing forceps to grab the extremities of each child - hands and arms, feet and legs, upper body and backbone, skull and face – that is, being torn limb from limb (Dilation and Evacuation Procedure) and filling tray after tray, year after year with pieces from his fresh kills.

Short of a Zen-like satori perhaps nothing will awaken abortioneers to the merciless, inhumane destruction of innocent children. In the end, Dr. Tiller was a paid thug with blood on his hands; he spilled gallons of it.

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