Avoidance is not an option
If only it were so easy.
The American Spectator has good, incisive writing. It’s always timely and issue-oriented. Quin Hillyer has finally decided to confront abortion. Long overdue.
It’s what I’ve always shied away from: directly and unambiguously addressing the issue of abortion itself, square on. I learned long ago that it’s almost impossible to have a reasoned conversation about abortion, because feelings are too strong and too raw. So I just avoided it. Avoidance is so easy.
But not an option. Now more than ever.
After agonizing over his qualms about the subject, mostly understandable but wrought in such a way that may give comfort to the radical forces for abortion…..Hillyer gets more into his subject.
The United States has far too many laws. The law should not be meant for little things. Law should not govern every human interaction. Law should not replace human judgment in most matters of everyday life.
But law is what society must rely on to govern the biggest issues, the ones where clear lines must be drawn — the issues where society must make choices because to abdicate those choices is to accept anarchy and disorder so rampant that they hinder the freedom of ordinary, innocent people. And the first duty of the law is to protect the life and liberty of the innocent. Where somebody is blameless before the law, he or she has the right to the law’s protection. It’s that simple. Furthermore, no one person’s liberty can properly be bought at the expense of an innocent’s life. Without life, there is no liberty; in law, existence must precede essence, because without existence the essence is meaningless.
The law exists to protect those who cannot protect themselves. And the law must, always, err on the side of life. Lost liberty is recoverable; lost life is not.
Now that he’s warmed up to the subject, he takes defense of the vulnerable seriously.
Law steps in to guard against defects of motives, of knowledge, of certainty, and of human nature. To guard against those defects, law must err, must always err, on the side of the most innocent, the most vulnerable, the most voiceless. To err on any other side is to risk an irreversible mistake. And law must err on the side of innocent human life.
Here, he addresses the essentials, so marginalized by the media style books that news consumer may be unsure about what constitutes the human life that can easily be seen as innocent.
We know a “fetus” is a life form, and we know it is, genetically, only human (not gorilla, not wombat, not cabbage). We therefore should know that we have no choice, in a realm where certain mysteries always will rein, other than to protect that human life which is most vulnerable and innocent of all.
An odd and clumsy way of arriving at the point, but there nonetheless. Life of the species homo sapiens.
Among the awards given by the Susan B. Anthony List last week was one given to young Lia Mills, a seventh grader from Toronto who refused to consider any other topic for a speech contest other than a plea, a well-reasoned plea, to stop abortions. “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” she said, quoting the famous elephant Horton (who heard a Who).
But that was just her rhetoric. Her reasoning — available on YouTube — went thusly: “We must remember that with our rights and our choices come responsibilities, and we can’t take someone else’s rights away to avoid our responsibilities.”
Out of the mouths of the young, wisdom.
