Way to confuse the issue

We do not need this.

After 33 years of equivocation over abortion, we now have a seismic shift in debate and legislation because of the groundwork laid in South Dakota. Lawmakers there answered the question – definitively – of whether there are “competing interests” in tension between the pregnant mother and her unborn child.

Diogenes brings his own particualr clarity to the question.

What “two significant sets of rights” are in conflict? The baby’s, certainly, is the right that any innocent human being enjoys not to be murdered. But what right of the mother could be in conflict with this right of her baby? One can see that certain interests, desires and projects of the mother, even wholesome ones, could be put at risk by childbirth, and these interests, desires and projects might be sanctioned by loosely-attributed “rights” (the right to the pursuit of happiness, the right to decent health, the right to a career, etc.). But no one even pretends that these rights “conflict” with the lives of innocent human beings in such a way that homicide is a option that can be licitly contemplated. My right to marry may be frustrated by the highly inconvenient fact that the only person I want to wed is betrothed to someone else, but even those who fully acknowledged my suffering wouldn’t see a conflict of rights at issue, certainly not one involving my rival’s right to life.

There are enough forces in the culture working overtime to defeat the ‘protection of life’ law in South Dakota. They know how much is at stake. No time for political correctness. Politics don’t determine what’s correct.