While the left is busy trying to take away our First and Second Amendment rights through a mixed campaign of laws and cultural pressure, they are simultaneously inventing new rights for us to embrace in lieu of the originals. “Rights” like a couple’s right to have any baker in America create a wonderfully gay wedding cake for their nuptials. “Rights” like a college student’s right not to be oppressed by the presence of a conservative speaker on campus. “Rights” like a woman’s right to abort her Down Syndrome baby.
It is this last “right” that sent Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post to her typewriter on Friday:
There is a new push in antiabortion circles to pass state laws aimed at barring women from terminating their pregnancies after the fetus has been determined to have Down syndrome. These laws are unconstitutional, unenforceable — and wrong.
I have had two children; I was old enough, when I became pregnant, that it made sense to do the testing for Down syndrome. Back then, it was amniocentesis, performed after 15 weeks; now, chorionic villus sampling can provide a conclusive determination as early as nine weeks. I can say without hesitation that, tragic as it would have felt and ghastly as a second-trimester abortion would have been, I would have terminated those pregnancies had the testing come back positive. I would have grieved the loss and moved on.
I’m going to be blunt here: That was not the child I wanted. That was not the choice I would have made. You can call me selfish, or worse, but I am in good company. The evidence is clear that most women confronted with the same unhappy alternative would make the same decision.
In the midst of her ghoulish op-ed, Marcus does come around to a decent point: How can it be legal for a woman to abort her child “on a whim,” yet not legal for her to abort because the child has Down Syndrome? On this, we agree, although we depart on the logical conclusion that this disparity brings us to. Marcus thinks this logical fallacy means that women should have the right to abort their babies for any reason under the sun; we think their “rights” should be restricted to a handful of extreme situations. But the pro-life/anti-life argument is an old one and it doesn’t need to be rehashed here for the nine thousandth time.
The point is that for a column like Marcus’s to run – and run with fairly little controversy – it’s a signpost of just how little respect for human life we now have in our society. It’s just “another thing” for us to disagree about, like whether or not prayer should be allowed in school or whether or not Mueller’s investigation is actually going anywhere.
Oh, Down Syndrome children: Do they have the right to live or not? Oh, and what do you think about those anthem kneelers in the NFL? There’s no scale of extremity anymore to shake us awake so we say: Jeez, this is really sick.
This is the true victory of the left. Not that they’ve secured their abortion “rights,” but that they’ve reduced the very issue of killing the unborn to something you might idly discuss on a Sunday drive.
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