Abortion and Liberty

The news was horrifying.

Reuters reports from Illinois“Thousands of fetal remains [dead unborn babies] found on property of deceased doctor”

“More than 2,200 preserved fetal remains have been found on the Illinois property of a recently deceased doctor who performed abortions, the Will County sheriff’s office said in a statement. The family and attorney of Ulrich Klopfer, who died on Sept. 3, discovered 2,246 medically preserved fetal remains on Thursday while going through the deceased doctor’s personal property and alerted the local coroner’s office, the sheriff’s office said. ‘The family is cooperating fully with this investigation. There is no evidence that any medical procedures were conducted at the property,’ the statement, issued on Friday, said. Will County is located about 45 miles (72 km) southwest of Chicago. The Will County Sheriff and Coroner’s office could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.” (09/15/19)

One thing that the 20th and 21st Centuries have given mankind is the ability to commit mass murder on a retail scale.  This is nearly as sickening as the evil actions of abortionist Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia, perhaps because we don’t know all the details of just how more than 2,000 dead babies ended up in pickle jars in this man’s basement.

What we do know is that each of these bodies is a dead child. Against the State: An ... Rockwell Jr., Llewelly... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details)

For centuries, Americans (and proto-Americans) lived lives of hypocrisy for having freedom and liberty while denying that to so many slaves (Black, AmerInd, Irish, and more) in their midst and by claiming and exercising human rights (given by God) while denying those rights even to people in this very land.  It was more than just failing to live up to ideals: it was blindness that is harder to forgive.

It is sad that finally ending those injustices, those sins, those deeds of evil, almost always came at the cost of stealing liberty from other people.

As a result, we have become hardened, as a people.  We see it in this very situation: the rights of women are furthered (supposedly) by stealing ALL rights from others: not just males, but females as well. (Too many people refuse to recognize that roughly half of all babies killed in the womb are girls.)

Call this the sin of Greek democracy, or of the Southron republics. The Greek city-states’ citizens enjoyed their liberties at the cost of their slaves. The slaveholders (and too many others in the South) enjoyed their liberties at the cost of their slaves as well.  But the outright deliberate murder of babies to provide women “freedom” from motherhood is far darker.

I realize that there are many libertarians – people who claim to be lovers of liberty – who will disagree with me.  Most will use, as an excuse, the idea that the fetus is not really a human until he or she is born, and before birth, she or he is nothing but a “blob of cells” or just a “part of the woman’s body” or even a parasite.

I do not understand that logic, not from a religious view, nor from a scientific point of view, nor from the point of view of a lover of liberty.

Such views are nothing more than warmed over versions of tribalism: the Greeks had no problem with enslaving the barbarians, because “they aren’t really human.” Many Southerners argued something similar: that black people were not really human.  AmerInd tribes which practiced slavery (most of them, sadly) considered only their own tribe to be “real people” – the slaves they captured in war or kidnapped or bought were just animals that were sorta like people.

Again, that is disgusting to me from every point of view that I can stomach. The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard, Murray N. Best Price: $9.63 Buy New $19.00 (as of 02:25 UTC - Details)

Just as the Abolitionists of the antebellum United States finally tore the Union apart because they could not stomach the evils of black slavery, so might today’s more radical pro-lifers decide to do the same and sooner than we might imagine.

Discoveries like this, and the Philadelphia house of horrors before it, are fuel to the fire.  It is worse, because just as in the 1850s the various governments refused to do anything effective, so, too, the governments – local, state, and federal – today are unwilling to do anything.

The victims today are unlike those ancient slaves of Greece, Rome, or even the American states (NOT just the South). Today’s victims of this evil tribalism, this hypocrisy, this violation of common (or not so common) human decency are without any recourse to themselves.  The ancient slaves, right up to the beginning of Secession and the War Between the States, could revolt.  Perhaps even without hope of success and without weapons, they could still resist the evil inflicted upon them.

An infant still in the womb, still dependent on his or her mother, has no way to resist, especially since it is the very mother who has decided or accepted the act of murder.

Reprinted from The Price of Liberty.