A woman who shows up at a Planned Parenthood clinic doesn’t need too much information. We don’t want to confuse her with too many facts. What she don’t know won’t hurt her.
These are the arguments opponents of the mandatory ultrasound bill are making, right? Just as William Jennings Bryan tried to protect Tennessee’s children from the disturbing details of Darwinism, abortion supporters want women’s minds spared the burden of TMBI: Too Much Biological Information.
After all, they’re just girls.
This is the net argument of the mandatory ultrasound opponents: A woman who has a better understanding of what she’s doing is actually worse off. Ignorance is pro-choice bliss.
Pro-choicers complain that making every woman seeking an abortion view an ultrasound of their unborn bab — er, “non-viable tissue mass” — is a purely political stunt from pro-lifers and the politicians who pander to them. You know what? The pro-choicers are right.
But just because it’s politics doesn’t mean its wrong. The ultrasound bill has pro-choicers in a full-blown panic because it directly addresses the abortion movement’s most powerful tool: cluelessness.
People who support so-called “abortion rights” simply cannot be honest about what it is they support.
When issues relating to abortion make it onto my talk radio show — which is extremely rare — I mandate one rule for my callers: They have to admit exactly what an abortion actually is. I’ve imposed this edict after hours of listening to pro-choicers engaged in logical contortions so twisted and extreme they make the editors of the Kama Sutra blush.
Abortion advocates have wrapped their minds in a cloak of self-deception that allows them to feel good about fighting so hard for the right to kill people.
They start by denying that an abortion involves a person. The legally-minded among them reach for court decisions that have done to unborn children what slavery did to Africans: You’re alive, you’re human, but you’re not really a “person.”
But getting a legal declaration of non-personhood doesn’t change biology any more than the Civil War did. Abortion advocates have thus been forced to convince themselves that these very young people aren’t “really” alive. That word — “really” — is the wiggle room that leaves pro-choicers willingly and happily ignorant.
What’s the difference between a “fetus” and an unborn child? How is terminating a pregnancy any different than terminating a toddlerhood? There is no meaningful difference, biologically speaking.
But the pro-choice movement has managed to finesse these obvious facts. Framing the debate in terms of “choice” — while simultaneously avoiding the fact that the choice is whether or not to kill someone — is particularly brilliant.
But this brilliant obfuscation cannot survive exposure to plain, photographic truth. Observers from both sides have acknowledged that support for abortion-on-demand has fallen as access to ultrasounds has increased. It’s simply impossible to make the argument that an abortion doesn’t involve a baby when a woman looks at a 3D ultrasound and sees, well, a baby.
Pro-choicers respond by attacking the idea that knowledge is a good thing. They denounce the ultrasound bill as “emotional blackmail,” an argument that only makes sense if abortions involve a life form worth getting emotional about. If what’s being aborted is no more significant than a tonsil or a toenail, where’s the blackmail?
The ultrasound bill breaks the barrier of denial and allows biology to flood into the equation. The fact that pro-choicers have spent 30 years denying biological facts should embarrass them. It doesn’t, which proves just how extreme the movement has become.
None of this means that abortion is wrong, by the way. Just as death penalty supporters argue that killing a criminal is more efficient than housing him for 30 years, abortion supporters can, if they choose, argue that killing an unwanted child is better (and certainly more efficient to society) than letting him grow up in poverty and neglect. Happy, childless women are more economically productive than unhappy single moms, to be sure.
Efficiency and convenience — these are the real reasons Americans continue to support legalized abortion. They are also callous and disturbing reasons for taking a human life.
Abortion opponents often display bumper stickers reading “Choose Life.” Opponents of the ultrasound bill may soon match them with a bumper sticker of their own: “Choose Ignorance.”
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