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Responding to pro-choice rhetoric: “don’t like abortion? don’t have one!”

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Top pro-life debater Scott Klusendorf reports on his recent lecture at Colgate University.

Excerpt:

During the extended question and answer, a polite female student replied (paraphrase), “I’m against abortion and will never have one. If one of my friends gets pregnant and wants an abortion, I will do everything I can to talk her out of it. But I don’t want the government involved in taking away a woman’s choice. I guess that’s why I’m against abortion and am pro-choice.”

The student was hardly alone. She was echoing the sentiments of millions of Americans who personally dislike abortion but do not identify as pro-life. Their beliefs are perfectly summed up in this popular bumper sticker: “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.”

Notice the bumper sticker completely transforms the nature of the abortion debate with a single word—“like.”

When pro-life advocates claim that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being, they aren’t saying they dislike abortion. They are saying it’s objectively wrong, regardless of how one feels about it. Notice what’s going on here. The pro-life advocate makes a moral claim that he believes is objectively true—namely, that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being. The abortion-choice advocate responds by changing that objective truth claim into a subjective one about likes and dislikes, as if the pro-lifer were talking about a mere preference. But this misses the point entirely. As Francis J. Beckwith points out, pro-life advocates don’t oppose abortion because they find it distasteful; they oppose it because it violates rational moral principles.

Imagine if I said, “Don’t like slavery? Then don’t own a slave.” Or, “Don’t like spousal abuse? Then don’t beat your wife!” If I said such things, you would immediately realize I don’t grasp why slavery and spousal abuse are wrong. They are not wrong because I personally dislike them. They are wrong because slaves and spouses are intrinsically valuable human beings who have a natural right not to be treated as property. Whether I personally like slavery or spousal abuse is completely beside the point. If I liked spousal abuse, you would rightly say I was sick! You wouldn’t resign yourself to, “I guess abuse is right for you but not for me.”

And yet this is precisely what the pro-choicer does. He reduces abortion to a mere preference and then declares, “Hands off! Keep the government out of the abortion business!”

Some choices are wrong. We can do better than abortion.

Learn about the pro-life case:

And some posts motivating Christians and conservatives to take abortion seriously:

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Obama administration refused to engage top counter-terrorism resource for Benghazi

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Guy Benson has a list of 5 revelations about the Benghazi massacre that came out in the last 48 hours. I’ve reported on a couple of them, but here are the last two on his list:

(4) The president keeps telling interviewers that he’s keenly interested in the results of this very, very important investigation.  But then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made an accidental admission yesterday:

Today, the White House press secretary let it slip during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One that President Obama’s inaction on the Benghazi situation now extends to inaction on the supposed investigation taking place. The administration has still not made clear what exactly is being investigated, or the extent of the investigation. And President Obama doesn’t much care. Said Carney: “He has not participated in the investigation. He is anticipating results that show us exactly what happened and who is responsible and what lessons we can learn from it and ensure it never happens again. He expects the investigation to be rigorous.”

The president is taking a hands-off approach to this sham of an investigation.  What a surprise.  I guess he’s got his hands full with more important things these days, just as he evidently did before and during the 9/11 terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including a sitting Ambassador.

(5) The motherload, from CBS News:

CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG). “The CSG is the one group that’s supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,” a high-ranking government official told CBS News. “They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon.” Information shared with CBS News from top counterterrorism sources in the government and military reveal keen frustration over the U.S. response on Sept. 11, the night ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 other Americans were killed in a coordinated attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

Counterterrorism sources and internal emails reviewed by CBS News express frustration that key responders were ready to deploy, but were not called upon to help in the attack … Another senior counter terrorism official says a hostage rescue team was alternately asked to get ready and then stand down throughout the night, as officials seemed unable to make up their minds. “The response process was isolated at the most senior level,” says an official referring to top officials in the executive branch. “My fellow counterterrorism professionals and I (were) not consulted.”

I think that #4 is particularly interesting, given that Obama missed tons of Presidential Daily Briefings just before the attack.

Read the whole list, then share it or tweet it. National security is one of the main responsibilities of the President. If this President can’t do the job he was elected to do, then we need to get one who can.

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NHS paying millions to hospitals to deny food and fluids to end-of-life patients

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Almost two thirds of NHS trusts using the Liverpool Care Pathway have received payouts totalling millions of pounds for hitting targets related to its use, research forThe Daily Telegraph shows.

The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the full scale of financial inducements for the first time.

They suggest that about 85 per cent of trusts have now adopted the regime, which can involve the removal of hydration and nutrition from dying patients.

More than six out of 10 of those trusts – just over half of the total – have received or are due to receive financial rewards for doing so amounting to at least £12million.

[…]At many hospitals more than 50 per cent of all patients who died had been placed on the pathway and in one case the proportion of forseeable deaths on the pathway was almost nine out of 10.

[…]The LCP was originally developed at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the city’s Marie Curie hospice to ease suffering in dying patients, setting out principles for how they to be treated.

It involves the withdrawal of treatments or tests from patients which doctors believe could cause distress and do more harm than good.

[…]A series of cases have also come to light in which family members said they were not consulted or even informed when food and fluids were withheld from their loved-ones.

What would happen if we had government-run health care? When you make something “free”, more people want to use it, but fewer people want to provide it – because there is no money in it. So what does the government do to control costs? They ration care to people who can no longer vote to keep them in power. The weak, the elderly – just put them on a pathway to death. Is that what we want here in the United States?

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