Ann Taylor Fleming contemplates what’s at the heart of the recent uptick in the culture war over abortion. She writes:
Compared with all the hard issues at the heart of this political year, nothing has come close in terms of the vigor and anger generated by matters relating to the reproductive health of women.
That’s where the long-simmering culture wars have come to rest: atop the female body.
Fleming believes recent dust-up is surrounding the new health care law is about people who want to deny women their sexual freedom by limiting their access to abortions. It is the standard logic of feminism and the sexual revolution. It’s all about a woman’s freedom to do whatever she pleases with her own body.
And therein is the question-begging that is at the heart of pro-choice ideology. Their view assumes without argument that the unborn are not persons but unwanted appendages on the female anatomy. To pro-choicers, the unborn have no more value than a hangnail that needs to be removed. On that logic, there is very little difference between abortion and liposuction. Both procedures achieve a trimming away of some excess tissue.
Thoughtless articles like this one do not change the fact that the focus of the divide between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is precisely about the humanity of the unborn. Pro-lifers offer moral and legal arguments for the humanity of the unborn, but pro-choicers don’t offer any such thing. When was the last time you heard a pro-choicer make a public argument against the humanity of the unborn? It almost never happens. All they have to offer is their self-evident assumptions and their disdain for anyone who dares to jeopardize the sexual freedom of women. That freedom trumps all—even the right to life of a baby growing in his mother’s womb.
The pro-choice side is ideologically bankrupt, but they hardly even know it.