A Better Choice

Town Hall ^ | June 15, 2013 | Kathryn Lopez

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At a recent Thursday-morning press conference, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was asked to explain the moral difference between the 20-week-old babies whom Dr. Kermit Gosnell killed in his Philadelphia clinic and the unborn children that legislation sponsored by Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks would help protect. It's a perfectly reasonable question, one she answered with derision and evasion.

The incident perfectly illustrated something that was noted more than four decades ago by the journal California Medicine: "The very considerable semantic gymnastics required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected."

Eighteen years ago, Pope John Paul II saw how the poison of such thinking was spreading in his encyclical on The Gospel of Life: "Conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life."

I thought of JPII while recently listening to Chuck Todd, host of "The Daily Rundown" on MSNBC.

Ruminating on the latest manufactured outrage over a Republican politician's anti-abortion comments, Todd noted -- with what sounded like both nostalgia and bewilderment -- that pro-lifers used to be better at talking about the issue. Now, it could be argued that the media pounces on and amplifies pro-life missteps while ignoring the everyday debate. Still, the man has a point.

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We owe it to ourselves as much as to the lives stuck in our semantics gymnastics to stop dodging and ask the question: Does a baby, at any stage in pregnancy, really have no value unless the mother wills it?

[Travis McGee]