Thanks for your thoughtful response. Personally, I have come down on both sides of the argument at various times in my life.
What strikes me - and bothers me - is the logical disconnect between what we as pro-lifers say we believe (abortion=murder) and yet we decry those who kill mass murderers. Yet, like you, it just feels wrong. But if it feels so wrong, is aborting a baby truly the moral equivalence of first-degree murder?
It will all be revealed in the end, I know. Thanks again for your reply.
Well, during the Puritan revolution of 1640, they talked about a “world turned upside down.” I think we have the same problem today.
If you went into an abortion clinic to stop abortions from taking place, you would be arrested and jailed for trespassing. In fact some of the early clinic protestors did exactly that, but it didn’t work.
If you somehow were standing in the operating room, as I imagined earlier, and you saw Dr. Tiller about to stick a pair of scissors into a baby’s head, you might stop that killing by wrestling him to the ground and calling the police. But unlike the case where you wrestled a thief to the ground who was about to kill your neighbor, the police would come and arrest you for trespassing and assault.
The problem, of course, is that Roe v. Wade turned our world upside down. None of the usual rules apply. The best thing would be to reverse that decision, and pro-lifers have been working on that for decades. In some ways they are winning the battle of public opinion, and closing abortion clinics down as people grow disgusted with them. But they are not being helped by the law. They are being impeded and sometimes abused by the law.
Roe v. Wade is right at the heart of the ideological war that is tearing our country apart and making consensus between right and left virtually impossible. Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg said, not long ago, that maybe Roe v. Wade was a mistake, because instead of settling the matter it has raised divisions that refuse to lie down and go away. Indeed, they will never go away while that is the law of our land.
What to do? Somehow, we have to reverse and vacate that decision, or our country cannot survive as it once was.