Abortion – nothing less than the extinguishing of a human life – calls into question a much larger issue, and that is the fundamental issue of the right to life itself. “Progressives” (and the use of scare quotes is intentional) prefer to subsume the value of this individual pre-born life under a cloud of group rights. For to acknowledge the right of the unborn to live is to acknowledge that an individual life has intrinsic value. And that is pure poison to the progressive utopianist meme.
I submit that the horrors of the last 150 years are the direct result of the rise of the will to power and its usurpation of the role that individual conscience, moral restraint and religious sanction used to play in Western human affairs. It is about the desire for the power to control the lives of others down to the smallest details. The great irony is that this interventionist (and ultimately, eliminationist) mindset is precisely what so-called progressives accuse conservatives of harboring. Those who call themselves “progressives” above all desire to wield the power to decide who lives and who dies.
Here is the Vulcan mind-meld translation of the core premise of the utopianist, “progressive” Left: ultimately, you have no right to live. By their lights, you are no more than a thing, an animal, or a machine. Therefore, you have no right to the fruits of your labors. You are a ‘resource’ at best. Or you are in their way and must be eliminated. There’s the last 200 years of leftist philosophy and its practical consequences in a nutshell.
The progressive refusal to acknowledge the value of individual human life over an evanescent conflation of group rights and collectivist ideology is one of the principal reasons why no peace, no accommodation, no compromise can ever be made with them. Theirs is a reckless, willful and fundamentally evil disregard for the most fundamental of all of our rights: and that is the individual’s right to live.
This premise is, has been, and continues to be central to the justification for the wholesale slaughter of millions of human beings – and the enslavement and impoverishment of hundreds of millions more. I have written a modest essay concerning the idea of killers without conscience and the pedigree of their ideas. These ideas are on display in the details of 0bamacare, for example. 0bamacare represents the deliberate and willful devaluation of human life – the reduction of people to mere objects. That is the next step on the way to physician-assisted suicide and, if it is not stopped, government-mandated euthanasia.
And worse. Far, far worse. But that’s precisely the intent of the so-called “Obamacare” legislation.
Why else would modernity’s Left seek to ‘move the goalposts’ that define life? And further, to define the value of individual life by its utility? “Utility” – to whom or for what? We have moved from questioning whether any sane human being should be allowed to make such decisions to dithering over who will get to decide. This is monstrous. And if any of you feel that this is hyperbole or tinfoil hattery, consider the source of such ideas.
Listen to Dr. Peter Singer speaking blithely of extending that ‘right to choose’ to children as old as 28 months! Why? Because Singer argues that at that age, well… they’re not fully conscious and capable of reason! Is this some crackpot who no one takes seriously? Hardly. Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His ideas are universally applauded within academia.
Why else would we hear of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel – Rahm Emanuels brother – also an ‘advisor’ to 0bama, advocating the assessment of the relative ‘quality of life’ under the aegis of his innocuous-sounding “Complete Lives” program? Emanuel’s guidelines are strictly utilitarian, and are based in part upon the notion of an individual’s ‘value to society’.
Emmanuel cites this entry from the Jan. 31, 2009 edition of the British medical journal Lancet:
“When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” This may be justified by public opinion, since “broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants and young adults over very elderly people.”
“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.”
Again, this is an argument for the value of human life based upon its social utility and it is not difficult to trace this view of human life back to its pedigree in early-20th century eugenics. Dr. Emanuel claims further that this system will not be subject to corruption – this fantasy assumes that all men are angels and the millennium has arrived. Systems such as this one, once entrenched, are easily co-opted by fiat and placed in the service of those who wish to arrogate the power of life and death to themselves. Dr. Emanuel offers the following as commentary to the Lancet article:
“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”
Some persist in crediting Dr. Emanuel with an unblinking and fearless rationality – that will all play a happy tune for high-minded progressives until they face the real and practical application of his utilitarian praxis. Say, for example, when the government panel – not you or your doctor – decides that your premature newborn infant will receive only painkillers because society has nothing invested in the baby and the calculus of the cost-benefit trade-off indicates that the care required will cost too much and have too uncertain an outcome. Or, when you discover that the treatment for your particular malady is now ‘off the menu’ because it hasn’t met one of the many new Federally-mandated prerequisites for its use and application. A paperwork detail, to be sure. But too late for you. Or, when you find out that the cancer that your mom survived in her sixties is no longer being treated because, after all, it doesn’t serve the common good to spend limited resources on the elderly – excuse me, elderly units as 0bamacase now defiens them – in the last few months of their life, does it? But they’ll doubtless take comfort in the knowledge that those resources will go to “people of worth,” as genocide enthusiast and Obama advisor Audrey Thomason defines them. Won’t they?
So what happens when:
1. Those goalposts defining the beginning and the end of life at last converge?
2. The decision as to who lives and who dies eventually passes from individuals and to the state – as it most surely will if death-worshipping progressives are allowed to have their way?
If that seems a tad, well, extreme to some of you, consider this: there are those who believe that Dr. Emanuel deserves a medal for his fearless and ‘enlightened’ rationality. Dr. Singer’s prescriptions for infanticide without guilt are warmly applauded in the halls of academe.
These ideas have consequences: they pave the road to a nightmare world of slaughter and atrocity – and if you don’t think so, then you haven’t been paying attention to the history of the last century. The nudge, the gradual squeeze – and then the shove into submission and oblivion. This is the foundation and the prerequisite for a world in which neither love, nor mercy, nor hope survive. It is a world where all of your hopes, aspirations and dreams, all of your love of country and family not only count for naught, for those hopes and aspirations – and you – will be extinguished as if you never had existed. Because you surely must be if these will-to-power driven monsters are to rule without fear of opposition.
Pope John Paul II in his 1995 work, The Gospel of Life made this observation:
This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable “culture of death”. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of “conspiracy against life” is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.
There is only one way the monsters who seek to impose such a hellish existence on this world can be stopped.
