> Look, even most Democrats in Congress draw the line at partial-birth abortion. I have a good friend who is strongly pro-choice, and even he compares partial-birth abortion to something that might have been done at Dachau, with the doctor using scissors and a vacuum to suck the brains of the fetus so that the head collapses.
Is it the gruesomeness that ought to render it illegal? Or is there a principle in there somewhere? Something to the effect that innocent human life ought not to be taken?
How can that principle apply to protect the life of someone who practices such horrors for a living, and not protect the babies being killed?
With each abortion committed, the aura of the sanctity of human life takes another beating. Today, it is the deranged individual who kills an abortionist in a bizarrely reasoned quid pro quo. Tomorrow, the gulag or the work camp, perhaps. Germany didn’t start out one day from out of nowhere and decide they were going to start exterminating Jews. It took a number of ideas, over the course of most of a century, to play themselves out for that to happen. A society that anguishes over whether to protect a first-trimester fetus is probably not susceptible to the logic of holocaust. But when we start deciding to kill the weakest members of humanity, because it’s convenient and because they can’t hit back, we already know where that sort of logic ends.
