Mrs. Curmudgeon forwarded me the link to this
essay at Salon.com. I have a hard time figuring out how to respond to an adult who, like Mary Elizabeth Williams, insists on presenting herself as an intellectual and emotional adolescent. She no doubt considers herself quite brave for writing,
Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal.
That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we
wind up looking like death-panel-loving,
kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can
be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose
body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her
circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of
the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.
She is, of course, not brave, but a moral monster who, despite (or perhaps because of) her self-congratulatory liberal credentials, has fallen into the exact same line of eugenic reasoning which was once openly proclaimed in this country until the discovery of German gas chambers at the end of World War II drove it underground.
And that's the worrisome bit. This shameful diatribe didn't appear underground, in some sloppily xeroxed newsletter or, as is more common these days, on an amateurishly constructed blog littered with broken hyperlinks. Instead, it appeared on Salon.com, which passes for a respectable media outlet. This kind of thing can be said right out in the open, it seems, without shame or fear of being judged immoral by polite and sane people.
Sixty years on from the war, and we've not simply forgotten its lessons: our society has laid the groundwork for it to happen all over again, as it has been happening since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.
