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Occasionally, I read or hear about something so stunning that I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience, watching from a detached vantage point as the world unfurls strangely in front of me. Yesterday afternoon, I had one of those experiences.

I was at work, pausing to check the headlines, weather and traffic, when I saw the surreal headline: “Massachusetts Appeals Court rules that judge was wrong to order mentally ill woman to have an abortion and to then be sterilized”.

Forced abortions and sterilizations in Massachusetts? Granted, the court-ordered violation of this woman – and murder of her baby – were stopped, but it still seems hard to fit these facts into the perception I have of the world I inhabit. This isn’t China, or some other totalitarian state; despite the admittedly growing monstrosity of state hegemony over too many areas of life, America’s still seems like a system worth saving through correction, not overthrowing. Judges don’t really order things like that, right?

I’m not wholly ignorant of the history of these kinds of criminal depravities in American jurisprudence; I know these kinds of judgments were not unheard of during the early heyday of Progressivism, 100 years ago or so, before the “historical marches” of fascism and communism progressed Europe into post-Christian, scientifically-ordered hell-holes, giving the eugenics and related movements a rather tarnished public image. I’m also very aware of the broad based public support for abortion, in both varnished and even unvarnished guises; for eugenics in just about every conceivable form excepting the currently unfashionable sex-selection killing of fetal girls practiced by Hindus and others; and even for sterilization of the “unfit” as part of the eugenic spirit, at least insofar as it is reflected in attitudes that some people, for the common good, just shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. even if the means of accomplishing that are not part of the reflection. Still, I wouldn’t have thought any judge in 21st century America would dare to be so craven, regardless of her own level of contempt for the human being.

A day later, there are still a few lingering things haunting my mind about this fiasco, after getting past the shocking moral depravity of the judge in the case – Norfolk (MA) Probate and Family Court Judge Christina Harms, who retired from the bench last Wednesday, less than a week after handing down this ruling, which among other indecencies, stipulated that the mother ‘could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse” into a hospital where she would be sedated and an abortion would then be performed’, according to the original Boston.com story I read, as well as the few others I’ve found.

The first is the amazing lack of legs this story has (not) grown. I would have expected that a story reported on  pretty major MSM news site about a judge in America ordering this forced abortion and sterilization would have gone close to viral within 24 hours – especially during an election year. This has barely caused a blip. Am I the only one shocked by this, or is this a case of the MSM looking the other way from what could be a political hot-potato for their political sponsors? Is there another explanation? I’m lost on this.

Secondly is the realization that it was apparently only the attempted forced sterilization that brought about the judicial rebuke from Appellate Court Associate Justice Andrew R. Grainger, who noted that the ruling contradicted a 1982 (MA) Supreme Judicial Court ruling on the right to procreate. The fate of the baby appears to have been handed over to yet another lower court judge for dispositioning! The courts might yet order the baby to be killed for having a mentally ill mother! Incredible.

Lastly, I was profoundly struck by what I can only characterize as a thunderous moral tone-deafness and spiritual imbecility on the part of the alleged adults involved in this, including the reporters (with the exception of Ben Johnson writing for LifeSiteNews.com, who picked up on this). It is a tone-deafness to the cruel irony that the mental incapacitation afflicting this women (schizophrenia), which is the cudgel being used to beat her into the torture chamber, appears to have its source in a prior abortion she had committed. Court records are clear that she had a breakdown after the abortion, and has been a basket case ever since, especially around issues concerning babies.

This poor woman is tormented by the evil of her earlier abortion, and this knuckle-dragging judge wanted to trick her into having another abortion! And her own parents are advocating for killing her child! May God have pity on all of them in their deformities. This tortured soul does not need an abortionist, she needs a priest. I pray one finds her soon.

Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 5th, 2012.

Douglas Farrow, from an outstanding piece in the new (and terrific-looking) issue of Touchstone, entitled Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage? Nail-head, meet hammer:

[W]e should observe also that when a family of some description is founded by a same-sex couple, it is always founded by violating the natural parent-child bond that marriage is intended to nurture and protect. It deprives the child, whether in the same way that divorce does or in some more innovative technological way, of its prima facie right to its own father and mother. But we should notice something else as well, and not merely parenthetically—something too little noticed either by the detractors or by the champions of marriage. Same-sex marriage violates the natural parent-child bond in every family, and the right of the family to protection by society and the state.

How so?

In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII rightly described the family as “a society very small . . . but none the less a true society, and one older than any State,” with “rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.” This society, “founded more immediately in nature,” is what the Universal Declaration has in mind when it speaks in article 16 of the family. The family’s status as “natural”—that controversial adjective is deployed only in this one specific article—allows it a certain priority over civil society and the state. The latter share an obligation to protect the family, but the family is not at their disposal.

Same-sex marriage dispenses with all of that, however. By excising sexual difference, with its generative power, it deprives itself of any direct connection to nature. The unit it creates rests on human choice, as does that created by marriage. But whether monogamous, polygamous, or polyamorous, it is a closed unit that reduces to human choice, rather than engaging choice with nature; and its lack of a generative dimension means that it cannot be construed as a fundamental building block.

Institutionally, then, it is nothing more than a legal construct. Its roots run no deeper than positive law. It therefore cannot present itself to the state as the bearer of independent rights and responsibilities, as older or more basic than the state itself. Indeed, it is a creature of the state, generated by the state’s assumption of the power of invention or re-definition. Which changes everything.

I have little to add except that I can happily cross “write a short but cogent defense of marriage from an anthropological perspective” off my to-do list – I can simply point people to Farrow’s article, which is far better than anything I would have come up with. Next time some sneering cynic asks you “How is your marriage ‘damaged’ by same-sex marriage?”, share this link. Marriage matters like nothing else matters in human society, and Farrow knows why. And he knows why contraception lies at the root of the breath-taking collapse of the institution over the past century – and especially the past half-century. Required reading for any morally serious person.

Prior to my summer blogging hiatus, I had posted a couple of entries on some responses to Mara Hvistendahl’s recent book on the social consequences of widespread sex-selection abortions in Asia. I ended up requesting the book from my local public library, and checked it out in mid-July. I couldn’t get past the prologue; it was dreadful.

As Hvistendahl laid out her project in the prologue, it was hard not to detect almost a sadness for a great hope gone bad; a belief that abortion should have been not just a means for individual women to “gain control” of their own lives, but a vehicle for social transformation, sure to lift the world out of the darkness of an evil past (i.e. the new, technologically-empowered order of Modernity triumphing over the evil institutions of tradition) – and yet, something had gone terribly wrong, somehow:

While ultrasound technology was modern, like many people at the time I thought that using it for something as crass as sex selection had to be temporary; one last instance of sexist traditions rearing their ugly head. (p. xiif)

It’s scary to consider how normal this thinking appears to many people – especially educated people.

There’s not a lot of need to explore in too much further detail the fundamental intellectual and moral error embraced by Hvistendahl: as if it were morally unacceptable to select for boys, but perfectly acceptable to select for health traits or some other eugenic purpose – or more to the point: that the practice of adults deciding which children to kill in utero can be justified on the basis of any utilitarian calculation, but only as long as the intention does not violate the sensibilities of people like Mara Hvistendahl. Abortion can’t be wrong simply because it is murderous, but it can be a thought crime, if your reasons don’t pass muster. Imagine that.

I understand that professional academics generally occupy a rather different world than that of working stiffs like me, traveling within a peculiar orbit of fashionable dogmas that seek to explain the world according to mythologies that place academics themselves at the epicenter of a deterministic universe, as gatekeepers to the science of the Answers to Everything™. They function as the Priesthood of Progress – and if they wear a white coat, then they’re like high priests, or bishops, or something. I get that. But what is a simple thinking person to make of fatuity such as this:

If females are scarce, males may kill a female’s existing offspring to maximize their chance at passing on their genes, inadvertently speeding up the species’ path toward extinction. (p. xv)

It’s hard to know where to start. Although written as a support for her theorizing on the declining prospects for peace in the world given the new gender imbalance among mankind in Asia, it is clearly standard-fare, goofball Darwinistic mythology – applicable, as must be the case, to sexual species generally. It’s tough enough to come up with a credible scenario wherein men might find a scarcity of women an inducement to kill other men’s children in order to try to ensure their own progeny, but to postulate such a clever motivation to irrational, purely instinctual creatures is beyond laughable. Of course, it’s hard enough to see how anyone can reconcile a Darwinist orthodoxy with an abortionist mindset to begin with, unless it is out of utter self-contempt. Still, this may seem somewhat irrelevant to my assessment of her book, at least until it is seen as an exemplar of the intellectual quality of the work as a whole.

What we’re given in this prognostication is a transparently dubious assertion about reality, being pushed down for validation into the quasi-sacred space of Darwinistic “explanations-of-everything via the progressive/evolutionary struggle for existence”, an intellectual playground where all kinds of absurd explanations for the world around us (sometimes derisively known as just-so stories) are readily embraced without much comment, and seemingly validated by the fact that things are indeed the way they are (i.e. the explanation for why they are that way must be true, or they wouldn’t be that way, right?). This is the logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent. It attempts to ride the coattails of a meaningless tautology (whatever exists is that which had been most likely to survive), but reads that tautology backwards, via a neo-pagan cosmology of primordial chaos and violence, into an origins mythology of a universal struggle for survival, which begets magical thinking in various affirmations of causeless effects, and assertions of motivated matter and acting secondary substance (i.e. species).

Sufficiently coated now with enough Darwinist dogma-dust so as to be protected from serious intellectual questioning, the idea is then walked back from the murky mists of evolutionary just-so-ism to a place where it can be supposed to be applicable to human society. Again, I understand how popular this kind of mental processing is, but I just can’t stomach it. Now, whether or not a theory of evolution recognizable as such to a modern Neo-Darwinist will ever offer a satisfactory biological explanation for the mysterious analogy of life on Earth is quite beside the point here. The point is that the kind of cheesy magical thinking exposed above, coupled with the ideological credulity already evident in Hvistendahl’s thinking on abortion, rendered the idea of a close reading of the work, in my judgment, a waste of precious time – though I would spend a bit more time scoping out the other sections to better grasp the work as a whole.

Browsing further, I found an interesting section exploring the effects of the woman shortage on marriage norms in Asia, where young women are now routinely imported as sexual commodities into countries with more aggressive girl-aborting practices, where they are very often taken by abusive men with no understanding (or concern) of how to treat women properly. There is, of course, also a burgeoning market in prostitution. In short, abortion has facilitated the subjugation of the region’s poorer women in a system of sexual slavery. Who would have thought that imposing a barbaric institution designed to kill children for profit and convenience could give rise to such blatant disrespect for women as persons? Go figure!

Hvistendahl might be right about the ominous practical implications of the Asian gender imbalance facilitated by abortion technology – and championed by Western “do-gooders” – but she is blind to the root cause, which is not the prevailing circumstances themselves, but the underlying moral imbecility of embracing pure evil as a vehicle for achieving a desired good. Moreover, little do the Mara Hvistendahls of the world know what’s ultimately in store for women in the West, whose status, in order to descend to such complete depravity, has to fall so much further than it did in societies in which women have not traditionally been viewed through the dignifying lens of Christianity. But the chickens will surely come home yet to roost, as men – increasingly alienated from any sense of duty, purpose, or responsibility in consumerist, “liberated” society – continue, progressively, to see women not as wives and as partners in the perpetual generation of civilization in the family, but as more or less useful playthings.

The “freedom to choose” is nothing but a license to kill, and the price of murder is the loss of all decency. The bill for this idiocy is coming due.

Quote of the Day for June 27th, 2011:

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat’s take on the Mara Hvistendahl book I posted on last Wednesday:

This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that she’s uncovered.

It’s society at large, she argues, citing evidence that gender-imbalanced countries tend to be violent and unstable. It’s the women in those countries, she adds, pointing out that skewed sex ratios are associated with increased prostitution and sex trafficking.

These are important points. But the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence.

Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.

My initial reaction upon hearing of this book was to be interested, but not interested enough to add it to my absurdly and hopelessly overgrown reading list, but the more I read about it, the more it appears that the author really did her homework, and that it might be worth a look.

Appropriately, Douthat seems concerned primarily with the complicity, unveiled by Hvistendahl, of self-righteous Western institutions in the propagation of the Orient’s “gendercide”, and I suspect that is not at all what the author had in mind, but the facts speak for themselves – eventually.

It seems also worth noting that the figure of 160 million “missing” (i.e. dead) girls is grossly understated as far as I can see, because it only refers to the delta from the imbalanced birth rate, not the total number killed, which would necessarily add a number approaching half the number of world-wide abortions, though one could argue that the others were killed for different reasons – as if that were important.

The lunatic fascist and socialist tyrants who were the dominant objects of public fear and loathing during the 20th century, it turns out, had nothing on the bureaucrats running The Rockefeller Foundation, Planned Parenthood, or the various liberal governments of the “civilized world” which oversaw the project of progress – not when it comes to the shedding of innocent blood for personal and political gain.

Quote of the Day for Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011:

Jonathan Last, in a review published at the Wall Street Journal Online of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, a recent book by feminist Mara Hvistendahl:

Ms. Hvistendahl is particularly worried that the "right wing" or the "Christian right"—as she labels those whose politics differ from her own—will use sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself. She believes that something must be done about the purposeful aborting of female babies or it could lead to "feminists’ worst nightmare: a ban on all abortions."

It is telling that Ms. Hvistendahl identifies a ban on abortion—and not the killing of tens of millions of unborn girls—as the "worst nightmare" of feminism. Even though 163 million girls have been denied life solely because of their gender, she can’t help seeing the problem through the lens of an American political issue. Yet, while she is not willing to say that something has gone terribly wrong with the pro-abortion movement, she does recognize that two ideas are coming into conflict: "After decades of fighting for a woman’s right to choose the outcome of her own pregnancy, it is difficult to turn around and point out that women are abusing that right."

Late in "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl makes some suggestions as to how such "abuse" might be curbed without infringing on a woman’s right to have an abortion. In attempting to serve these two diametrically opposed ideas, she proposes banning the common practice of revealing the sex of a baby to parents during ultrasound testing. And not just ban it, but have rigorous government enforcement, which would include nationwide sting operations designed to send doctors and ultrasound techs and nurses who reveal the sex of babies to jail. Beyond the police surveillance of obstetrics facilities, doctors would be required to "investigate women carrying female fetuses more thoroughly" when they request abortions, in order to ensure that their motives are not illegal.

Such a regime borders on the absurd. It is neither feasible nor tolerable—nor efficacious: Sex determination has been against the law in both China and India for years, to no effect. I suspect that Ms. Hvistendahl’s counter-argument would be that China and India do not enforce their laws rigorously enough.

Despite the author’s intentions, "Unnatural Selection" might be one of the most consequential books ever written in the campaign against abortion. It is aimed, like a heat-seeking missile, against the entire intellectual framework of "choice." For if "choice" is the moral imperative guiding abortion, then there is no way to take a stand against "gendercide." Aborting a baby because she is a girl is no different from aborting a baby because she has Down syndrome or because the mother’s "mental health" requires it. Choice is choice. One Indian abortionist tells Ms. Hvistendahl: "I have patients who come and say ‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’ "

Though the selection quoted here paints Ms. Hvistendahl as something of a crackpot, the review is largely appreciative of what Last takes to be a worthwhile expository work which explores some of the unintended consequences of what people saner than Ms. Hvistendahl recognize as the fundamentally evil franchise of legalized abortion. The practical social implications of the abortion movement are chickens slowly but surely coming home to roost, and represent nobody’s sexually-liberated utopia, needless to say. Nevertheless, it is truly astonishing to see how writers like Hvistendahl can maintain their ideological blindness in the light of of such damning evidence of their murderous folly.

Jazz Shaw has a troubling post on the blog over at HotAir.com, dealing with a recent suggestion from Pennsylvania Auditor General Jack Wagner to freeze new prison construction funding in PA. As the Entitlements Chicken comes home to roost, states are likely to begin looking at their corrections systems for ways to save. Nothing wrong with that in theory, but I have a hard time seeing how the typical alignment of political squabbling will produce a good path forward. To wit, Shaw’s two-cent’s worth on available options:

Wagner is excluding the ranks of murderers, rapists and their ilk, as previous, sensible plans have done. And rather than some sort of catch and release scheme, he’s examining alternate options including half-way houses, electronic monitoring for home detention, and evening – weekend release programs (which free up beds) for the well behaved.

All of these have potential, and I hope he’s not too badly excoriated solely for political gain over this. But the one item which seems to have been left off the table is privatization. While such plans have hardly been problem free, some have shown a great deal of promise. Getting the prison system off the state government’s books entirely and turning it over to a for-profit organization which will be motivated to do the job in the most economically efficient manner possible should also be considered.

Let me be blunt: the notion of privatizing prisons is inane – and perhaps insane. Securing the public order is one of the few unquestionably legitimate functions of government, and that includes the administration of punishment for wrongdoers. In fact, in one of his more famous and widely-quoted passages, Saint Paul tells us in Romans 13:4 that it is a sacred duty of the state; that the ruling authority “is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” Trading this duty for a price break is grossly irresponsible. Furthermore, it establishes a dehumanizing institution wherein human punishment – human degradation – is undertaken as a for-profit enterprise, which while not as completely evil as, say, the abortion industry, nonetheless flagrantly flouts decency’s law against the objectification of our fellow human beings, in ways more than a little reminiscent of slave trading. Yet, I fear this idea is likely to gain traction within certain circles.

Before this gets too far, I hope we can have a serious public discussion (ha!) about the meaning and purpose of punishment for crime. We seem to take the prison system as being essentially synonymous with the idea of a penal system, as if there aren’t any other serious alternatives except for options that could be bundled under the rubric of leniency – this despite the historical reality that the ubiquitous use of prison time  for punishing crime is relatively new. I realize the prison-focused model was implemented as a humanitarian alternative to older forms of punishment, but I’m not convinced prisons aren’t often very expensive means for completing the social alienation of men (and women) who are obviously already at least tending anti-social – further coarsening them, and facilitating and/or creating a criminal sub-culture that in turn facilitates permanent alienation from whatever virtue “straight” culture can manage to foster in its conforming members.

It’s also true that some people get their lives turned around in prison. But I suppose there are prisons and there are prisons, and again, there are prisoners and there are prisoners. For every prisoner that gets his life turned around doing time, how many become conformed to an anti-social norm that mitigates against their ever being prepared to function properly in virtuous society, and how is this related to the unmistakable and steady decline of virtue in an “outside” culture that lionizes moral transgression as a kind of counter-cultural bravery? At any rate, it should be clear enough that the actual consequences of the prison movement have not produced the results liberal society expected to achieve in its penal system.

Any serious conversation about this issue would require that civic leaders and other concerned parties understand the overall purpose of criminal punishment in American society; its intended goals from both a societal perspective and that of the individual offender; the relation of punishment to rehabilitative purposes in modern penality; the breadth of content of the actual practices of incarceration in America; and the effects of both actual and threatened incarceration on various elements of the population.

No small task that, but America has a ridiculously large prison population, and people are about to start arguing over whether or not we should turn its administration into a profitable business for someone – in order to expand that population even further, without interrupting tee times.

Quote of the Day for Wednesday, January 26th, 2011:

Joe Carter, writing an “On the Square” column over at FirstThings.com, on Being a Person:

But should all human beings be considered persons? Historically, the answer has been a resounding “no.” Slaves, women, infants, Jews, and “foreigners” all share a common history of being denied legal or moral standing as persons, despite being recognized as humans. The judgment of recent generations, however, has without exception concluded that denying personhood to these members of the human family is a great moral evil. I have no doubt that future generations will judge ours just as harshly.

Yet while recognition of personhood is the foundation of certain positive rights, it should not be required for a basic negative right—the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law. In other words, people cannot claim a right to kill you simply because they will not recognize you as a person.

This is an interesting article from Carter, in which he throws down the gauntlet to a certain extent by trying to move the arguments for the rationalization of abortion away from language concerning personhood, and toward the more ontologically coherent matter of being. That being said, I don’t see why he is apparently ready to concede any kind of functional imperative to personhood, even if the legal fiction of corporate personhood involves that kind of reductionism. It seem to me that we shouldn’t have too much trouble distinguishing in a moral argument between a person as a spiritual reality on the one hand, and on the other a legal construct that is transparently meant to be understood as a person only analogously.

Quote of the Day for Monday, January 24th, 2011:

Indiana Congressman Mike Pence addressing the rallying assembly this morning before beginning the annual Walk for Life in Washington DC:

We gather to mark the 38th anniversary of the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott. And we gather today in the shadow of a new pro-life majority on Capitol Hill. And we will keep gathering until Roe v. Wade is sent to the ash heap of history where it belongs.

These are trying times in the life of this nation. Our economy is struggling and our national government is awash in a sea of debt. Amidst these struggles, some would have us focus our energies on jobs and spending.

We must not remain silent when great moral battles are being waged. Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over life have forgotten the lessons of history. As in the days of a house divided, America’s darkest moments have come when economic arguments trumped moral principles.

A nation that will not stand for life will not stand for long. You know there can be no lasting prosperity without a moral foundation in law.

And as to focusing on spending, I agree. Let’s start by denying all federal funding for abortion at home and abroad. The largest abortion provider in America should not also be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title X. The time has come to deny any and all federal funding to Planned Parenthood of America.

Thank you for braving the cold one more time and saying to the heart of our national government, ‘We will fight on for life. We will fight on for the unborn and the brokenhearted.’

And we will fight on because we know, as Jefferson said, ‘God who gave us life gave us liberty…and God is just and his justice cannot sleep forever.’

And we know this: We will win this fight because the deepest desire of every mother and father is to protect their child, at any cost, even with the own lives and that truth cannot be erased.

The American people will make this right. We will restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law. Because every American knows in their heart, this is the greatest nation on earth because we acknowledge the God-given right to liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the unalienable right to life.

Yes, there was a huge, non-violent protest gathering for social justice in the nation’s capitol today. Who woulda thunk?

I like Pence, but he gets something very wrong here: Roe V. Wade was not the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott: it far exceeds Dred Scott in evil, both in intent and in application.

Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 20, 2011:

From page 8 of the Grand Jury report of the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania concerning the long-unfettered illegal practices of abortionist Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D:

Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. There were several oversight agencies that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of them did, not even after Karnamaya Mongar’s death. In the end, Gosnell was only caught by accident, when police raided his offices to seize evidence of his illegal prescription selling. Once law enforcement agents went in, they couldn’t help noticing the disgusting conditions, the dazed patients, the discarded fetuses. That is why the complete regulatory collapse that occurred here is so inexcusable. It should have taken only one look.

This is a gruesome report, which paints a picture of both bureaucratic incompetence and political depravity, while managing to miss the more fundamental causes: crass indifference and moral imbecility. Gosnell – and accomplices – is being charged with murdering viable babies following botched abortions, among other charges.

However, from the first paragraphs, it was evident to me that this is a poorly written, and not particularly well reasoned, document – high on dramatic flair, and full of disturbing facts, but lacking precision. I imagine that’s not uncommon for Grand Jury reports, but this one includes such luminous idiocy as this:

We believe, given the manner in which Gosnell operated, that he killed the vast majority of babies that he aborted after 24 weeks. (pg. 115)

The idiocy is by no means limited to the jurors. The report includes quotes (e.g. pg. 101) from “assistants” who made a living for years in this detestable operation, and who themselves personally participated in and performed the post-natal murderous act with scissors they all called “snipping,” and yet who took photographs of a 34-week old baby after he’d been killed, because they were disturbed by the killing, since the baby was so big. So big! Well, thank God for occasional bigness, I suppose.

A society that can routinely look the other way while evil like this gets perpetrated is a society in its own death throes.

Quote of the Day for Friday, November 26, 2010:

Rita L. Marker and Wesley J. Smith on euthanasia & euphemism, from a paper first appearing in the Duquesne Law Review Vol. 35, No. 1 (Fall 1996) pp. 81-107 under the title “The Art of Verbal Engineering, ” published on-line by the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force:

Today when mercy killing is discussed, it is couched in euphemisms — words of gentleness or the language of rights. Titles of euthanasia advocacy groups contain words like “compassion,” “choice,” and “dignity.” Even the Euthanasia Society of American has undergone name changes to present a more positive image. (In 1976 the Euthanasia Society of America changed its name to the Society for the Right to Die and, in 1991, it became known as Choice in Dying.)

No longer does anyone but its strongest opponent refer to mercy killing. The word “euthanasia” is generally avoided in proposals to legalize it. Old words are replaced or given different, vague meanings.

Like a constantly changing kaleidoscope, meanings shift ever so slightly, forming new patterns of thinking. Slowly, quietly — but inexorably — the previously appalling is transformed into the presently appealing.

The manner in which words are defined is key to achieving this transformation.

This is something that Dutch euthanasia practitioner Dr. M. A. M. Wachter, the ethicist/director for the Institute of Health in the Netherlands, knows well. Speaking at a 1990 international euthanasia gathering, he stated, “The definition builds the road for euthanasia.” He acknowledged that “euthanasia is the intentional ending of the life of another….It is always a question of terminating human life,” then went on to urge that careful attention be paid to definitions.

“Definitions are not neutral,” he said. “They are not just the innocent tools that allow us to describe reality. Rather, they shape our perceptions of reality. They select. They emphasize. They embody a bias. Therefore definitions constantly need redefinition.”

Definitions are indeed not neutral. But they constantly require re-definition, not redefinition…