Contributors

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Conservative Case for Abortion

In recent years conservatives have proclaimed themselves to be a party of ideology. They have set up dozens of "think tanks" where they pay academics to justify selfishness and greed with policies like supply-side economics, denying climate change, and eliminating taxes on capital gains.

It's been reported that Republicans will again include in their party platform a constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions. But this is completely arbitrary. After all, conservatives claim they believe all life is sacred, yet they favor the death penalty, limiting appeals in capital cases, summary execution of suspected terrorists, proactive wars with collateral damage (i.e., children killed by American bombardment), and Stand Your Ground laws that give people license to kill anyone they feel threatened by.

Conservatives could just as easily support abortion as they oppose it. So I will now present the conservative case for abortion, using the same sort of logic and rationalizations that conservative think tanks use to justify their other positions on killing, along with a smattering of religious and folk wisdom in the spirit of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh. 

Fair warning: these arguments may well revolt you.

Number 1 Think Tank Argument:

The government has no right to tell a woman what to do with her body. A woman's person is completely inviolable, even more so than a man's home in the Castle Doctrine. Natural Law dictates that a person has total responsibility for and dominion over their own bodies, and an unborn fetus, which derived all matter and nourishment for growth from the mother, is essentially another bodily organ, like an extra spleen, until such time as it becomes an independent and sentient human being capable of survival outside the womb. As such, an abortion is just another medical procedure, like removing a benign tumor.

Number 1 Limbaugh Argument:

The government ain't gonna tell your woman she can't have an abortion. You're gonna tell her what to do. If you don't want her to have that baby, she ain't gonna have that baby. She probably got pregnant to trap you anyhow. If you're gonna be on the hook for child support, you're gonna decide whether she has it or not.

Robertson arguments:

Because Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, all men are born with original sin. Aborted children are guilty as sin, by definition. Any argument that unborn children are "innocent victims" is inherently flawed.

The Bible says unborn children do not count as real persons, nor do they have any significant value:

According to Exodus 21:12-13, killing another man is punishable by death or exile: "Death is the punishment for murder. But if you did not intend to kill someone, and I, the Lord, let it happen anyway, you may run for safety to a place that I have set aside." But the penalty for killing an unborn child is a mere fine, as indicated in Exodus 21:22: "If men, while fighting, do damage to a woman with child, causing the loss of the child, but no other evil comes to her, the man will have to make payment up to the amount fixed by her husband, in agreement with the decision of the judges." Since the husband decides the worth of a fetus, the husband can decide whether the wife will have an abortion.

"And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the female thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver." -- Leviticus 27:6. Newborns and fetuses are worth nothing.

"Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them. And Moses numbered them according to the word of the LORD." -- Numbers 3:15-16. Newborns and fetuses don't count.

Original Intent:

If the Framers of the Constitution intended that the unborn have rights, they would have included it in the Constitution. Just as it's wrong to invent new rights for gays out of thin air, something the Framers would never have agreed to, it's wrong to invent new rights for the unborn, who aren't even living, breathing real people capable of independent thought or existence. After all, if a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person, an unborn fetus is obviously zero.

Rape:
There's no question that abortion should be allowed in the case of rape, if not required: a rapist can't be rewarded by allowing the child of his evil act to be born. And the child born of that evil seed will probably be evil as well: like father, like son.

Furthermore, the rapist's child is occupying a woman's womb where another man's child could be hosted. This represents a large lost opportunity cost, since the market price of a surrogate mother can run into six figures. The rapist is therefore literally stealing a small fortune should his bastard be allowed to come to term.
Personal Responsibility:

If people can't afford to provide for a child, they've got to do what's right and get rid of it. Putting their unwanted bastard up for adoption is pointless as well: it'll turn out to be a loser like its folks.

Economics:

Stand Your Ground laws allow you to pursue and kill someone who has stolen something from you, even if the thief is fleeing and you're completely safe. Since it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise a child, an unwanted child is like a thief who just keeps stealing from you for 18 years, presenting a grave threat to your economic livelihood. Since that unborn thief doesn't even count as a person, the government has no business telling you that you can't get rid of it.

Safety:

Women are 14 times more likely to die from childbirth than they are from abortion. It makes far more sense to abort an unwanted child than to chance death, serious injury or economic ruin. Why risk making a woman's children orphans and her husband a widower out of a cockamamie liberal concern for the non-existent rights of a non-person?

Welfare Reform:

People on welfare are a tremendous drain on the economy, sucking the life out of hard-working taxpayers. These welfare queens have oodles of kids and the rest of us are on the hook to pay for them. Kicking them off welfare isn't good enough: their kids will wind up in school, at least for a few years while they drag down the performance of non-welfare kids, and after that they'll drop out and become drug dealers, or get pregnant and go on welfare, repeating the cycle.

Therefore, in line with states' rights and in the interest of reducing costs, states should be able to use Medicaid funds to provide welfare recipients with free abortions so that the rest of us don't have to pay for the consequences of their fun. In addition states should be able to use Medicaid funds to incent welfare recipients to have abortions. Spending a few bucks up front will save hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run: most of those welfare queens would jump at an extra hundred bucks for their crack habit. Plus, it'll reduce the number of Democrat voters.

Finally, activist judges and the federal government should stop interfering with states who are trying to balance budgets. They should allow states to resume sterilizing women with multiple children on welfare, a practice which meddlesome Northerners forced Southern states to stop in the 1970s.

Yes, these arguments are shallow and hateful. But that's what conservative think tanks do for a living: rationalize the irrational and justify the unjustifiable.

2 comments:

Mark Ward said...

Hands down, the best post ever to be put on this site. The complete hypocrisy of the right laid bare...

GuardDuck said...

A post full of managing fantasies about the other side? Yeah, probably the best post ever on this site.