NYC Letter: "Punished With A Baby"

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I am going to teach [my daughters] first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby.

Mr. Obama,
disclosing precautions to forestall
being punished with a grandchild
PHILADELPHIA April 3, 2008 (CNA)

Nothing depicts the soundness of a society more than enjoyments in law. And no enjoyment is more fundamental, more crucial, than the enjoyment of life. For 197 years this was the preeminent inalienable right defining American moral culture. In 1973 all that changed with the legal fiction of Roe v. Wade. Roe relieved pro-abortion forces of making -- much less winning -- a persuasive argument for legal abortion to the polity. Decades of politicking state by state suddenly became unnecessary.

Instead the pro-abortionists began in earnest a re-education of the American public. The first lesson was that women bear fetuses not babies. Prior to Roe not only did women bear babies for the term of their pregnancies, most had one or a dozen names at the ready because persons have names. A fetus, as anyone who has taken a high school dissection class knows, has no moral content, no personhood. No one names a fetus.

The word "fetus" turns baby into so much tissue matter, bucking up sentimental progressives who hesitate about aborting baby. But the semantics of abortion are jarring. Women who abort, talk about fetuses, while mothers who birth, talk about babies. The conceptus is identical in both cases, the difference is the name. The word "fetus" connotes a thing, "baby" connotes a person. And, except for the most doctrinaire abortionists, aborting persons remains a crime, a homicide.

Lesson two was to retain the word "mother" for any woman enceinte. This is a culturally sympathetic term in contrast to the clinically reductive term "fetus". Where baby was dehumanized into mere matter, the woman was elevated by maternity. "Mother" straddles both the prenatal and postnatal worlds of baby and carries with it a strong supposition there will be a birth. [Pause.] For the abortionist there is no supposed birth. Abortion is the act of the anti-mother.

All of which brings us back to Mr. Obama and his revealing locution. Mr. Obama does not fear his daughters will be punished with a fetus. The punishment is a baby, that is, a small person. The left has become so recklessly triumphant, so openly confident it will prevail against life that it has dispensed with its own shibboleths, its own fictions. The left is ready to say plainly it aborts babies.

Or maybe not. Media Matters complains that Mr. Obama has been taken out of context, that he was talking about STDs or sex education or anything but abortion. We have checked our quote. We invite you to view Mr. Obama making the entirety of his remarks. Media Matters begs the question, just what does Mr. Obama, an abortion proponent, mean when he says "punished with a baby"? It certainly tracks with arguments advanced by pro-abortion feminists that abortion is a legitimate recourse when a fetus (i.e., baby) poses a burden to career or lifestyle or finances or self-occupation. Media Matters does not want to own up to Mr. Obama's remark because it does not want Mr. Obama punished with abortion at the ballot.

Abortion is not a "reach across the aisle" issue. This is the single most defining issue of any candidacy. There is Mr. Obama's garbled prefacing but plain enough declaring for abortion.

And then there is Sarah Palin declaring for life.

The difference could not be plainer.