Academia: the incubator for total abortion and all other bad ideas
Academia — that is, the world of colleges and universities — is the incubator for all of the worst ideas in America, with abortion as the latest example.
I’ll start with a three-part time-line, and then get to my point:
1. 1993, Practical Ethics, 2nd edition, a college text-book by Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne:
n Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics – not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant – disabled or not – has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.
The difference between killing disabled and normal infants lies not in any supposed right to life that the latter has and the former lacks, but in other considerations about killing. Most obviously there is the difference that often exists in the attitudes of the parents. The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents. They have, nowadays, often planned for the child. The mother has carried it for nine months. From birth, a natural affection begins to bind the parents to it. So one important reason why it is normally a terrible thing to kill an infant is the effect the killing will have on its parents.
It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities vary, of course. Some are trivial and have little effect on the child or its parents; but others turn the normally joyful event of birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents, and any other children they may have.
Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against killing it. Some parents want even the most gravely disabled infant to live as long as possible, and this desire would then be a reason against killing the infant. But what if this is not the case? in the discussion that follows I shall assume that the parents do not want the disabled child to live. I shall also assume that the disability is so serious that – again in contrast to the situation of an unwanted but normal child today – there are no other couples keen to adopt the infant. This is a realistic assumption even in a society in which there is a long waiting- list of couples wishing to adopt normal babies. It is true that from time to time cases of infants who are severely disabled and are being allowed to die have reached the courts in a glare of publicity, and this has led to couples offering to adopt the child. Unfortunately such offers are the product of the highly publicised dramatic life-and-death situation, and do not extend to the less publicised but far more cormnon situations in which parents feel themselves unable to look after a severely disabled child, and the child then languishes in an institution.
Infants are sentient beings who are neither rational nor self- conscious. So if we turn to consider the infants in themselves, independently of the attitudes of their parents, since their species is not relevant to their moral status, the principles that govern the wrongness of killing non-human animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here too. As we saw, the most plausible arguments for attributing a right to life to a being apply only if there is some awareness of oneself as a being existing over time, or as a continuing mental self. Nor can respect for autonomy apply where there is no capacity for autonomy. The remaining principles identified in Chapter 4 are utilitarian. Hence the quality of life that the infant can be expected to have is important.
2. 2013, Planned Parenthood lobbyist Alisa Lapolt Snow, testifying before the Florida House:
REP. JIM BOYD: So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief,” said Rep. Jim Boyd. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?
SNOW: We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.
REP. DANIEL DAVIS: What happens in a situation where a baby is alive, breathing on a table, moving. What do your physicians do at that point?
SNOW: I do not have that information. I am not a physician, I am not an abortion provider. So I do not have that information.
I can’t find biographical information on Snow, but I’m willing to bet she’s a college graduate and, judging by her look in the video, probably post 1985.
3. January 30, 2019, Ralph Northam (Dem), Governor of Virginia, educated at the Virginia Military Institute and Eastern Virginia Medical School, where he got an M.D. and after which he practiced as a pediatrician:
If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
AND NOW TO MY POINT: Whatever starts in academia does not stay in academia. Academia is where:
- Kids are taught to hate individual liberty and the free market, and to embrace all manners of socialism and other totalitarian governance;
- Bishops are educated and then refuse to excommunicate Catholic politicians who vote for “post-birth abortions” (i.e., murder);
- Jews and Asians, who are the people most likely to send their kids to college, produce generations of people who aggressively advocate for policies that are terribly damaging to them, everything from antisemitism and Israel hatred to academic quotas;
- People are taught that democratic, pluralist, open Israel is evil and that the Palestinian communities, rife with misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, anti-Christianity, anti-Hinduism, and myriad other anti’s and phobias, are superb societies that should be allowed to use genocide to eliminate Israel;
- Climate change madness, which is not supported by a scintilla of actual science, but does rely on a regular input of fraudulent temperature data, finds its intellectual home; where young people are taught that there is no such things as biological gender;
- Young people are told that their feelings trump everything and that rational thinking is a product of toxic, white masculinity;
- Non-white people are taught anti-white racism;
- Women are taught to hate men and men are taught that they are rapists; and
- Every other mad idea that pollutes the Western world is born and grows.
These ideas, unless stopped, will destroy our world. We already see how the end plays out with the abortion, which went from Singer’s boring academic arguments to the official position of the pediatrician governor of Virginia.
I grew up in a pro-abortion family and, to be honest, never thought much about it at an ethical level. I just knew it was a good thing and thought that those who analogized it to the Holocaust were being silly. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. It was a slippery slope and we have gone way behind the Holocaust, because the Nazis at least provided a justification — a terrible, false, totally evil justification, but still a justification — for what they did:
I’m not seeing any difference between this and the Spartans exposing imperfect babies on hillsides. https://t.co/hCp4pUykbb
— Bookwormroom (@Bookwormroom) January 30, 2019
That’s an easy one, @Bookwormroom . The Spartans killed imperfect babies. The Democrats are happy to kill any of them. It’s a tiny moral distinction, but the Spartans come out ahead.
— MadWolfJohn (@MadWolfJohn) January 30, 2019
If I could ask Congress to do one thing, it would be to withdraw every penny of federal funds from America’s colleges and universities. In five years, the madness would be over.