Amy Richards and the Culture of Death

I haven't had much time to blog lately.  A busy one-year-old doesn't leave much time!  And yet I wouldn't change it for the world.  In fact, when we first got pregnant, I had hoped for twins.  Oh, I knew first-hand how much more work that would be - my sister has twin boys.  I have always referred to them as "a baby and a buddy."  They seemed to come into the world pre-packaged with a friend for life.  How lucky for them!  And how lucky for their mom and dad.

Seems rather appropriate to start with that this morning, as I address the article "everyone's talking about" - the cold, calculating and murderous admissions of the (now) infamous Amy Richards in the New York Times a few days ago.  You all know the story - she got pregnant with triplets - a set of twins and a "stand-alone" and opted to abort the twins and carry the third baby to term.  The article is an abomination.  Richards expresses no hesitation, no regret, no remorse.  If she has any grasp of her others childrens' possibilities as human beings, there is no proof of it in her writing.  Her tone throughout is whiny, smug, defiant and callous.

Her castrated boyfriend seemed to want all three children, but she dismissed that possibility out of hand, hissing that that would condemn her to a life buying big jars of mayonnaise at Costco.  (I frankly think this whole article is an insult to Costco, and if I were the President of that company, I'd go on record saying so.) 

Isn't that just peachy?  A father has no rights - only responsibilities.  He wants his children.  But the woman's "choice" trumps everything else.  But why should this surprise us?  If these two childrens' lives don't prevail against her bodily discomfort and inconvenience (however severe), why on earth would a father's interest in his own sons andor daughters mean anything?

I can't add anything meaningful to the chorus of horrified voices that have spoken out about Ms. Richards' actions.  But I do have a different perspective that I would like to add.

Does anyone wonder why The New York Times published this piece?  Does anyone wonder why on earth Richards-the-Baby-Butcher wrote it?  If abortion is supposed to be this deeply private decision between a woman and her doctor (*chortle, snort, cough, gag*), then why the hell does a women choose to publish that story in one of the most widely-circulated newspapers in the world?

Is it just because controversial stories sell more papers?  I don't believe that for a second.  Is it to provoke the ire of pro-lifers everywhere?  Please.  Pro-lifers already oppose abortion.  And even under dire circumstances, such as the (admittedly rare) conception resulting from rape, or a severely-deformed child, the most consistent among us still maintain that abortion is the wrong response; that you don't punish a child for his or her father's sins; that you don't destroy a human being because he or she is less than "perfect."  How much more, then, would your garden-variety pro-life American cringe at this story?

No, the purpose of the story is to create support for poor, poor Ms. Richards.  And yet I wonder if it won't create precisely the opposite reaction.

In that vein, it's interesting to note what poll after poll is showing these days - that more Americans think abortion ought to be more limited than it is.  Some polls show that a majority of Americans think abortion should be illegal after 20 weeks (or "viability," the definition of which continues to be earlier in the pregnancy, thanks to technological advances).  And overwhelmingly, Americans do not support abortion for whimsical reasons like sex selection, or for minor problems like cleft palate.

But - even in these polls, the results seem to indicate that a majority of Americans are uncomfortable criminalizing or outlawing abortion in all cases - or very early in the first trimester.  (New advances in ultrasound technology may change that collective view, as well.)

The point is that even the majority of those Americans who consider themselves "pro-choice" have limited - and even conflicted - support for it.   And if you look at polls conducted over the past five years or so, increasing numbers of Americans oppose abortion in ever greater circumstances.  And this is in spite of abortion's easy availability.

This terrifies the hard-line pro-abortion movement.   They have always wanted complete support for abortion on demand for all 40 weeks of pregnancy.  Knowing full well that they would not get this right away, they started with the "hard cases" - rape and incest.  Then, it was for deformed or otherwise "imperfect" children.  (After all, who would mandate such a hardship as caring for a "special-needs" child?)  And whenever a child (or more than one child) would cause a possible detriment to a mother's health.  Including, of course, "mental health."  Or personal inconvenience.  And then they threw the lovely slogan, "Every child a wanted child," at us.  Oh, boo hoo.  We are supposed to feel better because the mother had her child killed.  And this is preferable than being born unwanted (whatever that means).

Some of the voices of the pro-abortion crowd are more forthcoming than others.  The so-called "Center for Positive Sexuality" (thanks to Ashli from The S.I.C.L.E. Cell for pointing this one out) proclaims proudly that any reason to have an abortion is a good enough reason.

CPS may be one of the few that says it out loud.  But their position is the ultimate goal of the pro-abortion movement.  The first step was to get a large percentage of Americans to accept the inviolability of others' "choices."  Having done that, they continue to try to whittle away at American' discomfort with certain types of abortions, or with abortions for certain reasons (viewed, perhaps, as frivolous).

There have been two ways to approach this.  The first was by lying, dissembling, covering up the truth.  There is no question but that the pro-abortion crowd has kept pregnant women and the American public at large deliberately ignorant about the number of abortions, the nature of the procedures, the percentage of late-term abortions, the level of fetal development, and other significant facts.  But the testimony in the recent cases challenging the Partial Birth Abortion Act has made that a more difficult challenge.

So, the other approach has been to desensitize Americans to abortion - at all times, using any and all methods, and for any reason whatsoever.

It's the old "camel's nose under the tent" approach.  Once you agree that an unborn child has no rights under the United States Constitution, once you agree that a woman's right to "privacy" encompasses her "right" to have her children killed, once you agree to the premise that one's "personal morality" cannot be legislated (the consummate absurdity) - you have lost any basis for objecting to any abortion at all.

The Richards piece is just the next link in a long, long chain.  The purpose of writing it, and the purpose of publishing it, is to continue to push the envelope of acceptance for abortion.

But even if, as the polls cited above seem to indicate, Americans' support for abortion is waning, not waxing, the advocates of death will not be still.  As many have already argued for years, it will not stop with abortion.  If we are expected to be "tolerant" of a woman's unilateral decision to have a shot of potassium chloride administered to the hearts of two unwanted (but  completely healthy) unborn children, then why not born but "imperfect" children?  Why not Grandma, suffering from Alzheimers'?  Why not Uncle Carl, paralyzed in a motorcyle accident?  Why not Mom, who is incontinent?

We are becoming a nation of nice Nazis.  "Nice," because we presently couch our decisions to terminate people's lives on high-minded premises like being deformed or unwanted, rather than racial supremacy or lebensraum.  And (in the case of the so-called "right to die" movement) on apparently compassionate grounds like "a life worth living" or "ending someone's suffering." 

Oh, how dare you draw that comparison!, the death advocates charge in a fit of false indignation.  The eugenics and genocide policies of the Third Reich were imposed from above!  Against people's will!  While we, only do away with the unwanted!  We harvest their tissues not to make lamps, but to help the disabled!  And we enlist the support of the doomed in their own demise!  And even where they haven't spoken their intent to die, we have self-interested, unfaithful spouses, ready and able to testify in court on their behalf!

I am not persuaded.  The spirit of the Nazi death camps is alive and well in this country, insidiously pervading every aspect of our culture like smog.  We've been living in it for so long that we can't even see it anymore. 

We already have hundreds - perhaps thousands of our own Mengeles.  They are in my town and yours - the doctors willing to cut little babies up into pieces. 

We have the political supporters - the Democratic Party has sold its soul to the pro-abortion movement, and virtually no one in it has the balls to stand up to them anymore.  (And I am not exonerating the "pro-choice" Republicans, either.)

For those who need religious sanction, we have some established American churches which have come out in favor of "choice."

We have a well-oiled propaganda machine.  Witness the New York Times - and 90% of the rest of the media.   (Go ahead and try to name five newspapers from major cities that have a stated pro-life editorial position.)

Why, we even have our very own crematoria!

It's true that we don't have Hitler.  But with people like Amy Richards, we don't need him.  For the moment, anyway, we seem to prefer to create our Culture of Death from the ground up.

 

... and my response to my friend

You know, one of the things that I think needs to be mentioned is the frequent use of the Bible quotation, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." My (now former?) friend closed her last e-mail to me with that quote.

I see it used all the time by people who want to hide behind it - to avoid taking a position on a controversial topic. Sort of like, "Abortion? I'm personally opposed, but I wouldn't impose my morality on anyone else." If there's nothing wrong with abortion, then why be personally opposed? It's like being personally opposed to spaghetti or shag carpet. People who say that want it both ways - they want acknowledgment of both their higher moral standard and their "tolerance." Because, in this day and age, "tolerance," is the only universally-mandated virtue.

But there is a big difference between not evaluating someone's - or your own - culpability before God, and not evaluating the rightness or wrongness of particular conduct.

Let me offer an example that cuts the other way. In this day and age, we have explanations for certain types of wrongful conduct. For example, we know that people who were abused as children are far more likely to abuse their own children. Some charge that that is just an "excuse." But there is a big difference between an explanation and an excuse. Just because we understand what might drive someone psychologically to abuse their children doesn't mean that it isn't wrong, that we don't try to protect the children, or need to punish abusers.

By the same token, even if we are not to "judge" someone in the eyes of the Creator, we are still able to identify conduct that is destructive. And certainly conduct from which we want to protect our children.

My friend's fury at my June 28th message stunned me. Particularly because she oddly characterized it as being about homosexuality, when I was speaking largely about heterosexual promiscuity in middle-school-age kids, never even discussed homosexuality, and made only a passing reference to legal scholars discussing gay marriage.

I don't know if I will ever know what made her go off like that. But, in the interests of closure, this was my response:
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"Ohhhhhhh-kaaayyyy. Whatever.

I will take you off of my e-mail list. But since this is the last e-mail you will get from me, I will set the record straight about a few things. For starters, I don't know where you got the idea that my last e-mail had anything to do with being gay, per se. Most of the behavior that I was decrying - particularly the promiscuity I know of that is going on at the middle school level - was definitely heterosexual. Otherwise, the political movement I was describing was among pedophiles. If being gay is a sensitive issue with you, well, okay. On the other hand, if you're trying to tell me that we need to be sensitive to the needs of pedophiles, we will have to agree to disagree.

And you can spare me the righteous indignation - I am not claiming to "know everything," or that I am "right" and everyone else is "wrong." What I am telling you, I am telling you as a lawyer. I did not bring up anything about gay marriage in the last e-mail. But regardless of how you feel about gay marriage (for example), the polygamists, polyamorists and pedophiles are already crafting the constitutional Due Process and Equal Opportunity arguments that will analogize their sexual preferences and civil rights to those of homosexuals. And I can tell you as a lawyer that there is no meaningful distinction between the "civil liberty" and "privacy" arguments made by homosexuals in favor of gay marriage, and those which will be made by the others. And for those who claim that consenting adults ought to be able to do as they please as long as it does not hurt anyone else (an argument with which I agree as a Libertarian, by the way), so this will knock out pedophiles, I can tell you that that argument is a house of cards. They will argue that there are already laws which have eliminated statutory rape, and which allow children under 18 to get judicial emancipation, as well as laws that allow girls as young as 13 to get abortions without their parents' consent. These laws, it will be argued, are justification for the elimination of age-of-consent laws. Once those are removed, pedophilia will have to be stricken from the penal codes, removed from the psychological literature as a pathology, and taught as just another "sexual preference" entitled to respect and compassion. I have read the law review articles; I know what's coming. It has nothing to do with being "right," and everything to do with being informed. If you're cool with that, that's your deal; I am not.

But, once again, nothing in my last e-mail dealt particularly with being gay. I will tell you that there are gay people in my life whom I love dearly. I was raised by "Christian" parents to be that way. I would raise my children to do the same. And of course, if one of my children was "born" gay, then they would still be my child, and I would still love them, of course. But if you read any of the social science (and I am not talking about "Christian" social science, but psychiatric and psychological journals), you will know that an enormous amount of homosexual conduct - and yes, even perceived orientation - is a direct result of childhood or adolescent sexual abuse. So, incidentally, is heterosexual promiscuity. Child psychologists know this. So do educators. But instead of eliminating the abuse, as a society we are moving toward legal protection of it. And you think that's okay?

My indignation has nothing to do with "judging" gay people and everything to do with my firm belief that it is the role of parents to inculcate children with their beliefs - parents who are in a position to put all of their teachings about love and tolerance in a context - not the role of government schools, who teach the latest social theory du jour, unattached to any morality of any kind, "Christian" or otherwise. It is precisely because the schools have become unmoored from any particular moral code (pick one, I don't care - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, whatever) that things have gone as far as they have. Because the alternative is not a different, equally firm, secular standard of conduct; the alternative has been no standard.

I am not blindly mouthing some garbage that got forwarded to me from some crackpot URL. I have been in education for 13 years, ****, and in that time I have seen a steady decline in academic standards, as well as standards of conduct. By way of example, one of [my sister's] friends teaches here at [a local middle school]. He told her about an incident in which a mother who was there for a parent teacher conference walked into the girl's bathroom to find a girl fellating one boy while taking it up the a** by another. Tell me what this has to do with being gay. Tell me there is not a significant problem in our public schools.

Instead of addressing the problem, the response has been to castigate those who want to maintain strong academic and conduct standards and a healthy environment for all children - black, white, poor, wealthy, whatever - as "racists," "sexists," "religious bigots," "judgmental all-knowings" and, clearly, the other sorts of labels you would like to saddle me with. Fine. At 43 I have seen plenty, and I can deal with what others think of me, rightly or wrongly. But the fact is that it is the very poorest citizens who suffer most, because they are not in a position to pay taxes and tuition at any sort of private school. If what I am describing is not the case with the public schools in Milwaukee, then you can consider yourself very fortunate. (Although I know that the school voucher movement has a very strong leader in an African-American woman from Milwaukee named Polly Williams, so I suspect things are as bad there as they are elsewhere.)

I also have good friends (whose politics are significantly different from mine, if that makes you feel any better) and who are schoolteachers in the public school system here. They admit to me - reluctantly - that there is not enough time in the day for math, science, reading, geography, etc., because their time is consumed with other so-called "social" programs mandated by the school system - self-esteem training, sensitivity training, "diversity" training, sexual orientation training, and related irrelevant nonsense. In their more honest, even desperate moments, they confess that they cannot do what they were hired to do - which is teach - because they are expected to do what parents used to do, and they can't. More and more children are coming to school unprepared, hungry, dirty, sexualized and sexually-abused, violent, uncivilized and amoral. There was a time when it was parents' responsibility to feed their children, bathe them, wash their clothes, help them with their homework, teach them right and wrong, protect them from exposure to materials they were not emotionally and psychologically prepared for (and yes, I think that other people's sexual practices and sexual orientations are among those).

But since the parents aren't doing it, schools think they should. And there's the problem. Because without any moral context (which legally, they cannot give) and only 7 hours in a school day, this is doomed to failure. The result is a system where diminishing academic effort has given way to ineffective - and in many cases, oppressive - social programming. (Speech codes come immediately to mind.) Parents are irresponsible, schools are ineffective, and everyone is gradually giving up civil liberties with little or no thought to the consequences.

If, in all of that, all you saw was some homophobic rant, then you read it with blinders on. Clearly I hit some nerve for you. Or maybe I am just bearing the disproportionate brunt of all the ire you have saved up from the "99%" that you've deleted and ignored. I am sorry about that, but that's the way it goes, I guess. You and I have known each other for 18 years, and shared many a story about intimate and painful personal faults and failings - ours and others. You know me well enough to know that this "judge not" nonsense is just that - nonsense. If one misperceived e-mail is all it takes for you to respond by saying, "maybe it's time I chose those I keep close to my heart more carefully," then you are obviously reacting to something other than that one message from me.

As per your request, you will not hear from me again.

Lost a friend today ...

Well, this was a complete surprise. I have a good friend whom I have known for 18 years. We were at each other's weddings (well, receptions - she married on a Caribbean island!)

I sent her a copy of my post from June 28th ("On sex education in the public schools"), and received this e-mail from her in response:
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"You cannot depend upon the schools to keep your children safe. You have to do it yourself. We all do. And it is getting to the point where school is what we have to keep them safe from. God help us."

God help YOU, ****. And God help your children if they ever realize they were BORN gay.

I saw that Oprah show (I hasten to add, it just happened to be on one day while I was ironing). In my opinion, you strongly misrepresented it.

I always knew we had differences of opinion on certain things, but this dissertation that you so desperately needed to send to "educate" the rest of us is an insult to me and, quite frankly, is infuriating.

I really could go on, but I TRY to make it a policy not to mix politics/religion and friendship. I have many friends who feel differently on issues than myself, but there is an unspoken rule that you keep these things to yourself.

I do not fill up my friends' mailboxes with my opinions (yes, they are your OPINIONS, yet spoken as fact) but am bombarded daily with those who choose to preach to me through forwarded emails and who basically use this forum as their soapbox at my expense. 99% of the time I delete them and ignore it, but this mail enraged me to my breaking point.

After going over this for two days in my head (...do I write an equally long dissertation and send it back to you? ...do I write it and send it to ALL of my family and friends in order to set my "beliefs" record straight? ...do I write it and send it to all my like-minded friends? ...do I write it just to get it out of system and then delete it? ...do I really have time for this kind of thing at ALL?), I have come to the conclusion that I have to say to myself: "I have a lot of friends; maybe it's time I chose those I keep close to my heart more carefully."

I'll end in saying that although I no longer follow a structured religion, it is for this very reason: I cannot associate myself with judgmental, all-knowing, so-called "Christians" who feel they have the right to tell myself and others how right they are and how WRONG others are.

So here are my bible quotes: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and "Judge not others lest ye be judged." Think about those...

Please take me off your email list."

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How very sad. I did answer. My answer is in the next post.