It’s true! In a recent post, Having lost their flexibility, pro-lifers are losing their cause, poor Megan can’t help lying her ass off even when (apparently) she doesn’t want to!
Let’s start with her headline: “Having lost their flexibility, pro-lifers are losing their cause”. What was the great rallying cry of the pro-life folks prior to the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade? “Abortion is Murder!” Excuse the fuck out of me, but what is “flexible” about that? Megan says the pro-lifers are losing their flexibility because she doesn’t want to admit that the whole “point” of their crusade was NO “FLEXIBILITY” AT ALL! Why is that so hard to understand?
Megan struggles some more as she tries to comprehend why she failed to anticipate “how tactically inflexible the pro-life movement would be.” Says Megan,
I’m sympathetic to those who feel that every life is sacred and must be protected at all costs. But this feeling has made pro-lifers obsessed with ensuring that no doctor ever performs a single unnecessary abortion. Unfortunately, the law is too blunt an instrument for such surgical precision. If you really want to make sure that no unwarranted abortion is performed, you will be forced to bar a lot of needed medical care.
First of all, Megan thinks that “sacred” means “precious”. It doesn’t. It means “divine”. The great majority of pro-lifers base their objections to abortion on religious grounds, believing in what the Catholics call “ensoulment”—that God endows each fetus from the moment of conception with an immortal soul, which is what in fact make us human. Contra Megan’s “naïve” assumption, there can be no such thing as a “necessary” or “warranted” abortion, because you have no right to kill an innocent human being for any reason, even to save your own life. Furthermore—for the great majority of Christians at least—no soul can enter the kingdom of heaven without being baptized. And you cannot baptize a dead fetus.1 For the majority of pro-lifers, an abortion does not merely murder an innocent human being; it also damns an immortal soul.
Now, I admit, this not the sort of stuff that gets talked about every day in polite society; but Megan surely has the smarts to puzzle it out for herself if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to. As I’ve previously complained (a lot!), when Megan’s right-wing friends start spoutin’ their right-wing jive, Megan silently attaches an invisible asterisk to all that right-wing jive, an asterisk that says, if you could read it, “Does NOT Apply to Megan McArdle and Her Friends”. Here’s the deal, Megan: It does apply to you and your friends. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, girlfriend; it tolls for thee.
1. What provision, if any, did Catholics and other Christians make for still births, which were not exactly unusual back in the old days? I have no idea, but I do know that St. Augustine raised the question of the damnation of “unfortunate” fetuses almost 1,600 years ago. Dante, who is pretty much my go-to guy for, you know, Hell and stuff, is silent on the matter.
