The Truth About Health Care For Illegal Immigrants

Ask Obama about health care for illegal immigrants and he says this:

When a caller asked about illegal immigrants under health care reform, Obama said the topic is one of many where misinformation has taken root. “This has been an example of just pure misinformation out there. None of the bills that have been voted on in Congress, and none of the proposals coming out of the White House propose giving coverage to illegal immigrants — none of them,” he said. “That has never been on the table; nobody has discussed it. So everybody who is listening out there, when you start hearing that somehow this is all designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants, that is simply not true and has never been the case.”

Okay.  Then what about this:

Roughly half of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. don’t have health insurance, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group. Like others who can’t afford medical care, illegal immigrants tend to flock to hospital emergency rooms, which, under a 1986 law, can’t turn people away, even if they can’t pay. Emergency-room visits, where treatment costs are much higher than in clinics, jumped 32% nationally between 1996 and 2006, the latest data available.

Does the Democrats’ health care bill overturn this 1986 law?  Does the Democrat’s health care bill specifically rule out illegal immigrants from qualifying for health care?

No.  In fact Obama tacitly acknowledges that, at the very least, nothing will change and illegal immigrants will continue to be able to flock to emergency rooms for their health care.  And since the basic law now says illegal immigrants are basically entitled to health care, they have to be specifically ruled out in order to be ineligible for benefits under a future health care bill.

But the Democrats aren’t allowing any exception preventing illegal immigrants from receiving health care under the Democrats’ plan, as this Newsmax article, entitled, “Obama Health Plan to Cover 12 Million Illegals,” proves:

On Friday, Democrats moved one step closer to giving free health insurance to the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal aliens when they successfully defeated a Republican-backed amendment, offered by Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that would have prevented illegal aliens from receiving government-subsidized health care under the proposed plan backed by House Democrats and President Barack Obama.

The House Ways and Means Committee nixed the Heller amendment by a 26-to-15 vote along straight party lines, and followed this action by passing the 1,018-page bill early Friday morning by a 23-to-18 margin, with three Democrats voting against the plan.

The Democratic plan will embrace Obama’s vision of bringing free government medical care to more than 45 million uninsured people in America – a significant portion of whom are illegal aliens.

If the Democrats have no intention of covering illegal immigrants in their health plan, why did every single Democrat vote against an amendment that would have prevented illegal immigrants from receiving government subsidized health care? I mean, if I had no intention of doing something, I wouldn’t have a problem voting for an amendment that makes sure the thing I don’t want anyway doesn’t happen.  Is that just me?

These Democrats are worse than the worst caricatures of used car salesmen.  They will promise you whatever the heck you want to hear; they just won’t put it in writing or stand behind it.  They are the worse kind of liars.  Don’t trust what they say when what they do directly contradicts what they say.

If Democrats want to claim that their bill won’t provide coverage to illegal immigrants, then demand they put it in writing, and codify it into law.  Don’t just blithely trust these weasels, or the propagandist mainstream media that is out to justify liberalism and vilify conservatism.

Obama has repeatedly promised that he will help “the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.”  But the claim itself demonstrates that Obama is lying now when he says none of the bills give coverage to illegal immigrants.  Because the “47 million” figure includes millions of illegal immigrants.

This Census [Bureau] report says that within the borders of the United States as of 2007 there were 45.65 people without health insurance. But this number, according to the Census Bureau, included 9.73 million foreigners, leaving only 35.92 Americans who were uninsured.

Another article:

President Barack Obama claimed during his Wednesday night press conference that there are 47 million Americans without health insurance.

A simple check with the U.S. Census Bureau would have told him otherwise.

Obama said: “This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.”

That assertion conflicts with data in the Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007.” The report was issued in August 2008 and contains the most up-to-date official data on the number of uninsured in the U.S.

The report discloses that there were 45.65 million people in the U.S. who did not have health insurance in 2007.

However, it also reveals that there were 9.73 million foreigners — foreign-born non-citizens who were in the country in 2007 — included in that number. So the number of uninsured Americans was actually 35.92 million.

And of those, “there were also 9.1 million people making more than $75,000 per year who did not choose to purchase health insurance,” CNSNews stated in a report based on the Census Bureau data.

That brings the number of Americans who lack health insurance presumably for financial reasons down less than 27 million.

The Census Bureau report also shows that the number of people without insurance actually went down in 2007 compared to the previous year — from 47 million to 45.65 million — while the number with insurance rose from 249.8 million to 253.4 million.

So I say tomato, you say tomahto.  I say Obama is going to cover illegal immigrants, and Obama says he’s going to cover all Americans – and the fact that he considers illegal immigrants as “Americans” is completely beside the point.  That’s the fine print, and who needs to waste time consider the fine print?

The point is that there is a massive disinformation campaign going on.  Democrats and their mainline media propagandists baldly assert up one side and down the other that the bill doesn’t “give coverage to illegal immigrants.”  And in the most rote, literalistic, never-mind-the-fine-print-just-sign-here mindset, it’s true: there isn’t a page that says, “We hereby grant illegal immigrants health care coverage because that’s just the kind of globalist-Marxist anti-American rat-bastards we are.”

But please don’t be so absolutely stupid that you don’t read the fine print.

During the presidential campaign Tom Brokaw asked Barack Obama and John McCain a fundamental question: “Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?”  John McCain answered that it was a responsibility; Barack Obama said – and I quote – “Well, I think it should be a right for every American” (as in all 47 million Americans).

If health care is a basic right, how do you restrict it?  How do you deny it?  How do you say something is a “right,” and then keep people from having it?

Based on Obama’s own moral logic, he MUST provide health care for illegal immigrants.  All you have to do is listen to Barack Obama between lies to know what he’s going to do.

The 2010 census under Barack Obama will count everyone present as “Americans” and will not separate out illegal immigrants.  You can take that infamous Newsweek Cover that proclaims, “We Are ALL Socialists Now” and change it to say, “We are ALL Americans Now.”  As far as Obama is concerned, if you happen to be in America now, you are an American.  And it doesn’t matter where you were born, or how you got here.

And neither will his health care plan.  They have intended to cover “47 million Americans” all along – and they WILL cover illegal immigrants unless they are defeated.

Abortion Destroys More Than Just A Baby

Abortion is a cancer that makes our society sick on every level. It destroys us individually – one baby at a time; it erodes the essential institution of fatherhood by removing fathers from the most basic decision regarding their children; and, ultimately, it creates unstable consequences that damage our nation and our world. And rather than being a necessary industry that protects the weakest and neediest among us, it is in fact a holocaust among the very groups of people we claim to be trying to save.

First of all, abortion clearly results in the death of a child. Do the math: if your beloved mommy had decided to have an abortion during her pregnancy with you, you would not have been born. More specifically, you would have died. Mommy would have killed you. The same you who was once a teen ager, once a toddler, once an infant, was also once a fetus, once an embryo, and once a zygote. Killing you at any point during that continuum would have rendered you every bit as dead. If you don’t believe me, look at your brother or sister; a different egg and sperm produce a totally different child every time. Even in the case of identical twins – where a zygote divides – we end up with two different children. Abortion destroys a child.

But when the Supreme Court looked down from Mount Olympus and divined in the Constitution a woman’s right to choose abortion, it did something else: it destroyed the rights of fathers, and undermined the traditional family structure.

Think about it: if a mother exercises her “right to choose” abortion, it presupposes a duty upon the father of that child to idly sit by while his child is killed. While mommy beams down at her little bundle of joy and says, “I could have chosen to kill you, but let you live because I wanted a baby, daddy is outside somewhere saying, “Well, mommy didn’t decide to kill it, so I guess I’m a father. How can anyone who claims to have an IQ above that of the baby that abortion kills not see how radically abortion undermines the role of the father?

Conversely, if daddy dearest is a “pro-choicer” who doesn’t want anything to do with his child and would very much like to choose death for it, he may well be subjectively compelled by the courts to pay child support. A woman can kill her child at will during pregnancy. That is her right. But if she subjectively decides to keep her baby, the courts impose the burden on a father to support that child whether he wants it or not. That is his duty. Where’s daddy’s “right to choose”? He has no rights at all, only duties selectively imposed upon him by the granting of this bizarre woman’s right. So much for equal rights; so much for equal protection under the law. If daddy desperately wants his child and mommy wants to abort, too bad, so sad, dad. If daddy doesn’t want to be responsible for his kid but mommy wants to keep it, to bad, so sad, dad. Abortion is not only murder, it is also patently unfair by any meaningful standard.

In their infinite wisdom, the courts decided that fatherhood amounted to nothing more than donating sperm and writing checks. A woman kills her child and is regarded as making a choice with all the moral consequence of choosing whether to buy a particular blouse. A father walks away from a liftime commitment of supporting that same kid that momma could have had chopped into little pieces and he becomes a “deadbeat dad.” And the same courts that made all this possible – after creating the chaotic disaster of “no-fault divorce” – have also nearly unanimously decided that fathers shouldn’t get custody of their kids. They’re lucky if they get joint custody! Being a father means being pretty low on the totem poll. And of course, in recent years, we have lesbians actually taking advantage of the latest science to bypass daddy altogether. So much for dads.

Incredibly, the same secular humanists who utterly failed to see the consequences of their utter contempt for fathers have for going on forty years continued to fail to see the clear cause-effect relationship between abortion and the declining participation by fathers. But suprise, suprise. Fathers by the millions recognized and internalized the utter meaninglessness that society clearly impugned upon them and simply walked away. Duties without rights, plus criticism without recognition, is no way to attract men to embrace fatherhood. And, for that matter, rights without duties is no way to attract women to embrace motherhood.

The statistics are overwhelming and inexorable. Abortion. Fatherlessness. Out of wedlock births. Single parent households. Crime. Drugs. Gangs. Prison. Chronic dysfunction. Studies galore support the death of the family with the rise of a sociopathic youth culture. In many major cities, 65% of babies are born to unmarried women. Nationally, 70% of the long-term inmates in prisons who have committed the most violent crimes grew up without fathers. INTERPOL statistics have likewise revealed that single parenthood ratios were strongly correlated with violent crimes. Studies of juvenile offenders have shown that family structure significantly predicts delinquency. Children born out of wedlock are three times more likely to drop out of school than children in two parent households, and they are far more likely to end up on welfare. And study after study has demonstrated that children without fathers are far more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, far more likely to be sexually, physically, and emotionally abused, far more likely to become obese, and far more likely to perpetuate the vicious cycle by having out of wedlock children themselves. And there is no connective link – NONE! – that more determines poverty than single parenthood.

You want to turn this tide around? Criminalize abortion. The problem isn’t too many children being born; the problem is fatherlessness! Stop the insane double standard. If fathers should have any duty whatsoever to support their children, surely mothers have at the very least the duty to allow their children to live! Hey, guess what? This isn’t a meaningless fetus; it is a precious, valuable human being, and BOTH mother and father have a duty to care for their child. Dad, you brought this little mouth into the world, and you have an obligation to provide for your baby; mom, you conceived this little bundle of joy, and you have an obligation to nurture your baby. But only a fool decrees that mother gets to decide whether a child should count enough to live, and that a father must somehow be duty-bound to completely respect and honor whatever her choice is. That is insane, and it is evil.

If we as a society begin to respect life enough that we begin to recognize that it is worth nurturing, worth, providing for, worth loving, and worth sacrificing for, then we will finally begin to see a turnaround in our society. Decades of terrible statistics will begin to improve as the society that demands that fathers recognize their children itself fundamentally recognizes children.

Abortion by its very design and by its very nature removes fathers from the equation of life. It is time to bring them back.

When fatherhood is trivialized, ignored, and removed as a factor by abortion, chaos follows. That’s what all the trends tell us. And that chaos has had a terribly detrimental impact upon society. The liberals who decry the United States’ involvement in the five-year old Iraq war may well have a point in noting the trillion-dollar debt that the war will cost American society; but they will not for a single nanosecond consider the multi-, multi-, multi-, multi-trillion dollar cost of abortion upon our society as it triggered massive fundamental philosophical and sociological degredations of human life. It is frankly incredible that so many supposedly intelligent people failed to see that the stupid logic that you are human only if you are wanted would not have massive unintended consequences.

And we will increasingly see the result of the international aspect of abortion as well. A June 13, 2007 news story (Infanticide, Abortion Responsible for 60 Million Girls Missing in Asia) begins as follows:

There is a little-known battle for survival going in some parts of the world. Those at risk are baby girls, and the casualties are in the millions each year. The weapons being used against them are prenatal sex selection, abortion and female infanticide — the systematic killing of girls soon after they are born.

According to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of the World Population Report, these practices, combined with neglect, have resulted in at least 60 million “missing” girls in Asia, creating gender imbalances and other serious problems that experts say will have far reaching consequences for years to come.

“Twenty-five million men in China currently can’t find brides because there is a shortage of women,” said Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute in Washington, D.C. “The young men emigrate overseas to find brides.”

The imbalances are also giving rise to a commercial sex trade; the 2005 report states that up to 800,000 people being trafficked across borders each year, and as many as 80 percent are women and girls, most of whom are exploited.

“Women are trafficked from North Korea, Burma and Vietnam and sold into sexual slavery or to the highest bidder,” Mosher said.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,281722,00.html

Here we have a clearly established link between abortion and sex selection, as well as clear correspondence between abortion and sex slavery as well as a link between abortion and an unstable and unsustainable societal dilemma in a nuclear state. What will be the long-term psychological state of an already rogue nation as hundreds of millions of men begin to come onto the scene who cannot possibly marry or ever enjoy a normal relationship with a woman?

I still recall Senator Hillar Clinton going to a women’s conference in China and lecturing the Chinese on abortion. In her view, although it is perfectly legitimate for American women to abort their progeny out of whatever subjective preference that entered their minds, as long as it is a woman’s “choice.” However, it is immoral for a nation-state to attempt – out of what they perceived as a direct threat to their national survival (i.e. a one child per family edict to control overpopulation) – to control the number of children born. This view is particualarly hypocritical coming from a liberal Democrat who generally favors big government bureaucratic solutions over individual free market ones. If her reasoning process wasn’t already twisted enough, she then proceeded to undermine her whole “abortion is wonderful as long as women choose to do it” by lecturing the Chinese on sex selective abortions, which are done not only in China but in much of the developing world out of long-standing cultural practices that value sons over daughters. In Senator Clinton’s reasoning, abortion is fine as long as it is a woman’s choice, as long as she doesn’t choose to abort her girls.

Sex selective abortions routinely take place throughout Asia, and is also a rampant practice in India and much of Latin America. In a bizarre but talionic twist, “a woman’s right to choose” has resulted in a literal holocaust against women.

And it is not only women who fall prey to the abortion mills. While so many liberals who claim to champion civil rights laud abortion, the fact remains that abortion has cut a terrible swath among black Americans. There is a clear prima facia case to be made that abortion seems to selectively favor the weakest, the poorest, and the most vulnerable members of society. If liberals had a functioning moral compass, they would be troubled by the ramifications of their ideologies. They don’t, and they aren’t.

Last month UCLA students had an actor call Planned Parenthood development centers in seven states asking whether his donation could be specifically targeted to “lower the number of black people.” Each branch agreed to process the racially earmarked donation. None expressed concern about the clearly expressed racist motives for the donation, and some staffers explicitly agreed with the racist reasoning. Planned Parenthood issued a statement that attempted to redirect attention from its profoundly racist staffers. We should likewise forget that 79% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are in minority neighborhoods, or that the founder of Planned Parenthood was a prodoundly racist proponent of eugenics. From its inception, Planned Parenthood has readily agreed with the statement, “the less black kids out there, the better,” which was uttered by the UCLA actor in his recorded conversation with Planned Parenthood’s Autumn Kersey. She called his position “understandable,” and indicated her excitement to process the donation. He was acting; the Director of Development at the Idaho Planned Parenthood office was not.

The Rev. Johnny Hunter has bemoaned the plight of black Americans, who are killing themselves off at an incredible rate, and has pointed out that abortion has killed far more blacks than the Klu Klux Klan. Dr. Alveda King, the niece of the famed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has used the same analogy, saying, “The great irony is that abortion has done what the Klan only dreamed of.” She quoted her uncle as having said, “It’s time that we remember the sacrifices of men like my father and my uncle who worked and died so that our children could live.” And she said, “It’s time to stop killing the future and keep their dream alive.”

The numbers are simply staggering. Dr. Alveda King says that a full one quarter of the black population is missing from the abortion genocide. “15 million black people have been denied their most basic civil right, the right to life,” she says. Out of 42 million total abortions in the United States, 15 million (35.7%) have been black. Black women are three times more likely than white women to have an abortion, and a nearly half of all black pregnancies are ending in abortion!

If conservatives championed a campaign that would inevitably come to result in the termination of women and blacks in massive numbers, one can only imagine the rhetoric of disgust and righteous outrage that would flood the media ink and airwaves. But the central plank of both liberalism and the Democratic Party has clearly done exactly that, and there is nothing but stony silence.

And may I point out (again) that abortion – which removes fathers from the equation and thus trivializes fatherhood – has anhiliated black fatherhood every bit as much as it has anhiliated their babies. When we look at the shocking statistics regarding black crime, drug use, incarceration, and dysfunction on virtually every level we need to realize that abortion is not the cure, but the disease.

Finally, let me discuss the relationship of abortion with the impending Social Security meltdown. By 2017, Social Security be greater than what it takes in (the definition of bankruptcy, by the way), and the trust fund will be completely emptied by 2041.

In 1950, there were 16 workers for every recipient of Social Security. Today there are only three workers for every recipient. And given current trends, within a few decades there will only be two. There are obviously other factors to account both for this trend and for the overall problems with Social Security in general, but no problem is greater than the fact that we have killed off more than 42 million potential workers since the 1970s. Grandpa’s generation did not exterminate themselves, you see (and all the wars from the Revolutionary War to the war in Iraq haven’t begun to kill off Americans the way abortion has!), and so there are a lot of people to support, and way too few to support them.

Medicare is in even worse shape. By 2014, payroll tax revenue will cover just over half of Medicare’s budget, and the program’s trust fund – which pays for critical medicare care – will be exhausted by 2019. Something dramatic will have to be done to save the program, and liberals’ promises to pump more government money into health care amount to what one of my professors – commenting on students who wrote lengthy answers to exam questions that somehow never arrived at an answer – called “pumping sunshine.” By the time the bickering parties and entrenched interest groups get around to seriously trying to turn around this Titanic, it will be too late to cut benefits, and workers will revolt on a level not seen since the early 1930s if they are called upon to pay the taxes necessary to keep the entitlement programs alive.

My fear is that the younger generation and the government bureaucrats will apply the same twisted reasoning as the thinking that brought us the abortion mills that caused so much of this growing disaster in the first place. If you can kill a baby before it has a chance to be born and become potential burdens upon society, why not kill the elderly before they have a chance to become guaranteed burdens on society? Watch out, grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will almost surely come after you!

Liberals despise the Bible, so let me end by quoting it. Proverbs 8:32-26, urging readers to pursue godly wisdom, says, “And now, o sons, listen to me: blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.”

Abortion is the love of death, and the pursuit of death over the pursuit of life. And the end of a culture that loves death is death.

In Defense of Life

There are many people who oppose the abortion industry, but they generally can’t do a very good job explaining why. The Republican Party is officially pro-life in its platform, but I’ve never heard a GOP candidate offer a good reason for being pro-life. But there are excellent reasons for being pro-life, and it is way past time that society heard them.

Democrats and “pro-choice” proponents offer “a woman’s right to choose” as the primary reason to support abortion. But let us think about that for a moment: should women have “a right to choose?” Sure they should, up to a certain point. But should that right extend to anything a woman might want to do? What if she wants to drive her car through a crowd of people? What if she wants to hijack an airplane and fly it into a skyscraper? Clearly, a woman doesn’t – and shouldn’t – have a right to do anything she chooses. The first question needs therefore needs to be, “the right to choose to do what?”

If you were busily working on peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink when your oldest child came in and said, “Is it okay if I kill this?” What would you do? Would you say, “Sure! Go ahead! Since I’m not certain of the ontological status of whatever you’re considering killing, I’ll leave the decision up to you!” Or would you turn around and look to make sure your little gremlin wasn’t talking about your youngest child? (Or maybe it wouldn’t matter, because you’d figure your firstborn was exercising that sacrosanct “right to choose“?). The ability to use rhetoric to cast metaphysical doubt on the meaning of “being human” does not mean that ignorance is bliss, and one can abort at will. The fact of the matter is, we haven’t even begun to understand the miraculous – and it truly is miraculous – process of a baby forming in mommy’s womb. The age of viability has decreased dramatically; medical experts have been repeatedly proven dead wrong again and again in determining brain function in comatose patients who later recovered after being declared ‘brain dead’; the Hippocratic Oath recited by doctors for centuries explicitly banned the performing of abortions; and so on, and so on. When in doubt, why not choose life?

And there really is no doubt, once we truly consider the issues. Ever hear the argument that fetuses aren’t human beings, so it’s okay to kill them? Think again. Both science and logic assure us that – from the moment of conception – that thing in the womb of a human mother is fully a human being. Take a moment and consider the taxonomic system by which every living thing is rigorously categorized and classified. By that system a human embryo is of the kingdom Anamalia, of the phylum Chordata, of the class Mammalia, of the order Primate, of the family Pongidae, of the genus Homo, and of the species Sapiens – same as any other human being. Put even more simply, that embryo is a human by virtue of its parents, and a being by the fact that it is a living thing: it is a human being.

And then there’s that whole “It’s a woman’s body” line. That one falls rather flat as well. The fact is that that from the moment of fertilization there is a separate, distinct, unique genetic individual in the mother’s womb; every cell in its little body is different from that of its mother. Half of children are male, for goodness sake! We are clearly not talking about a woman’s body; we are talking about her child’s body.

Then there’s the notion of a woman’s rights to her own body, which views the baby in her womb as a hostile invader forcing itself upon her. Why should she carry it to term if she doesn’t want to? Well, for one thing, because it’s her child. The so-called “violinist argument” is fatally flawed from the outset by casting a woman’s child in terms of an unwanted intruder whom the woman has no moral obligation to care for. Furthermore, we would never consider that rather despicable line of moral reasoning after a child is born – when it actually requires a far greater sacrifice and burden to care for (ask a new mother whether her child required more chasing around the house before or after birth). We go from the rather passive act of “being pregnant” to the extremely active act of caring for a newborn – and that burden proceeds to continue for years as the child grows up. Leave your five year old at home and go gamble in Las Vegas for a week and see what happens when you come back home if you don’t believe me. See how far that, “But I have a right to my own body” line takes you. It ought to take you all the way to jail for abandoning your child.

If this isn’t enough to dispel the “woman’s right to her own body” argument, then let us think about the way they are using the term “rights.” We must realize that in virtually every case one person’s right presupposes someone else’s duty. One person’s right to freedom of speech imposes the duty upon the remainder of society to tolerate what might be offensive to them for the greater good of a free society. In other cases, the duty imposed is far more selective: When liberals describe the duty of the rich to pay their fair share of taxes, they are imposing a duty on a small class of people. The wealthiest 5% of Americans already pay 57% of the taxes, and the wealthiest 10% pay 68% of the tab. The top 1% earn 19% of the income but pay 37% of the taxes; meanwhile the “poorest” 50% of Americans earn 13% of the income but pay only 3% of the taxes. This introduces a legitimate question for some future discussion: just how much more should the wealthy be expected to pay? [Don’t allow the issue of taxation to distract you from my argument: I merely raise taxation as an issue in which certain advocates subjectively claim that a few should have a duty to pay more, while the majority should have a right to pay less]. But in the case of abortion, the right given to the mother presupposes the most extreme duty upon one single individual – her child – the duty to die for the convenience of its mother. On the side of the “right of a woman to choose” are not only women who suddenly find themselves pregnant and their anxious parents, but hedonistic men and women who want to abdicate any responsibility for their “sexual expression,” along with a powerful media culture that aggressively pursues the same end, a powerful abortion industry and its lobby, the stem cell research lobby, unelected judges who impose their will on society, etcetera. Who is on the side of the right of the unborn to live? The Constitution – which guarantees the right to life as preeminent over all others – but other than that, far too few allies. One side has sole access to the megaphone; the other cannot speak. If we were to stop focusing on the Constitutionally-invisible “right to choose” and focus just for a moment on the DUTY OF PARENTS to nurture and care for their children, we would have a very different discussion indeed. I cannot help but remember the slogan of the Ministry of Health vans that Nazi Germany used to haul away retarded children, epileptics, children with malformed ears, chronic bed wetters, and the like to their deaths: Lebensunwertes Leben – “Life Unworthy of Life.” Today I still see cars bearing bumper stickers with the equally oxymoronic – but far more deadly – slogan, “Pro child, Pro choice.” What a shame that so many Americans have so blithely come to champion Nazi morality.

Then there’s that, “It’s only a potential human being” pseudo-argument. First of all, I’m not even sure what it means to be “a potential human being” – and neither do those who are reciting it. I do understand what it means to be “a human being with potential.” Let us begin this discussion with the straightforward observation that had your mother decided to have an abortion during her pregnancy with you, that you would not have been born. It would NOT have been some potential you that perished; it would have been you. You would have been one of the nearly 50,000,000 babies in America alone who were killed by abortion. Just as you were once a child, once a toddler, once an infant, you were also once a fetus, once an embryo, once a zygote. Killing you while you in any of those stages would have killed you just as dead.

And let us pause for a moment to consider what murder actually does to the victim. The character Clint Eastwood played in Unforgiven put it pretty well: “When you kill a man, you take away everything he has and everything he’s ever going to have.” A human baby will naturally inherit every quality of human life unless someone steps in and unnaturally ends that life. It is simply his or her nature as a human being to do so. You merely have to contemplate your own life to consider what would have been taken away from you had you been among the abortion statistics. This idea of “potential” as some ambiguous term that allows a mother to kill her baby is as ridiculous as it is amoral. If I were to walk up to you in a parking lot as you got out of your car and shoot you to death, what would I be guilty of? I certainly didn’t take away your past, as it has already happened. And if your future – when is clearly merely “potential” – doesn’t count, all I truly deprived you of is the two or three seconds of immediate conscious awareness. And I could have deprived you of at least that much had I merely asked you for the time instead of shooting you! For murder to be a serious crime, “potential” has to be a real, tangible thing that has intrinsic, incommensurable value. To attempt to argue that an unborn baby’s potential is somehow meaningless but a born person’s matters is both a fundamentally irrational and immoral distinction that leads inevitably to a degradation in the value of human life. Tyrants have routinely made the same type of “status of humanity determined by selective criterion” distinction when they said that Jews, or blacks, or any other class of people should not matter.

Deep down, I believe that even the Democrats and other abortion advocates realize the immorality of abortion in their choice of language. They demonstrate this by reciting the new mantra, “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” But why on earth should it be rare if it is a fundamental human right? How many other basic rights should be rare? Put “free speech,” “freedom of the press,” “the right to peaceably assemble,” or any other right that liberals hold as sacrosanct into this “____ should be safe, legal, and rare” equation and see how it flies. If abortion is a good thing, why on earth should it be rare? In point of fact, we should be encouraging more of it, not less.

During the Lincoln-Douglas presidential debates, when Douglas said that states ought to have a right to choose the institution of slavery, Lincoln famously said, “One cannot say that people have a right to do wrong.” Fortunately the country chose Lincoln’s moral reasoning over Douglas’. The Civil War was subsequently waged by a Confederacy which argued that their own rights were being systematically violated, even as they inhumanly violated the most fundamental rights of the blacks they oppressed. Apart from the fact that the party of Lincoln, the party of abolition, was the Republican Party and the party of Douglas, the party of institutionalized slavery, was the Democratic Party, I cannot help but see the parallels between the Party of Slavery and the Party of Abortion. For one thing, the Party of Abortion uses the identical arguments to justify its abominable institution that the Party of Slavery relied upon. For another, the Party of Abortion is just as insistent upon its “rights” as was the Party of Slavery, even as they systematically violate the rights of the most innocent and most helpless.