Savage Culture Shift

It appears to me the side of evil is trying to one up each other. Last week New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo rejoiced that the state legislature had passed a bill for abortion up until birth.

Not to be left behind, the next day the Vermont legislature announced a state constitutional amendment to make abortion up until birth a right.

This week Virginia made the news when Governor Ralph Northam said infanticide is a right to privacy issue for the woman.

Earlier today, Andrew Klavan started his podcast talking about the shifting culture. He showed an election map from back in the 70s of Nixon winning reelection by an overwhelming majority; only Massachusetts and DC went for the Democrat. Then he showed a photo of some dope smoking hippies. There weren’t so many of them. Just a small part of the population, really.

Screenshots from Andrew Klavan's program

But now, if you were to ask who won, it would be that small minority. They changed the culture to want free sex without consequences, drugs without stigma, foul language, and a general coarsening of the culture. Klavan even pointed out that his not wearing a tie on his show is a result of their win. It wasn’t about numbers. It was about influencing the culture.

Further into his podcast, he was talking about the abortion bill in Virginia that got a lot of attention yesterday. It didn’t pass at this time (thank you Virginia Republicans). But there is video of the bill's proponent, Democrat Kathy Tran, giving testimony, and being pressed to answer what finally becomes clear: abortion would be accepted for essentially any reason (the mental health of the mother under too much stress) right up to the moment of birth, well beyond viability, and even during labor.

Then, to clarify, the Virginia’s governor did a radio interview. And he certainly did clarify—in a way that is beyond shocking. He calmly describes what would happen in the case of a completed birth in which the mother didn’t want the baby, maybe because of a disability or deformity. The baby would be made comfortable, and then doctors and the mother would discuss what should be done about whether to care for the baby or let it die. Or perhaps actively hasten the death of the baby (i.e., murder). He seemed mystified that there should be any upset about something that he thought should be a decision between the mother and the doctors.

Screenshot from here

The mainstream media did not cover the issue. At all. Fox News, however, did cover it. One part of that referred to a Maris poll (which I referenced the other day) showing that only 15% support unrestricted abortion at any time during pregnancy, while 74% want some kind of restrictions: in cases of rape, incest, life of mother, or first trimester, or possibly up to 20 weeks (when pain is known to be felt).

Here’s the transcript of this two-and-a-half-minute segment of Andrew Klavan:

Very few people support third trimester…. What he was talking about was infanticide. He said the baby could be born, and if they decide--  I’m only laughing because it’s so nuts. If you don’t laugh, you cry. I mean, he’s basically saying you could leave it there to die.

What I’m telling you is it doesn’t matter what the polls say. It doesn’t matter what the polls say. He has moved the Overton Window to where a governor of a state can talk about legalized murder, and people just say fine. [He had mentioned that the 3 main news networks were silent on it.]

I know so many liberals, and they all say the same thing. Whenever I talk about the radicalism in the Democrat party, the liberals all say, “Well, most of my friends don’t agree with that.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not how many people. It’s where they are, and what they do, and how they change the culture.

And whether you speak up. Because, if you’re sitting there going, “Well, I don’t agree with that, but I’m voting for him. I’m voting for him, because, you know, that’s radical, so he won’t get away with that,” then you just made that acceptable. If you vote for a guy like that—in fact if you vote for his party, as far as I’m concerned—you have made that statement acceptable. It is all right, if all the doctors agree, and the mother agrees—and men don’t get a say, because what have they got to do with humanity?—it’s all right to leave that baby to die.

If you vote for that, if that’s acceptable talk to you, if you’re not outraged, you’re part of the movement of the culture in that direction. It does not matter whether you agree or disagree. It doesn’t matter what the polls say. It matters that you allow that atmosphere, like poison, like miasma, to seep into the culture.

And people breathe it in, and the next generation of people sitting here will go, “You know, the majority didn’t want to be killing children, but somehow here we are all killing children. I killed mine, but it was different; I disagreed with it. I thought it was wrong.”

You know, it’s just in the same way I don’t wear a tie. You know, in the old days of course I would’ve been wearing a tie, but the 60s culture won. It’s—  Even I use a lot more foul language than I think is right, because the 60s culture won. The culture is dominant. It dominates everything.

What has the culture been doing? I’m not sure I can tell. I had hoped that the growing evidence that a fetus is a growing human baby, made more and more obvious as technology improves, would persuade more. And it does seem to.

And yet, simultaneously, the small minority of the pro-infanticide crowd gets more brazen.

Back in 2013 there was a Salon piece in which a woman admits that, yes, the growing fetus is a human life. But then add, “So what?” (I wrote about it here.)

There’s a story from several years ago, out of Melbourne, Australia, describing a debate over allowing “after-birth abortion,” or killing of a baby after it is born, if that is the mother’s “choice.”

Even earlier, 2011, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva wrote a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics, inventing the term “after-birth abortion,” trying to change the emphasis from the Dutch guidelines: “infants with a hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering”, instead proposing “‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice.” In other words, let’s ignore any caring feelings about the infant and shift the emphasis to the mother’s choices about her quality of life.

In 2015, Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer declared that infanticide wasn’t necessarily wrong; he’d been saying this for years, but in 2015 disability activists started a petition calling for his resignation. Here’s Singer’s logic:

Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.

Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life support—which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection—but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.

Notice the shift away from acknowledging will to live of the infant (which is evident even in utero). Change the recognition of the baby’s human right to life, and pretend the baby is subhuman, without even a noticeable will to live. Then consider only the convenience or inconvenience to the mother. And then, with the attention shifted there, simply snuff out the life of the baby. Actively. That means to poison, stab, suffocate. To murder.

Yesterday a sitting governor declared, with apparent calm rationality, that killing a baby after it is born ought to be just as acceptable as before it is born, and no mainstream media found that remarkable. Since we know, from ultrasounds, that the baby is just as alive before birth, why should birth make a difference? If you’re not horrified by that, then you need to ask what cultural shift you’ve already succumbed to.

Another good story from the Babylon Bee

At what point does an infant become fully human? Well, that depends, according to these “experts.” On something vague, such as developing a “sense of their own existence over time.” How do you measure that? Do they have to develop language in order for you to measure it? Are you talking months, or years? At what point is a child safe from its parent’s murderous wishes?

The dehumanization that leads to genocide is something we ought to recognize from the last century. If there was an error the Germans made, it was not speaking up, loudly and clearly, to prevent the atrocities from happening.

We must stand up and loudly declare that killing babies is wrong. After birth, or before birth. As a wise elephant once said, “A person’s a person no matter how small.”