The hypocrisy and the lies behind amendment G

Alexander Blackstone (nom de plume)

 

This coming November South Dakota is going to vote on amendment G, that is to say, whether abortion will become a constitutional “right” or not. In other words, whether doctors should be entitled to kill an innocent human being. The promoters of this referendum declare that all they want is to empower South Dakotans, their families and their health care providers to be able to make decisions concerning whether to have or not to have an abortion, and to wrestle such power from the politicians in Pierre. They claim that now women may not access an abortion even if their health is at risk and that they run the risk of being punished if they abort. These allegations are a total misrepresentation of the truth.

I must start by stating that there is no moral teaching or legal usage that condemns indirect abortion. That is to say, nowhere ever has been punished the killing of the unborn by an action that aims at healing the mother. The most usual case is the ectopic pregnancy. There is no author or legal system, and certainly not in South Dakota, that criminalizes the action that, in order to prevent the mother’s mortal bleeding, takes the sick trump where an unfortunate embryo has nested. Concretely, the 1877 South Dakotan law that banned abortion established that abortion is punishable “unless the same is necessary to preserve her [the woman’s] life.”

In second place it must be stated that all criminal laws are established by the community either through its representatives or by popular assembly, and they impose a moral opinion on all the members of the said community. Homicide is a criminal offense, even if a minority among us would like to be able to kill their enemies; rape is a criminal offense, even if a minority among us would like to have the power to rape women or children. It is of the nature of criminal law to impose a moral opinion on the dissenters and it amounts to great hypocrisy or ignorance to claim otherwise.

In the third place, it is not true that the promoters of amendment G want the decision concerning abortion to stay with citizens and their families. In fact, this amendment could lead to young underage girls suffering an abortion without their parents even knowing it. Actually, what usually happens is that a naïve girl gets pushed by her irresponsible boyfriend to go to an abortion facility. He claims that, since the “solution” of abortion exists, if she chooses not to use it, then the baby is exclusively her problem. Once at the facility, the girl is pressed by the “health care” personnel and she can hardly escape the tunnel in which she was thrown in a moment of confusion. Later she will regret for all her life that “choice,” even when she really acted in part dragged by the circumstances. My wife and I know of a similar case. 20 years later one of our friends was still very upset for that moment of confusion and lack of will to stop the evil chain that ended in the death of her baby.

The hypocrisy of the rhetoric that anti-natalist practices care for the mothers and the poor goes back to the life of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who was a eugenicist. She wanted to purify the race of the US by diminishing the number of African Americans, for example. In her own words: “The ministers [sic] work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we wish to reach. We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members” (letter to Clarence Gamble, Dec. 10, 1939, cited by Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy [Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005], p. 43). According to dr. Samaan, she even had close contact with Hans Harmsen, the main source of Hitler’s population policies.

Finally, it is worth noting that, according to Samuel Buell the woman who suffered an abortion was not punished by either the state’s laws or the state’s courts of the United States, before or after Roe vs. Wade. Only the doctor or other person who killed the baby were treated as serious felons. So, the criminal laws that punish abortion usually go against the “health care” provider who refuses to live up to the Hippocratic oath that should guide his or her actions: “I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.”