A Perverse Axiology
I saw an article on LifeSiteNews the other day about an abortionist who, in the midst of extracting the parts of an 18 week old baby she had just killed, felt her own 18 week old baby kick in her womb for the first time. She describes how tears just started to flow down her face. The whole article is about her admission of the violence of abortion and its negative impacts on abortionists. She mentions:
“serious emotional reactions that produced physiological symptoms, sleep disturbances (including disturbing dreams), effects on interpersonal relationships and moral anguish.”
If one only quickly skims the article he might leave with the impression that this is a confession of a repentant abortionist. It is not. Rather, the article, it seems to me, is an attempt to bring the suffering of abortionists into the public sphere in the vain hope that public expression of the truth of the violence of abortion will some how provide healing to those who continue in the destruction of unborn lives.
This article, it seems to me, is this doctor’s attempt to justify what she realizes at some pre-conscious level to be a grave moral transgression. However, it is more effective in revealing the tortuous thinking that our times have brought us. She relates an experience of running from a D&E abortion where she had just reassembled the parts of the baby she had dismembered, to another room in which she was trying to help save the life of a premature baby of the same age. She asked the question about the moral difference between the two situations, in which she said it would be unthinkable to do to the prematurely born baby what she had just done to the unborn one. Her answer was based upon the location of the baby and, “most importantly,” the hopes and wishes of the mother for the baby.
It is the mother’s will which determines whether it is legitimate to kill a child or not. Instructive also is that this doctor talks about the discord between her experiences of abortion and her chosen values:
“caught between pro-choice discourse that, while it reflects our values, does not accurately reflect the full extent of our experience of abortion and in fact contradicts an enormous part of it, and the anti-abortion discourse and imagery that may actually be more closely aligned to our experience but is based in values we do not share.”
This doctor’s axiology is very post-modern. It is the mother’s will that determines the status of the baby. It is this capriciously chosen value disconnected from a contradictory reality, even when that reality is confirmed by her own personal experience, that allows this tormented soul to justify continuing to destroy lives: those of the unborn, of the mother, pf the father, of their families, and of all of those involved in the abortion industry. This is indeed, a very perverse axiology and this is the value system of those who are trying to bring us “humane” healthcare reform. Be afraid…be very afraid…
.jpg)
I read this article a few days ago as well. Well, I read as much of it as I could. It was so upsetting that I became dizzy and could no longer stand.
Comment by Steve — October 19, 2009 @ 10:20 AM
I read and agreed with your post completely, until the very last sentence.
Why do so many people have to equate health care reform with “death panels” and abortion? Are you really that shallow?
I work in health care in a very poor state (Mississippi) and have seen first hand the suffering of individuals who can’t afford health insurance. It is a national tragedy and embarrassment that we allow this problem to persist, rich as we are.
I am pro-life as you are. You think as I do that the government should ban abortion. So I am perplexed that you see a “government solution” for abortion as appropriate but a government solution for the uninsured as something to be afraid of.
A favorite argument of pro-choice advocates is that conservatives want to force women to have their babies, but don’t want to pay for the raising of the children. Universal health care would be a great answer to these people. Even if we don’t provide everything for every child conceived, if we advocate for universal health care we are giving every child two things, guaranteed — health insurance and public education. That is a lot and would go a long way towards shutting our opponents up.
Perhaps universal health insurance is the price we have to pay to advance the pro-life cause. But linking the worst of abortion to health care reform is not very responsible, and not very caring towards the millions who want insurance — most of whom have never had an abortion.
Comment by Michael Hebert — October 24, 2009 @ 9:06 AM
Michael – thank you for your comments. Perhaps I could have been more clear in what I meant by my final comment. However, I also believe that you are reading much more into the comment than was written. I do not equate heath care reform with “death panels” or “abortion.” What I do is warn that the current administration and most of the leading proponents in the Democrat Party in Congress are, at some level, encumbered by the subject perverse axiology. It it they, in their words and actions, that link health care reform with abortion, not I. I and others are simply raising the alarm at this link.
I completely agree that health care reform is very much needed. I believe that universal access to basic health care is a human right in a nation such as ours. The specifics of the approach can be debated. However, any healthy system will have to take into account the truth of the human person. A deficient anthropology is usually behind the mistaken theories on both sides of the aisle. Conservatives who want to leave it completely to market forces do not recognize the mutual obligation we have for one another. Liberals who want the government to take all of the responsibility do not recognize the fundamental human need for individual responsibility and liberty of action to be preserved if the individual and the social system is to flourish. Any long term sustainable system will have to try to accommodate both of these anthropological truths.
Currently the system is broken because it is an amalgam of the two aforementioned defective ideologies. We have an individualistic, market driven system with health insurance and a badly run, government controlled system in Medicaid and Medicare. The government’s proper role is in setting the conditions for a healthy system but not in removing the individual/local initiative and responsibility for running such a system. By the way, this is the great difference between a government working to end legalized abortion and taking over the management of health care. The first is within the government’s authentic role and the second exceeds it. By the way, I also think that public education has gone astray for the very same reason, though there is still the possibility of reforming it because in education there is at least a local structure in place even if it does not work very well. But this is another issue.
In the end, the current broken system is still preferable to a system that institutionalizes abortion on demand at the tax payer’s expense. It can be seen that this is an underlying goal by every defeat of language that would explicitly rule out government funded abortion from these proposals. One may not accept intrinsic evil as an integral part of a solution to a legitimate need. I would have to ask you to dig deeper into the issue of authentic social justice which can be discerned through study of the co-principles of subsidiarity and solidarity before coming to the conclusion that a government run health care system in itself is a legitimate solution to the problem. Furthermore, I would ask you to consider whether one that enshrines abortion on demand into the system could ever be a legitimate price to pay for the increased access to basic health care that I agree is needed.
Comment by David — October 24, 2009 @ 11:26 AM
Hello Friends congratulate them on their blog and I hope to have the opportunity to visit ours when you have time, our blog’s mission is to comfort those who suffer and today is a brief biography of St. Philomena.
For now we are his followers and we will be watching their publications.
Greetings
http://sedconsolacion.blogspot.com
Comment by daniel — October 29, 2009 @ 7:44 PM