Michael Schuttloffel is the executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference.
by Michael Schuttloffel
In January, the nation marked the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.
Over those 40 years, 55 million unborn children have had their lives cut short by abortion. Their number, and the brutal manner of their death, defy comprehension: Imagine the combined population of 26 American states being wiped out — that would be 55 million people. Yet America yawns.
Perhaps it is appropriate that such a poorly reasoned court decision — as now acknowledged by even supporters of legal abortion — has spawned 40 years of contorted, often preposterous, reasoning in defense of America’s abortion-on-demand regime.
Americans today look upon unborn children in the womb through the marvel of 4D sonograms and have no doubt that they are seeing a baby. Yet vast numbers of these same people go about their lives untroubled by the fact that there are 1.2 million abortions per year in this country.
Somewhere around half of these abortions ends the life of a little girl, yet we are told that abortion is a matter of women’s rights and women’s health. This seems an odd claim, since for females as much as males, death is not particularly healthy.
Now, the Kansas Legislature is considering legislation that shines a light on the extreme cognitive dissonance that is so apparent in many Americans’ attitudes toward abortion. Pro-life legislators are attempting to ban the practice of aborting an unborn child solely because of the child’s gender. Genderselection abortions almost always target unborn girls for elimination and are believed to be responsible for at least 160 million missing girls and women worldwide.
Remarkably, self-styled women’s rights groups have opposed such bills elsewhere, and the Obama White House opposed its passage in Congress. So it has come to this: Abortion advocates now argue for the right to destroy an unborn child purely because she is a girl . . . in the name of women’s rights. With this Orwellian claim, the diabolical illogic of the abortion movement collapses upon itself.
It is tempting to hope that as time goes by, respect for women and their equal dignity and value will increase, making gender-selection abortion attractive to fewer and fewer people.
However, it seems equally likely that the coming trend toward designer babies may only desensitize people further to the idea of exercising “choices” in regard to the traits of their children, whether through genetic engineering or through abortion. As long as there are people willing to argue that we must protect women by killing girls, anything is possible. And as long as Americans continue their now wellhoned indifference, the very worst is likely.
