Partial Birth Abortion

Greg Koukl says:

I learned the term velocitized in high school driver's ed. When a driver accelerates from, say, 30 to 60 miles per hour and settles in, he gets acclimated to his new speed and loses his sense of velocity. It doesn't feel as if he's moving any faster than he was at first.

This is dangerous on the highway, but it's deadly when it happens to the moral consciousness of a culture. When a culture's decline in values begins to pick up speed, it becomes velocitized. Years ago, theologian Francis Schaeffer said that what was unthinkable yesterday is thinkable today, and ordinary and commonplace tomorrow.

Keep that in mind when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments today on a federal law banning partial-birth abortion. That the court must consider the legitimacy of a law forbidding this barbarism marks the velocity of our moral descent.

Calling a procedure an abortion doesn't make it one. Abortion happens to a child inside her mother's womb. With partial-birth abortion, most of the child is outside the mother. That makes this procedure infanticide.

Here's how it works: The baby is delivered feet first until only her head remains in the birth canal. The doctor takes a pair of curved Metzenbaum scissors and punctures the base of the child's skull. He suctions out the brain tissue with a catheter, and then delivers the baby's corpse.

To the morally sensitive, no argument is necessary beyond a clear description of this procedure. The morally velocitized, though, are content with the thinnest rationalizations to condone this brutality.

One woman told a radio interviewer she preferred partial-birth abortion because the baby was delivered whole and not chopped up into pieces. It gave her the opportunity to say goodbye. Another said it's the most "humane" way for the child itself.

Odd. We debate how best to take a child's life, not whether it's right to dispose of children.

Does it somehow strengthen a killer's legal defense because it took only one shot to the back of the head to dispatch his victim? Imagine the appeal: "Your Honor, it was the most humane way; he didn't feel a thing."

The more sophisticated defenses of partial-birth abortion generally fall into three categories. First, detractors say the legislation is unnecessary because the procedure is so rare. Second, it's a vital medical option necessary to save the life of the mother. Third, the fetus dies even before the abortion takes place, so the procedure is morally benign.

The first defense is silly. If these abortions kill innocent children, then why ignore a single, preventable death?

Second, the law in question allows partial-birth abortion when it's necessary to save the mother, though such circumstances almost never occur.

Third, if the baby were dead before delivery - in most cases, this isn't true - then the law simply wouldn't apply.

The moral depravity of partial-birth abortion is self-evident. Either you see this or you've been velocitized, dizzied by the speed of our moral decline.

(HT: JT)