Abortion: Who Are The Radicals?

I think that reasonable people can agree that Republican senatorial nominee from Missouri, Todd Akin, was profoundly mistaken in his apparent belief that a woman has natural defensive measures that, if she is raped, shut down the reproductive system to avoid pregnancy. Clearly, that idea is wrong and a myth or, as some might say, an old wives tale.  A lawyer friend of mine tells me it was an argument used in the 19^th century to argue that a rape did not occur, if the victim was impregnated.  It has been suggested that Akin may have gotten his faulty information from Dr. John Wilkie, a pro-life physician who apparently wrote a paper on the subject around ten years ago. I can safely say that Wilkie is probably a crank.  As I understand it, the idea was also promoted in the 70s in a supposed study by another doctor. I’ve tried to find it, but I can’t find information on any serious study that suggested such a thing. If anyone else can locate it for me, it would be great. I’m just curious.

Now, having agreed that such a belief is pretty crazy, I want to say that his basic argument, apart from trauma prevents pregnancy, is that the baby is not responsible for the unwanted pregnancy. This has been lost in the uproar over the science of procreation.  Frankly, abortion results in the death of a baby. I would have to say that there is a good argument that exemptions in the case of rape or incest are still troubling for me.  However, somehow the Todd Akin business is a way for liberals to suggest that we conservatives are Neanderthals, who want to control women’s reproductive rights, that we conservatives are extremely radical. This is like Nancy Pelosi calling anybody else an ignorant witch.

I suspect that most people, when they consider the realities of the procedure, would say that partial-birth abortion was extremely radical. In this procedure the abortionist jabs a sharp object in the brain of the living baby human’s brain before the head can follow the body out of the birth canal. Why do they do this? Because if the baby were to be completely born, killing the baby would be considered murder. This is a very small point, especially for the dead baby. You want more extreme radical?  President Obama has always supported and voted for any kind of abortion on demand.  He even voted 3 times as an Illinois state senator to protect the practice of allowing a baby born alive from a botched abortion to go without medical attention. If a wounded baby were to come to the emergency room, law would require that medical attention not be withheld. Every baby born on purpose could expect the same medical attention to save its life. However, if a baby somehow survives an abortion attempt, according to President Obama and his fellows worshiping at the altar of abortion, that little human must be left alone, even though it might survive with medical care. Who convinced them that babies who can survive outside the womb—science and medicine has made that a possibility earlier and earlier in the pregnancy—are not human beings?  The idea that abortion does not kill a baby human being is a much bigger and deplorable misunderstanding of human physiology than Akin’s.  Akin’s wrong opinion has not ended a single human life. As I once told my professor and other liberal students in a college American history class—they loved to bring up liberal political points when discussing every historical subject—I predict that humanity will eventually be brought, by the religious community, to the moral realization that abortion is abhorrent, even as happened with slavery. Again, who are the radicals and who are the most misguided?