Interesting.
I don’t know about you, but I sure am sick of abortion advocates refusing to deal with the core issue of whether an unborn child is a human life and an individual with a right to that life no matter how much it may inconvenience the people who brought it into existence, or just “part of the mother’s body” that she has the right to choose to remove, like a tumor, wart or bad tooth. The mainstream news media has been four-square in favor of the latter convenient boot-strapping argument with all of its intellectual dishonesty.
So how does CBS explain referring to the death of an “unborn child” as a murder? If it is murder to kill an unborn child, all other murder statutes hold that it is murder no matter who does the killing, since the UBC cannot consent to its own death. One can’t use violence as the distinction, because to the aborted unborn child, abortion is violence. There is a legitimate distinction to be made regarding when it is fair, honest and just to regard an unborn child as a human being with the right to have a chance at life, but CBS has skipped over that issue completely.
I want to hear the CBS explanation for how it can support killing unborn children when Democrats, progressives and feminists call for it, but call the act murder when it’s done in a shooting in Germany.
In related news, progressive commentators are outraged that a Virginia judge compared the transfer of frozen embryos to selling slaves under a state law defining slaves as chattel. “It’s repulsive and it’s morally repugnant,” Susan Crockin, a lawyer and scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, told the media. Will someone please ask Prof. Crocklin if she regards an unborn child as a human life that the law should protect, or the property of the mother, who can thus take its life just as slave-owners were allowed to kill their slaves.
I think the slavery-abortion analogy is useful and apt. If it isn’t I haven’t heard or read a persuasive reason why. The critically-buried film “The Island,” which I wrote about here, (I regret not devoting a whole post to it) raised the issue. Nobody wanted to talk about at the time.
Which is it, CBS, Professor Crocklin? Human beings or property? Murder or “a woman’s choice”?
Ethics Alarms 
As near as I can figure, the only difference (to the pro abortion crowd) between murder and an abortion is whether or not the child is wanted. If the child is wanted and killed, it’s murder. If the child is unwanted and killed, it’s an abortion.
I suspect it is more cynical, relating to how the child is killed. If it is killed in an abortion, then it is just a collection or cells or an inconvenience. If the child is killed in gun violence, then it is a precious life taken before its time by one more instance of senseless, needless gun violence.
jvb
Why wouldn’t that apply to born children too, I wonder?
As I have said a few times, if you don’t know the answer to that one, you haven’t been paying attention, and I know you have been paying attention. The idea that gender is mutable, depending on what the person decides to identify as, is only the apex of a pattern of thought on the left whereby the definition, meaning, and significance of anything, be it a person, a statement, or an action, depends almost entirely on the politics and motivation of the person behind it and the person interpreting it. It’s a little bit like the ends-oriented judicial approach where a judge decides that a case “says whatever I interpret it to say” to the point where it can almost say that (with apologies to Tony Banks, Phil Collins, and Mike Rutherford) day is night, left is right, and black is white.
It is the logic whereby cops who are normally thought of as klansmen suddenly morph into freedom riders when they are enforcing laws that the left agrees with, especially when they have to do with private ownership of guns. It is the logic whereby the American Military, usually thought of as a bunch of fools enforcing the will of corporations around the world, suddenly morphs into the greatest humanitarian Force in history when it is peacekeeping or getting involved in conflicts that have absolutely nothing to do with American interests but make the left feel like they are doing something. It is the logic that says that clergy are petty tyrants and pedophiles, but somehow they morph into great moral authorities when they say things the left agrees with, like linking gun control and climate change to scripture. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this reasoning can say that a human fetus is only a baby if the mother wants it and is nothing more than medical waste otherwise.
The people who think like this are the most certain people in the world. They are proto-Greta Thunbergs and David Hosses, certain of strong opinions and really not interested in discussing them or justifying them, only that those they tell them to accept them. These are the people who tell those of us who disagree with them that we can’t possibly be pro-life, because if we were truly pro-life, we would be working to end the death penalty, outlaw private possession of firearms and slow down police forces that take so many young black men’s lives every year, to say nothing of working to end American intervention abroad that frequently results in loss of life. These are also the people that say that those of us on the political right can’t be pro-freedom, because if we were truly pro-freedom, we would be working to free people from debt that weighs them down, the necessity of employment that keeps them from pursuing their dreams, and relationships that inevitably favor one gender over the other, as well as freeing women from the burden of bearing and rearing children who they do not wish to.
To those of us who actually have a functioning brain, which I would like to think I do, statements like that are the beginnings of a discussion. They are an invitation to explain why certain things are certain ways and are justified, whereas others might not be. To the kind of people who say them, however, they are not a beginning but an end, a conclusion concluded long ago in which there is absolutely no confusion and none can be found (with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers). They are tools to kill, not stimulate, discussion, red flags to stop a conversation dead in its tracks, lights which will shine on the error of a decent person’s ways and bring him over to their side with little effort.
Here’s the other side of it, however. If those of us who disagree with them throw back our own statements, like if you were truly so concerned about black lives you would be more concerned with those that get snuffed out in the womb each year, the black lives that get extinguished by their own people, and maybe staying out of trouble and avoiding death of the hands of the police, or that if you are so concerned about the lives of women, how about those who get snuffed out in the womb by other women? How about educating existing women to avoid relationships it can only end badly? Anything like that, they look at us like we suddenly sprouted a couple of extra heads. It’s just more of the left’s wanted dictatorship over and monopoly of all things. It’s just so much easier, after all, if everyone is doing the same thing, thinking the same thoughts, and speaking with one voice, the voice of the left.
The standard well-off white woman’s stance on abortions seems to be that poor black women need to be able to abort their babies so the poor black women are not oppressed. Of course, these standard well-off white women also have a black lives matter sign in their yard or stuck on their car’s bumper. The irony never seems to make itself obvious to them. The poor black women seem to need the standard well-off white woman and pro abortion laws to protect them from too many black lives messing up their black lives. The poor black women are obviously incapable of managing their own lives because black men and women seem to have an uncontrollable urge to have sex and conceive black babies. It’s pretty ugly. Essentially Margaret Sanger eugenics disguised as concern for the less fortunate? Nasty.
Right. It is entirely situational, and ergo, neither has traction.
The single (double?) murder of a pregnant Laci Peterson by Scott Peterson got Lefty’s Hempen Homespun in a hitch 20 years ago.
Laci Peterson Unborn Child PROMPTS POLITICAL BATTLE
At the time, Lefty did say the quiet part out loud: “Abortion-rights groups nonetheless are alarmed that Congress might, for the first time, recognize a fetus as a potential victim independent of the expectant mother.
The narrative shifts when it conflicts with another far left bugaboo.
In this case, guns.
In other words, “if conservatives care so much about the unborn, why don’t they pass common sense gun control laws to prevent unborn babies from being killed when the mother is shot?”
Reminds me of a headline during the post 9/11 anti-terrorism kick. It collided with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. A headline announced a number of gay military intelligence servicemen had been discharged and made a point to mention that some of them spoke Arabic.