Pro-abortion politics, which are at all times and by necessity the politics of simple barbarity, have in recent years become proactively spiteful as well. A recent example is southern Indiana’s district court, which recently struck down a pro-life law that state’s legislature had passed.
The judge in that case, Tanya Walton Pratt, found unconstitutional the law’s provision barring abortions sought due to genetic abnormalities. By itself this is unsurprising and, by the logic of abortion rights, understandable: if it’s legal to kill your baby for any old reason, it seems it should be legal to kill your baby for being mentally and physically disabled, as well.
But Pratt went further, finding another provision of the law unconstitutional: the section that mandated abortion facilities dispose of fetal remains by either cremation or burial. The honorable judge could apparently find no legal basis for “treating fetal remains in the same manner as human remains.” As she wrote: “Stated otherwise, if the law does not recognize a fetus as a person, there can be no legitimate state interest in requiring an entity to treat an aborted fetus the same as a deceased human.”
Those Cannot Be Anything But Human Remains
A deep-seated and fanatical strain of anti-scientific zealousness runs through the pro-abortion movement, to the extent that pro-abortion partisans are inclined not only to deny basic scientific facts but to make logical casserole out of the basic linguistic principles upon which those facts rest. In this case the good judge, in denying that an “aborted fetus” is not the same as a “deceased human,” has done both.
I feel almost embarrassed having to point this out to a grown woman, but nevertheless it seems necessary: aborted fetuses are deceased humans. There is literally nothing else they can be. They are not deceased grizzly bears, or deceased Orca whales, or deceased caterpillars. This is not merely basic science but basic existential epistemology: a thing is the thing that it is, and it cannot be something it is not.
It makes perfect sense, then, to dispose of the bodies of abortion victims in the same way we would dispose of any other human remains: respectfully and carefully, giving due reverence to the innate dignity inside every human being. We do not, after all, dispose of human bodies in a respectful fashion because they are “persons;” we do it, rather, because the human body, being a constituent feature of the human being, is worthy of that honor.
We Cannot Acknowledge the Truth
Within a legal system as hostile to unborn rights as is ours, pro-lifers have to eke out our victories where we can, and the proper disposal of abortion remains seems like a reasonable compromise. Such a measure does not even require pro-abortioners to concede anything about its legality—women would be perfectly free to undergo abortions for whatever reason they decide. Medical offices would merely be required to not dump the remains of abortion victims down the sink or in the garbage pail like old cigarette butts.
But abortion politics are uncompromising: even the appearance of humanity is too much for pro-choicers to stomach, as it clearly was for Pratt. So a perfectly defensible law was struck down on the grounds that the state of Indiana could not possibly have any interest in ensuring that the remains of its dead citizens are not flushed down the toilet like used tampons.
The pro-life movement has a long road ahead. We can take comfort in knowing that we are right and will surely, in the end, prevail. For now, it is worth marveling over just how resolute the pro-abortion movement is: in the United States, it is considered “unconstitutional” to mandate that human remains be disposed of like human remains. It could almost be considered funny, if it were not so starkly horrifying.
