An old trope says that honesty is the best policy.  That’s true, unless you’re attempting to do something morally shady.  Thence comes the euphemism “a way of hiding brutal honesty with words.”  “Ethnic cleansing” comes to mind; it makes one think of applying stain cleaner to human remains, forgetting that those human remains were in fact once living.

These euphemisms deaden the moral nerves a bit; after a short time, one’s moral compass can’t feel anything at all.  Sometimes, though, pro-abortion liberals reveal their true intentions and feelings despite attempts to cover them up.

Cut to Sophie Lewis, a pro-abortion feminist who decries the family social order.  Lewis seems to have moral difficulty justifying killing the fetus even though she wants to defend killing it.  She admits that abortion is killing, albeit a “form” of killing that we need to be able to defend (logic seldom used elsewhere).  I may kill a housefly, or a farmer may kill a chicken; these are not “forms” of killing.  Dead is dead.

Later, Lewis describes pregnancy as “gestational work” and the pregnant mother as a “gestator” — words that take away from the beauty of bringing a child into the world.  Having children, to her, is akin to factory labor, something that would make her existence the result of a tedious, unfulfilling endeavor, if you follow her reasoning to its logical end.

Rather than run from admitting what abortion does, Lewis demurs:

What would it mean to acknowledge that a death is involved in an abortion? Above all, it would allow for a fairer fight against the proponents of forced gestating. When “pro-life” forces agitate against feticide on the basis that it is killing, pro-abortion feminists should be able to acknowledge, without shame, that yes, of course it is. When we withdraw from gestating, we stop the life of the product of our gestational labor. And it’s a good thing we do, too, for otherwise the world would sag under the weight of forced life. It is a hard pill to swallow for a misogynist society, sentimentally attached to its ideology of patriarchal motherhood, but the truth is that gestators should get to decide which bodies to give form to. This choosing is our prerogative. A desire not to be pregnant is sufficient reason in and of itself to terminate a gestatee.

This is Lewis saying that she and her intellectual kin want to kill the unborn, and they’re justified in doing so to prevent patriarchal males from ruling their bodies.  Notice the wordplay.  The unborn child is a “product of our gestational labor,” mothers are “gestators,” killing the unborn is “terminating the gestatee,” and saving the child is “forced life.”  Why can’t Lewis just say that she is advocating killing an unborn child?  It’s because the nature of what she wants is so obvious that she must cleanse her vocabulary.

I thought this honesty would be a rarity until recently coming across liberal Bill Maher’s comments on that same subject.  Maher wins conservative props for castigating leftist liberals who say opposition to abortion is based on hatred of women.  That is not true, he notes, correctly stating that that claim is just made up.  Those against abortion, he says, believe it’s murder, adding that “it kind of is” and that he’s okay with it.  He later adds that the Earth is overcrowded anyway, and we won’t miss those aborted.  Wow.  That makes a person’s worth dependent on other people’s need for him.  I can’t think of a more depressing philosophy than that.

Courtesy of Matt Walsh, a snippet from the Daily Wire features Alabama representative John Rogers criticizing a bill that would criminalize almost all abortions.  Rogers echoes the common “pro-choice” refrain that the decision to abort should be a woman’s.  Yet he goes farther, adding that some kids are unwanted.  “You bring them into the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair,” he says.  “So you kill them now, or you kill them later.”  But at least he doesn’t resort to calling these killings a “form of killing.”  He’s frank and honest about what he believes.

I appreciate Lewis’s and Maher’s honesty.  Coping with what abortion is about is rare.

One commenter on YouTube noted that it’s “funny how everyone sharing this argument has had the opportunity to live.”  That’s the truth about liberals in politics: they don’t want to, or expect to, cope with the results of their beliefs.  Had the reaper came for them under the guise of a “form of killing,” they would think differently about what their philosophy brings.

Jeffrey Stueber, a frequently published author, is a member of the Lutheran Science Institute, a Christian apologetics group based in Wisconsin.  His website is https://thesecularleftcritique.wordpress.com.

Image: Nogwater via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).