A friend of mine once told me about a troubling conversation with a coworker. The coworker agreed with the Republican Party about taxes, government spending, all the usual fiscal conservative issues. Nevertheless he said he could never vote for the GOP because he claimed Republicans were “obsessed” with abortion. He said he didn’t understand why this one issue was so important to the GOP and as long as it was the pro-life party, he couldn’t support them.
Even though this man was opposed to almost every position of the Democratic Party, abortion kept him squarely on the Left. He never got the irony that despite agreeing with the GOP about nearly everything he wouldn’t vote Republican because of their supposed obsession with abortion.
Leftists are irony-proof.
The whole thing bemused my friend. She couldn’t understand why one issue had such importance to this man. I said that I believed the man had had at least one child of his aborted. She said that was right; she knew it for a fact. And there’s the rub. That is what this is all about. This man has to vote for Democrats because the Democrats tell him that he didn’t have his own child killed. Democrats tell him a blob of cells was removed from his sex partner’s body. No harm, no foul. If the pro-lifers are right about abortion how can this man—and millions more like him—live with what they have done?
When I was much younger, I tried to justify the fiscally conservative-socially liberal position. Ironically, talking with women who had had abortions convinced me I was wrong. The more these women tried to justify what they had done, the more plainly I could see the pain and the great moral horror of abortion.
I once knew a woman who had had an abortion decades before I knew her. She still waxes on about her reasons; endlessly, if you give her the chance. Her family had “neurological defects”; her sons were labeled hyperactive, her nephew autistic. Actually one of her sons was gifted and bored to death in public schools. Still the label put on her son became a license to believe her children were defective. So she aborted a child she was sure would have more defects. I never asked her if she wished she had aborted her first two “defective” children.
The decision this woman made to abort her child is such a raw nerve she tried to convince her daughter-in-law to never have children. She wrote her daughter-in-law a laundry list of genetic defects that run in the family. She was so haunted about her own decision she was driven to make her daughter-in-law just as haunted. This woman was obviously in pain, desperately in need of having her decision validated.
That is the abortion issue in a nutshell. This is why every year a million heartbeats are snuffed out legally. This is why the mere fact that some people are opposed to abortion creates hysteria in abortion supporters. Franklin Roosevelt’s enduring scheme for the Democratic Party to buy votes and create a dependent class that would forever need Democrats in office shoveling out the entitlements was mild in comparison to the nine old men on the Supreme Court in 1973 who bought a nation’s soul.
In moments of weakness, foolishness, or wretched selfishness, people chose what seemed the easy way out. In the wake of such bad decisions, they must spend their lives looking for absolution. Democrats tell these people they did nothing wrong and they grasp at that absolution like medieval sinners buying indulgences.
If abortion is ever again made illegal, millions of people will have to come to terms with what they have done. They will need to stop denying they have sinned, or trying to foist their sins on others. They must look at a vision of their own lost child and ask forgiveness.
It is much easier to just dismiss the GOP’s “obsession.” Much easier to try and force acquiescence to their view. Much better never to have grandchildren than to feel the pain of having taken your own child’s life. Keeping abortion legal means never having to face the horror of what they have done. Those who have committed that sin will do whatever it takes to keep their absolution.