Imagine a government that tells a man his neighbors have a 3-year-old they have decided they can’t support financially or emotionally — and then tells the man he must take a machete and kill the child for everybody’s good.
The word “barbaric” would not even begin to describe the government’s position. The mere attempt to conscript this would be, incontrovertibly and in the full horror of the word, evil.
Yet that’s essentially what the Biden administration will be proposing when it moves to scrap a Trump administration rule protecting the conscience rights of medical personnel . The Trump rule, which has been tied up in courts, would allow medical personnel to decline to take part in abortions (or other procedures that violate their faiths). On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that the department plans to implement the new regulations (the ones reversing the Trump administration’s conscience protections) later this month.
Under the new regulations, not even someone observing the most devout, traditionalist faith (a faith prohibition clearly established for nearly 2,000 years as seen in the writings of, among many others, St. Athenagoras in 177 A.D. ) would be allowed to decline even the lead role in performing an abortion. Biden would force a doctor, against the doctor’s deepest conscience, to become an executioner. The president’s proposed rule is an (im)moral monstrosity.
It does not even require someone to be “pro-life” to recognize this as a monstrosity. The objection has nothing to do with whether or not abortion is allowed by law. Most sentient humans who support keeping abortion legal to the very moment of birth should recognize the difference between allowing a woman to procure an abortion and forcing someone to perform one.
The refusal to acknowledge the distinction here is perhaps the most extreme example imaginable of an ideological contagion rampant on the uber-“progressive” Left today: the inability, indeed refusal, to distinguish between that which is allowed and that which is mandatory. On issues of as little ultimate importance as coronavirus masking to ones involving the free-expression rights of artists to choose which messages they wish to convey, the Left acts as if almost anything that is allowed is therefore mandatory and that whatever is not mandatory is therefore prohibited.
As my colleague Tim Carney wrote in January : “The totalitarian mind doesn’t allow for anything to be optional. If it’s good, it should be mandated. If it’s bad, it should be banned. Individual choice plays no role in this worldview.”
When it comes to issues directly involving the taking of a life — and yes, a preborn child is indisputably a life, whether or not one believes it is “ensouled” or otherwise meriting protection — the insistence that allowance must become compulsion is particularly repulsive. Even if a “pro-choice” person does not consider abortion to be murder, all reason and decency should lead that person to respect the belief, rooted deeply in history, that it is. It is indisputable that for a doctor who holds that belief, the surgeon’s scalpel used in the womb is the precise equivalent of a machete used on the neck of a 3-year-old child. And for many obstetricians who have devoted their entire professional lives to bringing children safely into the light of day, the act of conscripting them to destroy those children would be an unimaginable hellishness.
Only one outcome to this topic is humanely and morally acceptable: The Trump-era rule must be preserved, and the Biden proposal must be aborted .
Authored by Quin Hillyer via Washington Examiner
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