Abortion creep
Confronting the implications of your own homicidal philosophy
Blake Masters is an Arizona Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who has apparently for some odd reason decided to walk a third rail on abortion and basically be completely in favor of it. Facing an uphill battle against Democrat Mark Kelly, Masters this week “softened his tone and scrubbed his website's policy page of tough abortion restrictions,” NBC reported, after which he dropped this campaign spot on Thursday:
“Look, I support a ban on very late-term and partial birth abortion.” So Blake Masters is admitting that, apart from the exceedingly rare instances of “very late-term” abortions (which should most assuredly be outlawed), he’s pretty much okay with allowing abortion laws to continue as they have, with little change—he’s content to do nothing at all to stop literally 99% of all abortions. This is what passes for vanguard conservatism in this country now. That is a sad and pathetic testament in and of itself, at least if you’re actually conservative.
Yet there is something hard to square here—something doesn’t jag right, it makes you squirm and shift and wrinkle your upper lip in uncertain disgust. It isn’t until you’ve thought about it for a bit that you realize Blake Masters is using his kids as props in a campaign video where he basically says he’s okay with killing lots and lots of kids. You can’t avoid that. The man is happily playing Star Destroyer with his boys, pew-pew-ing with a toy Tie Fighter while the toddler knocks a glass of water off the table, while at the same time obliquely advocating policy that will ensure many more boys never pick up a Tie Fighter or knock over any glasses of water, ever. Because they’ll be dead.
Such is the fruit of abortion politics—a philosophy of wholesale killing where, as Peter Kreeft wrote, “nature, reason, and justice are … replaced by artifice, prejudice, and power,” though somehow never in a way where your own toddlers are the ones who are in any danger (“I've noticed,” Ronald Reagan once observed, “that everyone who is for abortion has already been born”). Look away from that if you want; avert your eyes if you simply cannot take it. Abortion has thrived for so long because so many people would rather look at something else.
But even if you’re not looking, you’re still feeling it; you can’t shake that feeling in your gut, that sour, rotted splashing that tells you something is deeply, deeply wrong here. Blake Masters claims that his own policies would simply “put us on par with other civilized nations,” and I’m afraid he’s right; this is indeed what passes for civilization these days, and it is not good.