'Do you support infanticide' is never a trick question
The answer should always be no, unless you're insane.
One of the weirdest things about modern pro-abortion politics is how thoroughly terrified it makes its practitioners in certain circumstances. I honestly, legitimately believe that many if not most pro-choice advocates are keenly aware of the ethically precarious foundation of pro-abortion ideology—the legalized summary killing of innocent human beings—and that in the context of political debates they are constantly, mortally afraid of getting tripped up by someone on that basis.
That’s the takeaway from a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing this week wherein South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman asked a series of pro-choice advocates whether or not they “support infanticide.” Now, as a practical matter the representative’s questions were a bit clunky; his inquiry might have been better framed as, “Do you believe infanticide is an acceptable extension of abortion rights as a means of eliminating a mother’s responsibility over her child?” But of course that’s pretty obviously what he meant so we can forgive him for that.
Well, maybe the witnesses won’t be able to forgive him
This is an incredible series of exchanges. You can see the sort of deer-in-headlights mentality overtaking these women: They are instinctually afraid that if they condemn the killing of fully born and living human beings, that will somehow undermine their position in favor of killing unborn ones. To their credit, they’re kind of right—if they make a profound moral distinction between a born human being and an unborn one, at some point they’re going to have to explain why, and they don’t want to do that, because they will lose.
On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to craft some kind of philosophically incoherent yet nice-sounding response to the question that at the very least opposed the killing of born infants: “I do not support infanticide in any way at all and I think that that’s irrelevant to the question at hand regarding abortion healthcare,” or whatever. There, easy, done. But they couldn’t even do that! Because abortion politics demand comprehensive fealty to “abortion” at every conceivable level, up to and including the possibility that you kill your child, or let it die, after it’s left the birth canal.
If your politics lead to you such self-evidently ghoulish ends, the healthy and responsible thing to do would be to examine why you’ve arrived there and whether or not you should change your position. Somehow I doubt that will be the case with the three star witnesses here, though one can always hope.
In the meantime, if nothing else, it can be mildly entertaining to witness this sort of agonized rationalization on the part of pro-choicers, and a laugh is not for nothing—humor, as Peter Ustinov noted, often serving as “a funny way of being serious.”