Killing our own babies isn’t enough. We have to make sure that everybody else in the world has access to dead babies as well. Because that’s what it’s about: global fairness and domestic unity. I certainly feel less divided now, don’t you?

I guess now that he’s got the president’s salary and perks, this issue isn’t above his pay grade any more. Whew. Somebody tell Scarecrow the real way to get a brain.

Hey, how about less net spending, Mr. President? Maybe we could stop funding domestic abortions at a slightly higher than 1:1 ratio.

One of my favorite atheist/agnostics points out that Obama chose poorly in using abortion to make the argument that those who have religion need to recognize that “because God says so” is not a sound basis for public policy.

Right on, he did, but it’s not surprising that he felt safe in doing so. The anti-abortion position is in no way limited to Christians, but any Christian who bases the anti-abortion argument on God is simply begging for marginalization. The argument must be predicated on the continual-line humanity of a person from conception to death in a nursing home for it to have legs in the battle against the pro-abortion position. The obvious relationship is that it is because humans are human no matter in what format or age that Christians are so well convinced that God views abortion as baby killing. The God part should be derivative, not foundational.

It seems by observation that another consequence of the self-marginalization that goes along with predicating the argument on the wrong keystone is that atheist/agnostics are hesitant to express outright pro-life positions because they find it difficult to formulate justification outside religion (and, as I was reminded after writing the post, because they fear being 1) lumped in with extremists; 2) lumped in with the religious who justify their positions on religion alone). Another of my favorite atheist/agnostics is not willing to see abortion banned but does admit she couldn’t do it herself and piles on a healthy dose of rage for those stupid enough to get themselves into positions where they think they have to.

Each of those times, even if the idea I might be pregnant only lasted for five minutes, I contemplated the possibility that there was a real live tiny human being inside my body, and I knew beyond any doubt that if it really were there, I could not kill it.

She goes right up to the idea that a human baby is a human baby from the very beginning but then backs off in the post to the point that every woman must decide for herself. I am in no way picking on Rachel here; I really liked that post as I like most of what she has to say. I’m just pointing to an example of a person who believes without religious foundation that a conceived fetus is a human baby and yet who will not go on to apply that as an objective standard. I think there’s a lot of that going around, and I think the marginalization of the pro-life as a religious position hastens others stopping short of applying that objective standard.

So Obama believes positions with religious origin or relationship must be shaped into cogent arguments not based on God or they have no place in public policy. As a Christian, guess what? I completely agree with that standard. Go tell it to the people who think “love your neighbor as yourself” and “turn the other cheek” are recipes for government instead of a standard of personal conduct–or rather, those Christians and non-Christians alike who use those passages as clubs against Christians who don’t believe that war is the greatest evil.

Dear Columnists, Especially on the Right:

It is not “a woman’s right to choose.” It is more properly called “a woman’s right to choose abortion.” Without abortion she still has a choice: Keep her child or give the child up for adoption, both perfectly viable if heart-rending alternatives.

I read the phrase, which is, after all, only what everybody calls it nowadays–the common cant on abortion–in a Pat Buchanan column about something else entirely and it made me realize the more we accept the phraseology of the opposition, the more we legitimize their semantic sleight-of-hand. Now you see the abortion; now you don’t, because it’s become a “right to choose.” No, it is the right to choose the abortion itself, nothing more or less.

Justice Scalia tells audience at University of Portland, a Catholic school, that when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, it is the Supreme Court’s duty to follow long-standing tradition rather than challenge it. His choice of quotations was illuminating:

Scalia used the same quotation to open and close: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’ ”

He pointed to what some consider its original source, a George Bernard Shaw play called “Back to Methuselah.”

But the quotation is often misinterpreted, he said. In the play, a serpent says it to a woman named Eve.

But after thirty-plus years, the same principle will be used to bring pressure against any future Court considering the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Let’s hope the presiding justices have longer constitutional memories than the abortion activists.

Bonus Portland: Abortion clinic as “urban renewal.” Because they’re mostly about “education.” Are we to believe that in a crowded city where the suburbs are being squashed by an “urban growth boundary,” Planned Parenthood was actually the highest bidder for the city’s vacant lot? Maybe somebody should ask the City Council that. Wow, if only we had an organization who would ask questions and find things out for the public, how great would that be? Maybe The Oregonian should try to find an organization like that and let us know how it goes.

In various messages based on what you think is the mindset of the woman involved:

One card expresses sympathy, offering the gentle reminder that, “As you grieve, remember that you are loved.” Another provides encouragement for someone who “did the right thing.” Yet another strikes a religious tone with the thought that “God will never leave you or forsake you.”

That last one’s true. That middle one’s an abomination. That first one’s rather a conundrum: if she’s grieving so much right at the time, maybe she should have waited a little and tried to come to terms with going another way. Maybe Card Sender should have helped her to a direction that didn’t involve so much grief. For people who would send a card like that, I hope their conscience is clear as to having done all they possibly could to support and encourage the would-have-been mother, to help her find peace, before the heinous act was committed.

Allah brings the blunt.

Sister Toldjah brings the blunter, with a good rundown of some home truths about abortion.

To the Portland woman who drives around with an “Abortion Is Mean” bumper sticker:

Go you! With one fell phrase, you have, however weakly, absolved yourself of any supposed partiality towards abortion and completely trivialized the scope of an unnatural act of cruelty. You pair that up with that other sticker that says “Mean People Suck,” and you’ve got yourself a statement.

Horrifying.

I know something about the state of mind a woman can enter when she discovers she is unwillingly pregnant. But I will never understand the depravity necessary to take this action:

Police were called to the Hialeah clinic on July 20 after a report that a person–identified by Overton as clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez–took the infant and placed it in the biohazard bag.

It is infuriating that a law called Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is needed in this country. After the birth of a child, no matter how many weeks along, its subsequent entombment in a plastic bag or any other form of action that leads to its death should be prosecuted under applicable homicide laws. And the killers jailed for life.

Via Rightwingsparkle.

One of those weird coincidences that sometimes happens. I don’t watch The View. But this morning when I turned on the TV, it happened to be tuned to the show, and a young blonde woman was telling about seeing a stroller, two children in it, out on the sidewalk in front of an NYC establishment, no adult responsible for it in sight. She said she stopped and stood guard by the stroller for approximately seven minutes before the woman appeared whose responsibility the stroller was. When the woman finally came out, it transpired that it was the nanny, not the mother, who had left these children parked alone in front of the place while she went in and got her breakfast. Blonde Woman gave her a dressing-down and was ruminating over whether or not to try to get word to the parents of these children.

Good for her. I would be inclined to do the same. Nobody has any business leaving small children unattended in a public place for any length of time.

Later in the day, Hot Air shows me this. Thank you, Allahpundit! Blonde Guardian of Abandoned Stroller is Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and I applaud her courageous stand on this issue. Note especially how circumcise Mel Gibson in public” Joy Behar sits there looking like she’s smelling curdled milk as Elisabeth unfolds the radical idea that life begins at conception.

What about Barbara Walters’s assertion that “your life may be totally ruined” if you become pregnant by a rape? Why must it be ruined? Can’t it be grotesquely upset for a while, until you decide whether to keep your child or give him/her up for adoption? And if you’re talking grotesquely upset, wouldn’t the rape alone accomplish that, pregnant or not? Once again feminism is self-defeating: Why encourage strong coping skills, good decision making, responsibility, and firmness of mind in a woman when you can just flush the embryo down the memory hole and hope she gets over it?

…but only if you eat it.

That is the gist of the argument for embryonic stem cell research, as it has always been the argument for abortion on demand. But the inescapable fact is that (to borrow a phrase from friends) a developing embryo is the same biological entity now that it will be after forty weeks of gestation.

These microscopic clusters of cells aren’t life as most people think of it. They have the potential to become human only if they are successfully implanted in a woman’s uterus.

Your apple is food whether you choose to eat it or not. If it sits on the counter and eventually rots, that will be due to your neglect, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t nourishing food while it was healthy. Human beings develop from embryos. Whether they are implanted or not does not change their fundamental human nature. Like the apple does not stop being food until it’s spoiling, the human embryo does not stop being human life until it’s dead.