Shorter Peter Singer: Saving very premature babies only makes future retards. Let them die!
Recently in Life Issues Category
Jill Stanek is a tenacious blogger. She was a nurse at Christ hospital in the Chicago area who witnessed babies who survived attempted abortions being left to die. She has nobly fought for the rights of unborn child and for the rights of families since. Her blogging (both at her own blog and at the Illinois Review blog) is often an excellent source of news and commentary about the pro-life movement in Illinois and the shameful shananigans of our state legislature. For instance, here, she shows that if we really wanted to mandate vaccines that would save lives, we would go after the flu, not cervical cancer.
But sometimes, she can be a little crazy. And by a little crazy, I mean insane.
You know the scene at the end of Godfather II, where Kay tells Michael that she aborted their baby and he slaps her? It's pretty much the most depressing scene in movie history. First, there's Kay. Terrified of her husband the murderer, she kills her unborn child. Then we have Michael. This scene marks the bottom of his downward spiral. Faced with the reality that even his own wife, the woman he professes to live, is abhorred by him, he lashes out at her.
Jill Stanek looks at this scene and... well, this is what she sees:
That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby. Compare that to the modern day cowardly male response, "It's your choice. Whatever you decide, I'll support you." Or worse, his threat to abandon her if she does not abort.
It was this fierce devotion to family that strangely endeared us to the Corleone men despite their otherwise heinous behavior.
We love him because he smacks his wife. You see, it shows how much he loves his family.
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The Godfather trilogy is the story of the train wreck that is Michael Corleone's life. When we first meet him, he's a war hero, a true Italian-American success story, complete with the WASPy girlfriend. The world is his oyster. As he gets mixed up in the family business. things start falling apart. We start to see it in part 1, where he grows cold dealing with Kay, even refusing to tell her he loves her on the phone. ("Hey Michael! Why don't you tell that nice girl that you love her?") When he flees to Sicily, he marries another woman, who becomes the first casualty of his involvement in the family business when an attempt to kill Michael takes her out instead. He returns to America, reconnects with Kay and marries her. So is he finding redemption? Well, the movie ends with him going on a murder spree (one victim being his sister's husband), lying to Kay about it and in the final scene, we see the actual and metaphorical door being closed on Kay's face, shutting her out of that part of his life.
Part 2 starts with his son's First Communion. The party is a ridiculous event complete with brass band and politicians who don't know his son's name. The event is ostensibly about young Anthony, but it's really about Michael's power and connections and ends with an attempt on Michael's life. The rest of the film documents Michael's descent, culminating in Kay aborting their child and leaving him and then the murder of Fredo.
In part 3, we see Michael is repentant, sort of. He wants out of the crime business, but he still lusts for power, attempting a takeover of the Vatican Bank. Mildly repentant though he may be, and despite his best attempts to reconcile with his estranged family members, the wrecking ball keeps swinging, and by the end of the movie, it claims his daughter - the one person left in the world who still loves him. He dies alone with his corpse being sniffed by the dog.
Back to the actual scene where Kay confesses the abortion. Her whole point is that she had the abortion because he's a villain. The war hero she fell in love with and married and who promised to legitimize the family has become a man whose primary business is violence. So how does he respond? Pow! He turns his ruthlessness towards her.
Contrast this: in part 1, Sonny, who is pretty much a stupid sociopath, comes to the aid his sister when he finds out her husband is beating her. Michael, however, is the wife beater. Along with the murder of Fredo, this scene marks the point where he loses all of our sympathy, as we see that the one virtue he professes, loyalty to family, is not always binding.
In fact, there simply is no virtue in the scene. If we were to look for any pro-life lessons to be drawn, the best we could do would be to say that it points to abortion as a crisis of fatherhoood. Kay is horrified by Michael; she thinks the child inside of her could be another Michael, and she can't stand it. If he loved her, if he treasured her and took care of her, above all by being an honorable man himself, the abortion would never have happened.
I understand what Jill is trying to say. Men should stand up for their children, they should be good men and take care of their families, but how she thinks the pro-life cause is served by using an example like this is beyond me. I'd say that she didn't think before using this example, but even after I called attention to her craziness in the comments of her post, she sticks to her guns. What else can one say? This kind of thing makes every pro-lifer look bad.
Living City - a magazine associated with the Catholic Focolare movement - has a brief, but inspiring message from a Chilean woman who gave birth to a little girl with Down's syndrome:
From one point of view we were frightened by the suffering and difficulties that awaited us. On the other hand a well of love had been opened up in us, as though that innocent being had opened a spring right in the heart of God. The reality that we experienced at that moment has been with us ever since.
Ramesh Ponnuru was on Tom Ashbrook's On Point radio show last week discussing his book The Party of Death, a book which I will be checking out from the library as soon as I can. The host enlisted two guests to gang up on him and Ponnuru performed marvelously.
The audio link can be found here. It's instructive to hear Ashbrook harp on the book's title for the whole hour, and when Ponnuru calls him on it, the host (with no sense of his own irony) compares the title to an incitement to genocide.
Towards the end of the show, the complete unseriousness of his opponents is revealed. First, bio"ethicist" George Annas, when asked for a perspective from bioethics, proceeds to talk about Roe v. Wade and opinion polls. Then, Neera Tanden, former Hillary Clinton staffer, professes bewilderment that Ponnuru opposes abortion but doesn't want millions of women thrown in prison.
Regardless, Ramesh holds his ground well while fighting off the triple team.
Another two-fer of good reads. Today's selection comes from NRO.
Stanley Kurtz, who deserves some kind of award for the work he does, shows how European sociologists are much more honest about gay marriage undermining traditional marriage than their American counterparts.
Eric Cohen debunks arguments for more federally funded stem-cell research.
Today, the Supreme Court pulled it's head out from down under (if there's one thing W has delivered on, etc. etc.) and declared that pro-life activists are not akin to the mafia. Deo Gratias! Congratulations to Joe Schiedler, the Pro-Life Action network and all others who came out victorious today!
It turns out the birth control path is killing women three times faster than the pill.
Citing federal death and injury reports, the AP also found that about a dozen women, most in their late teens and early 20s, died in 2004 from blood clots believed to be related to the birth-control patch, and dozens more survived strokes and other clot-related problems.
