It would be the understatement of the century to suggest that last week's Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, a decision that reversed their infamous creation of a previously unknown "right to abortion" in the Constitution 50 years earlier, has sparked a wave of emotional outbursts across the country's political landscape.
But while it's true that emotion often clouds our better judgment and can cause us to say things we don't really mean, Jesus Himself testified to the truth when rebuking the Pharisees that, "the mouth speaks what the heart is full of."
If that's the case, the past several days have been an eye-opening, revealing experience for anyone paying attention to many of our country's most notable voices.
Begin with the President of the United States. Joe Biden's hypocrisy and inconsistency on the right to abortion is well known. As Senator, Biden voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have voided the Roe decision and allowed the people to decide the legality and regulation of abortion in their individual states. In other words, he voted in favor of doing the exact thing the Supreme Court just did in their Dobbs decision.
While that definitely makes the president's faux-outrage a little over-the-top, the real jaw-dropper came in his scripted remarks last Friday evening. Lamenting how the decision will "have real and immediate consequences" for women across the country due to its extreme nature, the President scolded:
"So extreme that women and girls who are forced to bear their rapist's child — of the child of consequence. It's a — it just — it just stuns me. So extreme that doctors will be criminalized for fulfilling their duty to care. Imagine having — a young woman having to ch- — carry the child of incest — as a consequence of incest. No option."
Their rapist's what? A young woman having to carry the what of incest? There has existed a silly semantics game on the left, dutifully facilitated by a sympathetic media where the word "child" is desperately avoided when describing the being in the womb. This, of course, has been an intentional, calculated effort to dehumanize the baby human, relegating it to the moral significance of a tumor or "clump of cells."
No matter how scientifically and intellectually buffoonish the game has been, those have been the rules. Rules that Joe Biden just violated by recognizing the humanity of the unborn child. Once admitted, the moral dilemma is daunting: why can a mother choose to exterminate a child one second before delivery, but not one second after delivery? If this is a human child in the womb, how is she legally deprived of her basic human right to live?
This debilitating question for progressives is precisely why many observers think the left lost the abortion battle when it radicalized itself from "reluctant supporters of a tragic procedure" to "aborting children is the apex of female empowerment" radicals.
Meanwhile, political commentator Ana Navarro, who appears regularly as a co-host on ABC's "The View," said the proverbial "quiet part" out loud in a ranting interview on CNN following the Court's decision.
Her willingness to use her own family members who have Down syndrome, motor skill deficiencies, autism, and mental handicaps as justification as to why the right to abort children is so important, grossed out more than just a few people. It's one thing to believe that mentally, physically, and emotionally handicapped people are less human than you are – or at least less deserving of their human rights – but it is quite another to say so out loud.
And though her progressive bona fides will likely spare her from being dismissed as "The View's" fake-conservative voice, her credibility was so shredded that avowed atheist, and politically moderate CNN contributor S.E. Cupp couldn't help but chide Navarro's epic callousness:
Good heavens. This was Cupp's best attempt to affirm the individual dignity of all humanity? Is a person somehow on firmer moral grounds to declare, "I don't want a kid, so I would like to abort mine" than to declare, "I don't want a handicapped kid, so I would like to abort mine?" How is it any better? Either life is valuable and worthy of protection or it is not, regardless of whether a child is handicapped or healthy, privileged or impoverished, boy or girl.
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The shock of losing Roe has provoked many abortion-rights supporters to begin voicing the contents of their heart. Doing so has revealed that though the case for abortion rights just collapsed legally last week, it's been a pile of smoldering rubble morally and intellectually for a long, long time.
