Rape? Incest? The health of the mother?

Protestant pro-lifers agree with Catholics that from conception the fetus is the moral equivalent of a human baby, safely born; and all are unanimous that infanticide is unforgivable and intolerable.

But then the Protestants muck up their own position, punching holes in the flat prohibition of abortion favored by the Catholics with exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother.

Coupled with the claim universal among the pro-lifers that the fetus is at every stage the moral equivalent of an infant, the egregious implications of those exceptions are staggering.

Are conservative Protestants really ready for infanticide in such cases?

If not, then in all consistency, why not?

The Catholics, while openly dissenting, are careful not to mention these implications that, as a rule, the Protestants do not anyway own up to.

And the pro-abortionists don’t trumpet them since the last thing they want to do is remind the public it thinks ill of infanticide.

On the other hand, no such consideration prevents them damning Republicans publicly when they turn out adulterous or gay, though they certainly don’t mean to encourage the public to condemn adultery or homosexuality.

So maybe they’re just too stupid to even notice.

As for those of us who are fine with abortion at will in the early weeks of pregnancy but insist on protection of the fetus as soon as it is recognizably a human child, however tiny, allowing abortion then and thereafter only for euthanasia of the unborn child for the same sorts of reasons as would justify it for a newborn, we are pretty much unrepresented in the public battle.

To the extent that the law may satisfy our views that is because ours is so close to the position imposed by the Supremes all the way back with Roe.

It is certainly not because there is an organized political wolf-pack fighting viciously to uphold them.

Booman on Obama on Plan B

And as to the matter of Plan B, it suits us moderately pro-abortion types to a T, though it is no surprise it offends pro-lifers universally since, as I understand it, the drug prevents implantation after conception rather than preventing conception.

Of course, the strain of opposition to which Obama is deferring is of a different sort.

He is deferring and appears to share not pro-life qualms about murdering a bare zygote but widespread parental reluctance to accept or even appear to accept that children so young may be so precociously sexually active as to make over-the-counter availability of the thing to twelve year olds without parental notification, let alone control, an issue.

In the guise of defending the health of the very young he is defending the preferences, illusions, and prerogatives of parents.

Yet liberals who criticize his actions in this matter seem to have not a word to say about that, not wishing to force Americans, mired in their guilty hypocrisy, to witness a clash between their (our) frankly heathen views on childhood sex and the sincere and professional puritanism of the American Christian clergy who so dominate American conservatism.

Just as they have no wish to make American churchgoers own up to their hypocrisy about so much else to do with sex, from soft porn and contraception to the active sexuality of unmarried young adults to their insistence on easy divorce and support for the legal possibility of abortion in at least some cases.

Hence the repugnant liberal handling of last summer’s clashes over contraception coverage for church employees.

It was a straight up fight between the relentless clericalism of the Republican right and the post-Christian sexual ethics of liberal America.

But most of post-Christian, liberal America refuses to see itself as such, made up as it is in great part of those churchgoers mired in hypocrisy I previously mentioned.

And so the left unanimously disguised this head-on collision with Christianity as an assault on the rights, independence, and autonomy of women by the angry, white, old, and usually impotent males who dominate not only the clergy but the Republican Party.

However infuriating that dishonest orgy of racism and feminist man-hating was to this elderly white male, the instinctive mendacity of the left on this occasion worked out, I suspect, better than candor would have done.

And that was far from the first time.

PS.

In a way, it’s a bit of a surprise that it works so well for the left to dress up an anticlericalist fight as a clash between forces of white patriarchy on the one side and multi-hued feminism on the other.

You might think someone would demand a bit more clarity what the folks opposed to patriarchy are actually for.

But maybe this, too, is just another of those things to do with sex that America doesn’t want to know about itself.

All the same, your really true-blue feminist, after all, is frankly and quite self-consciously pro-matriarchy.

She knowingly, though perhaps not at all openly, favors an organization of society in which women don’t marry but take lovers as they will, bearing such children as they wish alone and raising them on their own, accepting formal or informal child support from men at their option – men who may pay bills and help out but have no authority.

And that is the social organization you get when young people hook up but don’t marry.

It is what you get when young women follow the advice of Murphy Brown and intentionally have and raise children with no man in the house.

It is the same as the social organization of the most desperate regions of America’s black ghettos.

Expect feminist support for some sort of universal access to day care and pre-school to grow.

Just another way to get men to help pay for raising and caring for those kids, while denying them authority and any but a paid or subordinate role.

Just another way to get men, and America, to enable matriarchy.

Just like abortion laws that given women, but not men, a “choice.”