Safe, Legal, and Rare

A reader sees through the pure crap sophistry of that unholy trinity:

I was pro-abortion till I became pregnant–it’s very difficult to claim babies aren’t human when you have grown one from scratch. But even when I was pro-abortion, “safe, legal, and rare” made no sense to me. If there’s nothing to it, who cares if it’s rare or common? Likewise the new excuse that it’s a “wrenching decision.” A few years ago I had a heel spur removed–there was nothing wrenching about the decision at all. I was glad to be rid of the thing. So if abortion is just minor surgery, what’s so wrenching about it, other than the cost?

I could not put weight on my foot for 6 weeks after I had the operation. Terribly inconvenient. My son was a great help. Maybe pro-life organizations should put out ads that say “Don’t kill your baby–you may need his help someday.”

A while back I wondered if you hear from anybody else who dislikes the ugliness of modern society. What say you?

In any age, there’s much to hate and much to love. As a reader remarked, what we now call the good old days were referred to then as “these trying times”. I was watching Lost the other day and there was an interview with one of the creators talking about how great it would be to go back to the 70s. The thing is: I lived through the 70s and people at the time were stressed out about much the same things they stress out about now: war, economy, family breakdown, etc.

Re: Safe, Legal, and Rare. Exactamundo. The “rare” bit is a sop to assuage the guilty conscience. As C.S. Lewis said, “A long face is not a moral disinfectant.” If you know something is evil, saying you feel bad while you are doing it only increases your guilt because you *know* what you are doing is evil. If you say you wish it was rare and then add that it’s also a good thing (as, for instance, when Marc Thiessen argues for “rare” torture (Standard lie: “Hey! We only did it three times!”) and then tells us that it’s actually *good* since it conferred quasi-sacramental absolution in its grateful victims–that’s an even deeper descent into evil. As Isaiah says: “Woe to him who calls good evil and evil good.” Proponents of both abortion *and* torture tend to use the “safe, legal, and rare” arguments to rationalize their support of grave intrinsic evil.