On Abortion, Killing, Murder, Tearing Limbs, Throwing Out Heads, and Personal Responsibility

Rabbi Dov Fischer writes in Spectator,

There is a difference between “killing” and “murder.” A difference in law, a difference in language. The Ten Pronouncements (wrongly translated as the “Ten Commandments”), for example, bans murder, not killing (lo tirtzach — and not lo taharog). Thus, it is perfectly acceptable and sometimes even righteous pursuant to Biblical theology for soldiers at war to kill the enemy, for regular people to kill attackers. Indeed, that is why the same code of life permits and even commands capital punishment in certain discrete instances. On the other hand, murder always is forbidden.

...According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there have been 45 million abortions in America since 1970. That is quite a number to absorb. There were approximately 200,000 in 1970, and the number jumped to 763,000 in 1974. It kept rising to 1,429,000 in 1990, and it then started a downward spiral descending to “only” 638,000 in 2015. A simple graphic shows that abortions predominantly have impacted the population numbers of Black and Hispanic America. African-American women are three times as likely as Caucasians to undergo an abortion; Latinas twice as likely. Ironically, Republican conservatives who lead the fight against Roe v. Wade and abortion on demand, who march for life, by now would have been wiped out politically if they had won their battle. Given the propensity of Blacks and Hispanic Americans to vote Democrat Left, and the greater propensity of liberal Caucasian women than their married conservative counterparts to abort, the twenty million or so fetuses aborted between 1970 and 1990 would have become voters by now and very probably would have tilted elections Leftward in several states now and for decades to come. Ironically, it has been the pro-choice movement that has allowed Republican conservatives in America still to enjoy any choice at all come election time, saving the other 49 states from turning into California, which almost-literally has become a one-party state.

Apparently, these new Gosnell laws that New York, Virginia, and other such states are advancing often would entail injecting a potassium compound into a fetus’s heart to stop it from beating. A short time into the pregnancy the fetus head gets too big to extract out of the woman, so it first must be cleared of its “gray matter,” the brain contents. Then the head can be crushed to a more manageable size for extraction, perhaps pulled out by forceps, perhaps by vacuum suction. Suction likewise vacuums out the limbs, the different body parts, the crushed head. As with all suction devices, the vacuuming procedure obviously tears limbs from limbs.

...It well may be expected that the Left Mediacracy will ignore these statements, instead ferreting within their Left echo chamber to find the George Soros types in the Jewish community, including the ADL that has been taken over by former Obama White House personnel, to create the alternative reality that fosters and advances the Left narrative. But for Jews who actually practice Judaism, who abide by the kosher dietary rules and who observe the Jewish Sabbath as it is constituted, the approach is in sync with that of Christians and fundamentalist Protestants, devout Catholics, and even secular and atheist Americans who cannot countenance poisoning the heart of a fetus to stop its beating, sucking its brains out of its head, crushing its cranium, and vacuuming its arms, legs, and other body parts except in the most extreme of circumstances when the dilemma extends beyond inconvenience and goes to the heart of whether the baby’s exit will murder the mother in the process.

If a society is to be judged by how it protects its most vulnerable, the battlefront for morality and American values will be decided not by whether a wall to secure a porous border is moral but by how the revived abortion debate plays out.

Read more here.