Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 11, 1994 TAG: 9409090006
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FREDRICK M. WILLIAMS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Since abortion exploded on the national scene in 1973, pro-choice Americans have repeatedly told those who are pro-life that they favor choice, not abortion. They wanted, they said, simply to affirm the dignity and value of choice. Choice was sovereign, and the act of choosing was somehow supposed to legitimize what was chosen.
When pro-lifers asked whether the content of the choice was relevant, we were told that any relevance was a private matter. No one had the right to impose morality by judging the choices of others.
When we said that this philosophical wasteland on the border between secular existentialism and nihilism might prove corrosive of morality in other areas, we were dismissed as alarmists and cranks.
For 20 years, this bare ethic of choice in a framework of moral subjectivism has been the standard argument for legal abortion. But choice as a moral imperative cannot provide a standard by which to distinguish good choices from bad.
There's something pathetic about the attempts being made, at this late date, to explain why the murder of abortionists is wrong. If choice is God and moral subjectivism is the creed, then there's no reason why one man's fetus can't be another man's abortionist.
Perhaps Paul Hill doesn't think that abortionists are fully human, or that their lives are meaningful (Aug. 4 editorial, ``Anti-Abortion Absolutism''). Perhaps he believes that their right to life is outweighed by the right to life of pre-born children. We may disagree, but do we have the right to impose our moral perspective on Hill? Well, yes we do, but the pro-choice movement is incapable of saying why.
This incapacity explains much of the hysteria among pro-choicers. Their principle of choice has been turned against them, and they're powerless to explain why it shouldn't be. They're outraged. How dare Hill destroy human lives and remain so relaxed and nonchalant about it!
Well, how indeed! Pro-choicers would do well to spend some time reflecting on the implications of that insight.
Now that some misguided individuals have taken to killing abortionists, perhaps it's an opportune time once again to extend to the pro-choice community an invitation to join pro-lifers in rejecting the use of (in the words of George Weigel and William Kristol) ``privately sanctioned lethal force'' against human beings who are considered inconvenient or unwanted.
Fredrick M. Williams of Roanoke is an engineer at an industrial automation plant in Salem.
by CNB