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Let's say the pro-lifers got what they say they want. Not just the overturn of Roe or even an outright ban on abortion nationwide. Let's say that an overwhelming majority of Americans became convinced that abortion was murder. I think it's pretty obvious that if we came to that conclusion we couldn't just ban abortion and move on. We'd have to grapple with the "fact" that we'd been committing infanticide on a mass scale for decades, that we'd created entire systems to murder children as efficiently and easily as possible, that we had the blood of millions on our hands. You don't just move on from that.
The first question is what you do with the murderers. As far as I can tell, the going assumption is that we wouldn't prosecute the people currently performing abortions since it was legal at the time. But that's nonsense. What the Nazis did was perfectly legal when they did it, but we still prosecuted the leaders. I can easily imagine we might decide to overlook the actions of most of the grunts involved in abortion (we did something similar with the Nazis), but at the very least the leaders of Planned Parenthood would need to be tried for their crimes against humanity. Maybe every doctor and nurse at every clinic in the country would be put on trial.
In this scenario, remember, it's not just that abortion has been banned, but that as a society we've come to an overwhelming majority consensus that abortion is murder. The argument that people involved in the abortion industry didn't know that zygotes, embryos, and fetuses were just as human as infants wouldn't be a defense, it would only heighten the enormity of their crimes, they would have managed to dehumanize their victims to an inconceivable degree, a dehumanization so successful that they didn't feel even a twinge of conscience.
So far I've only been discussing the medical professionals involved in abortion, but what about the mothers? What about the people who had coldly killed their children as though they were nothing more than a "clump of cells." The pro-lifers tend to argue that people who seek abortions are victims as well, and perhaps in our collective wake-up we've agreed to that narrative, but I can't imagine we'd do nothing about them. These are people who have killed their own children. At the very least, at an absolute minimum they certainly can't be allowed to have any children in their custody. Any children they do have must, for their own safety, be placed in foster care. If they get pregnant again, they certainly cannot be permitted to raise their babies.
On a cultural level, terrorist attacks against abortion clinics would be framed as what, in that alternate reality, they truly are: heroic actions taken to safe the lives of the innocent. The radical fringe of the pro-life movement would actually be the resistance, as heroic and valorous as the French who took up arms against the Nazis during the occupation of France.
The further I go down this road, the more absurd it becomes. If pro-lifers were really correct about what they claim to believe, the recognition of that reality wouldn't be as simple as banning abortion. It would require the transformation of our society.
The first question is what you do with the murderers. As far as I can tell, the going assumption is that we wouldn't prosecute the people currently performing abortions since it was legal at the time. But that's nonsense. What the Nazis did was perfectly legal when they did it, but we still prosecuted the leaders. I can easily imagine we might decide to overlook the actions of most of the grunts involved in abortion (we did something similar with the Nazis), but at the very least the leaders of Planned Parenthood would need to be tried for their crimes against humanity. Maybe every doctor and nurse at every clinic in the country would be put on trial.
In this scenario, remember, it's not just that abortion has been banned, but that as a society we've come to an overwhelming majority consensus that abortion is murder. The argument that people involved in the abortion industry didn't know that zygotes, embryos, and fetuses were just as human as infants wouldn't be a defense, it would only heighten the enormity of their crimes, they would have managed to dehumanize their victims to an inconceivable degree, a dehumanization so successful that they didn't feel even a twinge of conscience.
So far I've only been discussing the medical professionals involved in abortion, but what about the mothers? What about the people who had coldly killed their children as though they were nothing more than a "clump of cells." The pro-lifers tend to argue that people who seek abortions are victims as well, and perhaps in our collective wake-up we've agreed to that narrative, but I can't imagine we'd do nothing about them. These are people who have killed their own children. At the very least, at an absolute minimum they certainly can't be allowed to have any children in their custody. Any children they do have must, for their own safety, be placed in foster care. If they get pregnant again, they certainly cannot be permitted to raise their babies.
On a cultural level, terrorist attacks against abortion clinics would be framed as what, in that alternate reality, they truly are: heroic actions taken to safe the lives of the innocent. The radical fringe of the pro-life movement would actually be the resistance, as heroic and valorous as the French who took up arms against the Nazis during the occupation of France.
The further I go down this road, the more absurd it becomes. If pro-lifers were really correct about what they claim to believe, the recognition of that reality wouldn't be as simple as banning abortion. It would require the transformation of our society.
