[Joe Doyle copied us on an email he sent to a friend in response to Tom Friedman’s column, Why I Am Pro-Life in the New York Times. It was not written for publication, but Joe graciously agreed to allow to publish it here. —Brother André Marie]
I am not sure Tom Friedman’s New York Times column merits a serious response given the manifest ignorance and inaccuracy of the piece. Did you read where he said no one should be killed by a concealed automatic weapon? Automatic weapons are already illegal in the U.S. There is not a single state in the Union where you can carry machine guns or automatic rifles, nor is it physically possible to conceal an M-16. The term “concealed weapon” usually refers to pistols, which are either single shot or semi-automatic.
If Friedman — who is a poster child for the Olympian arrogance, smug parochialism, and unjustified intellectual pretensions of America’s left-wing media elite — is completely clueless about guns, he is even shakier about high school biology. He referred to a “fertilized egg”, by which I’m presume he means an embryo. According to National Review, he originally wrote “a fertilized egg in a woman’s ovary”, which of course, doesn’t exist in biology.
Snobs, bigots, and half-educated secularists like Friedman are always prattling on, as Friedman does in his column, about opposition to abortion being rooted in “religion and philosophy”. Unlike the pro-abortion prejudice, the pro-life position does comport with the perennial wisdom of western civilization — the Hippocratic Oath, Aristotelian philosophy, the Hebrew Bible, the Didache, Thomistic theology, English common law, Roman civil law, etc.
It is biology and embryology however, not religion and philosophy, that tells us when life begins. It is reason, natural law, and the common good, not sectarian dogma, which informs that it is wrong to kill the innocent. It is the supporters of abortion, like Friedman, who reject science and reason, and embrace irrationality and superstition. Have you heard their superstitions? “Life begins at viability”. “Life begins at birth.” “It is only a child if the mother wants it.” The barbarians in the so-called Dark Ages were lucid compared to the modern advocates of abortion.
Nothing Friedman wrote was original. He even plagiarized Barney Frank’s old calumny that pro-lifers were only concerned about life from conception to birth. This is one of the lies which moral imbeciles like Friedman regularly employ to unjustly abuse civilized people who oppose child murder.
The largest non-governmental provider of health care in the world is a pro-life institution called the Catholic Church. The largest non-governmental provider of charity and social services in the world is a pro-life institution called the Catholic Church. The largest non-governmental provider of education in the world is a pro-life institution called the Catholic Church.
While supporters of legal abortion argue for physician assisted suicide and euthanasia, pro-lifers support the compassionate alternative of hospice and palliative care. While supporters of legal abortion hustle women to the butchers in the abortion clinics, pro-lifers offer support for continuing the pregnancy and the compassionate alternative of adoption.The largest non-governmental provider of services to pregnant women in the U.S. is the pro-life movement.
Friedman recycles the tired, threadbare,and absurd argument that only those those who embrace liberal public policy prescriptions regarding quality of life issues can be described as truly pro-life. The illogical premise seems to be that only socialists, or at least, welfare state proponents, can consistently oppose abortion.
Pro-life citizens have nothing to apologize for. Since 1973, fifty-four million innocent children have been cruelly slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs through surgical and medical abortions alone. God knows how many tens or even hundreds of millions have been killed through chemical abortions and abortifacient contraceptives. The methods of killing include saline scalding, vacuum suctioning, and surgical dismemberment. In ultra-sound images of abortion, the unborn child can be seen instinctively moving away from the surgical forceps trying to sever its spine. One in three American pregnancies now end in abortion.
Contrary to Friedman’s fatuous assertions, pro-lifers are not narrow or extreme. They are sane, rational, humane, charitable, morally responsible human beings who oppose the injustice of mass murder on a genocidal scale. History will view them as those who resisted Nazism and Communism.
