A Life Worth Sacrificing

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Mary Elizabeth Williams has laid it out plain and simple. The staff writer for Salon and author of Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream, has stated in a recent article on Salon.com what intellectually honest people have been saying forever: the fetus is indeed a life. But at the moment that we might loudly applaud this great news from this supposedly popular columnist, we abruptly stop, for what she then says next snuffs out any hope that she and others have seen the light.

What is it she writes next?

That the fetus, which is “indeed a life,” is, in fact, “A life worth sacrificing.”

A life worth sacrificing? Evidently, if it gets in the way of “the boss.” Williams continues:

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

So, to hear the logic, the rights of the mother always trump the rights of the unborn because the mother is autonomous and the unborn child does not yet have autonomy. The mother’s interest always trump the interest of the “non-autonomous” child “inside of her.”

The dictionary describes “autonomous” as “self-governing, independent, able to choose, able to make decisions and act on them as a free and independent moral agent.” So the logic goes like this: if the four-month old girl is suddenly in the way because the mother’s circumstances have changed and the girl is now inconvenient, then she should be sacrificed.

Or consider this logical conclusion: if the sixteen-year old boy is in a terrible accident, now incapable of self-sufficiency and independent thinking, no longer autonomous in that he no longer has the capacity to self-decide, then he should be sacrificed. His life should be ended; particularly if it inconveniences his mother. After all, as Williams’ writes, the mother’s rights “automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity. . . . Always.”

Or consider this logical conclusion: should the seventy-one year old mother, who now has Alzheimer’s Disease and cannot make any independent or even moral decisions for herself, inconvenience her forty-eight year old daughter, then mom is toast. She should be sacrificed. Her life should be snuffed out because she is, I suppose, no longer the boss. That baton has passed to the daughter who finds caring for mom to be utterly inconvenient. And we wouldn’t want to inconvenience the poor 40-something woman, now would we?

Williams certainly would not. Consider her reflection on her own 40-something world:

And I can say anecdotally that I’m a mom who loved the lives she incubated from the moment she peed on those sticks, and is also now well over 40 and in an experimental drug trial. If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.

I am deeply thankful that she is a mom who “loved the lives she incubated from the moment she peed on those sticks.” I just hope that when she is no longer convenient for her kids to associate with she does not find herself the recipient of her own sick conviction, sacrificed by her offspring because she somehow got in their way. I guess if she had a glimmer of awareness within her as they suffocate her in the night with a pillow she will be applauding their actions even as she writhes for her last breath.

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