In Michigan, a 16-year-old boy is being charged with a crime for causing his teen girlfriend to abort her child with her consent.. The boy is being charged with “intentional conduct against a pregnant individual resulting in miscarriage or stillbirth.” You may be surprised to find that I think the boy should not be charged at all. At most he should be charged with practicing medicine without a license.
After all, what did this boy do that isn’t done every day in abortion. He and his girlfriend conspired to have him strike her abdomen every day for two weeks with a toy baseball bat. Again, this is with her consent. If she hadn’t been pregnant and they had done this for sexual gratification, there would be no charges. It is the fact that she was pregnant and caused an abortion. Yet this is the ridiculousness of the law: It is wrong to kill a child in the mother’s womb with her consent unless it is done by a licensed medical professional. Then the child is a fetus with no legal rights.
Even further heightening the ridiculousness of the charges and the law is that the mother won’t be charged. If she had beat her own belly, it seems, she would not have committed a crime either. These are the ridiculous legal and logical contortions that legalized abortion has brought us to. As a society we know, according to the promptings of the natural law written on our hearts, that attacking an unborn baby is wrong. The most natural instinct, even among the animals, is protection of the young. Yet, we evolved humans have come up with the convoluted idea that the unborn child is only human based on the mother’s consent, not objective reality; and that killing the child is acceptable under certain conditions, narrowly defined, such that it is a cherished right here and a criminal offense there.
Ever since Roe v. Wade, the law has become schizophrenic, and unless we recover a sense of accord with objective Truth and Justice, we can expect that the law will cease to be just and instead will become a relativistic tyrrany. It has certainly become so for that 16-year-old boy.
“Practicing medicine without a license” … exactly.
One common (if more sophisticated) piece of pro-abortion propaganda is that abortion was not illegal at common law. And that the U.S. laws Roe struck down, mostly passed in the 19th century (that detail is true), were not efforts to protect unborn life, but public-health measures pushed by physicians trying to give themselves a monopoly on “safe,” therapeutic abortions. Call them (anachronistically) The Vera Drake Competition Protection Statutes. (Now with any bill, there will always be rent-seekers and people pushing from different motivations. But the claim that the increasingly sophisticated scientific knowledge of unborn life in early modern medicine just played no role is a flat lie.)
But to bring this point back to this ridiculous arrest—how it all comes full circle. Only now, the abortion **license** is becoming a form of public monopoly for doctors. Even the mother—y’know, the person whose freedom the abortion license is supposed to protect—is not immune. If she kills or damages her baby by smoking crack (which means, in principle, potentially any drug, not excluding alcohol), some states have criminal penalties on the books.