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Virginia Lawmaker Wants to Make Child Sacrifice Easier

Nothing screams “nasty woman” quite like Virginia lawmaker Kathy Tran’s cold-blooded and thankfully defeated bill that would have legalized de facto infanticide. When asked prior to the vote if her bill would allow the slaughter of a full-term baby during labor, she was forced to publicly admit that it would.

If it had passed, full-term healthy babies could have been slaughtered for any reason that a murderous doctor deemed a threat to a mother’s “mental health.” Just wondering, shouldn’t this be a hate crime? Wikipedia defines a hate crime as one in which a “perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership in a certain social group.” Doesn’t the premeditated, direct killing of humans based on their age fit that definition?

Tran’s morally transgressive and repugnant bill removed the requirement that abortion is permitted if “continuation of the pregnancy is likely to substantially and irremediably impair the mental… health of the woman.” She removed the words “substantially and irremediably.” This means that a mother could have her full-term child aborted if she says it would only insubstantially and remediably “impair” her “mental health.” And y’all know what that means. It means that Virginia would have followed Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont—where women can have their full-term babies killed for no reason—in legalizing de facto infanticide.

As I wrote several days ago, 24 other states permit the active, intentional killing of full-term babies for “mental health” reasons, which include “emotional, psychological, and familial” considerations. In other words, for any reason. What Tran’s removal of the words “substantially and irremediably” did was make it glaringly obvious that “mental health” is a deceitful rhetorical pretext to conceal that abortion of full-term, healthy humans is legal.

When asked about this barbaric law, Democratic governor and pediatric neurologist Dr. Ralph Northam employed some tricksy rhetoric to try to persuade listeners that de facto infanticide of full-term babies is justified if they are defective:

When we talk about third-trimester abortions…. it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So… if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.

First, who calls a full-term baby a “fetus”? Interestingly, in the next sentence, he inadvertently acknowledged the truth that the full-term “fetus” is actually an infant.

Second, would an infant that may or may not be resuscitated be a dead infantone whose breathing or heart has stopped? If so, this raises some questions. How did this fetus/infant in Northam’s sanitized hypothetical come to be dead? Was Northam alluding to the natural death of an infant born with a condition incompatible with life, or was he referring to an infant whose death was caused during labor by a Dr. Mengele-wannabe? If full-term babies can be killed because of severe deformities or terminal conditions one day prior to their birth day, why shouldn’t full-term babies with severe deformities or terminal conditions be killed post birth—also known euphemistically as “after-birth abortion.”

Tran and Northam seek to implement legislatively what philosopher Michael Tooley, Princeton University “bioethicist” Peter Singer, and eugenicists everywhere advocate. They advocate for the legal right of some humans—let’s call them Superhumans—to decide which humans have a right to live and which—because of their defects—have no such right. Let’s call the latter group the Expendables.

Tooley wrote this in 1972 in an article titled “Abortion and Infanticide”:

An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity…. If this view of the matter is roughly correct, there are two worries one is left with at the level of practical moral decisions, one of which may turn out to be deeply disturbing. The lesser worry is where the line is to be drawn in the case of infanticide…. The practical moral problem can thus be satisfactorily handled by choosing some period of time, such as a week after birth, as the interval during which infanticide will be permitted. This interval could then be modified once psychologists have established the point at which a human organism comes to believe that it is a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states.

Through some tortured reasoning about the ethics of torturing kittens, Tooley concludes that it is not membership in the species “homo sapiens” that determines the right to life but rather self-conceptualization as a “continuing subject of experiences and other mental states” and a belief that one is “such a continuing entity” that confers on humans a right to live. Therefore, neither newborns nor humans in the womb—or as Tooley calls them, “parasites”—enjoy that right.

As I have written, Peter Singer wants to extend killing “rights” 30 days post-natally to allow parents to ascertain the health status of their conditionally wanted children. After all, some imperfect humans may have escaped all the currently available tests for determining human perfection and, therefore, “wantedness.”

The infamous Singer himself acknowledges in his book Practical Ethics that we have already started down the unctuous slope:

I do not deny that if one accepts abortion on the grounds provided in Chapter 6, the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong. As I shall try to show… this is not something to be regarded with horror…. [O]nce we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that… collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific.

More recently, in 2011, two philosophers at the University of Melbourne, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, published a paper in which they advocated for “after-birth abortion”:

[W]e argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

In the “social justice” paradigm that divides society into oppressors and oppressed, who are the oppressors: the Superhumans or the Expendables?

We are fast returning to paganism, from pagan sexuality to child sacrifice. Is there a moral difference between sacrificing babies to imaginary gods and sacrificing babies to the god of self?

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Virginia-Lawmaker-Wants-to-Make-Child-Sacrifice-Even-Easier_01.mp3


On February 22nd, IFI is hosting a special forum with Dr. Erwin Lutzer as he teaches from his latest book, “The Church in Babylon,” answering the question, “How do we live faithfully in a culture that perceives our light as darkness?” This event is free and open to the public, and will be held at Jubilee Church in Medinah, Illinois.

Click HERE for more info…




Life-Terminators

Abortion is much in the news lately as Judge Brett Kavanaugh—who many abortion-cheerleaders fear will overturn Roe v. Wade—stands poised to become the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Their protestations to the contrary, abortion supporters—who call themselves euphemistically “pro-choice”—are, in reality, pro-death. Women who seek abortions do not seek centrally to terminate a pregnancy. They seek to terminate a human life.

Here’s a thought experiment that might help reveal the ugly truth hiding behind euphemisms: Imagine if all these past 45 bloody years, it had been technologically possible to extract tiny humans from the wombs of their mothers at the earliest stages of pregnancy and incubate and nourish them until they reached full development at which point they could have been placed for adoption. The pregnancy would have been terminated but the lives of babies spared. Does anyone really believe many women would have chosen to terminate their unwanted pregnancies without terminating the lives of their children whom they didn’t want?

Even without such technology, women could have chosen to allow the termination of their pregnancies to occur naturally and without killing their human offspring. All they had to do was wait 1-8 months and voilà, pregnancy terminated, babies’ lives spared. But the termination of a pregnancy was not the ultimate goal. Death of a new human life—the product of conception between two humans and one with unique DNA—was the ultimate goal. The incomprehensible truth is that women who choose to “terminate their pregnancies” prefer the ignoble choice of death for their children over the noble choice to give their children life in the arms of women and men who want them.

Defending abortion in such a way as to mask the barbarism of the act requires recasting incipient human life as either non-life or life unworthy of any rights (The non-life argument is challenging because of, well, science). Since ideas have consequences, we’re seeing that what was once considered shameful and tragic—that is, killing one’s own offspring—is now celebrated by the rich and famous. Actress Martha Plimpton encourages women to “shout their abortions,” Hollywood made a romantic comedy about abortion, and comedienne-manqué Michelle Wolf performed an abortion-celebrating comedy sketch titled “Salute to Abortion” for her now-canceled show.

The idea that because tiny womb-inhabiting humans are not fully developed, lack self-awareness, depend on others for survival, have physical anomalies that will cause suffering, are afflicted with conditions “incompatible with life,” or are inconvenient to their mothers, those mothers have the right to have them killed has far-reaching, tragic, and predictable consequences.

As I wrote prior to HB 40 being signed into law, there are no criteria that Leftists can manufacture to defend the right of some humans to snuff out the lives of other humans that apply only to incipient human lives. Whether those criteria are intrinsic or extrinsic to humans in the womb, they can be applied to humans who escaped the torture chamber that the womb has become.

Intrinsic criteria such as immature development, dependency status, lack of sentience, or lack of perfection apply to humans outside the womb as well. Extrinsic criteria such as being considered a financial or emotional burden also apply to humans outside the womb. And so, we’re seeing the mission creep of death supporters.

Unethical Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer wants to extend killing “rights” 30 days post-natally to allow parents to ascertain the health status of their conditionally wanted children. After all, some imperfect humans may have escaped all the currently available tests for determining human perfection and, therefore, “wantedness.”

As I wrote earlier, Leftists who believe that more developed, self-aware, able-bodied, and cognitively superior humans have the right to exterminate less-developed, or cognitively or physically impaired humans whose self-awareness is diminished or absent are kindred spirits with Singer.

The infamous Singer himself acknowledges in his book Practical Ethics that we have already started down the unctuous slope:

I do not deny that if one accepts abortion on the grounds provided in Chapter 6, the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong. As I shall try to show… this is not something to be regarded with horror…. [O]nce we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that… collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific.

Then in 2011, two philosophers at the University of Melbourne, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, published a paper in which they advocated for “after-birth abortion”:

[W]e argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

One of the many grotesque arguments “progressives” use to rationalize human slaughter is to suggest that in order to prevent adult women from choosing to have back-alley abortions, we must keep the slaughter of humans in the womb legal.

Let’s add some perspective. Here’s from the liberal pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute:

In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women…. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200.

Compare those numbers of accidental deaths to the 647,000  intentional killings of humans in the womb just this year.

Someone recently asked me who would care for and how we could afford all the “unwanted children” that would result from the abolition of legalized human slaughter (well, that’s not exactly what he called it). It’s important to note that not all of the babies who are currently in the death chute, destined by their mothers to be killed would become wards of the state or dependent on social services. Moreover, the $500 million dollars that we currently give to Planned Parenthood for their bloody business could be re-allocated to organizations that help needy families—including faith-based organizations.

If legalized feticide were abolished, the very real possibility exists that some—perhaps many—women would use their “reproductive rights”—rights that don’t include killing other humans—more responsibly. There are reasons we have a million abortions every year, and one of those reasons is we’ve made it cheap and easy.

Some women would use birth control more consistently. Some would become less promiscuous. More would allow their offspring to live and place them up for adoption. More would allow their children to live and would raise them themselves.

And some would freely choose to have back-alley abortions. If infections followed, they would be treated with antibiotics. None of these women would have their hearts injected with digoxin, their skin burned off, their brains scrambled and sucked out, or their limbs torn off. Let’s remember that none of the over 60 million humans slaughtered in the womb since 1973 chose her or his own slaughter.

But most important, no amount of public expense can ever justify the deliberate killing of innocent humans.

Once humans arrogate the right to determine the value of the lives of others or, as with abortion, when humans predict the future value or experiences of the lives of others or the costs to others of the lives of weaker humans, we have launched ourselves down a slippery slope that will end in involuntary euthanasia (also known as murder) of those who are deemed unworthy. Once we say that a person’s unwantedness or presumed unwantedness or physical imperfections rob her of her right to exist and justifies her killing, how is it possible to prevent the killings of others whom the powerful deem unworthy? Once we rid ourselves of that pesky notion about the “sanctity of life,” who among us is safe?

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Life-Terminators.mp3


A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois! 

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Abortion, Infanticide and Euthanasia Oh My!

Laurie's Chinwags_thumbnailIt was recently reported that the Netherlands will soon open the country’s first center for child self-murder euthanasia for children between the ages of 1-12. The country, which already permits the involuntary killing of infants up to the age of 1 and permits medically assisted suicide for children over the age of 12, is revisiting prohibitions of child-killing between the ages of 1-12. The NL Times, a Dutch newspaper, shares this startling story:

Within the next year a center for euthanasia in children will open in the Netherlands, professor of pediatrics Eduard Verhagen predicted to Dutch newspaper AD, who calls him the authority in the field of child euthanasia.

Under current Dutch legislation, euthanasia can be applied for infants up to a year old and kids over the age of 12, if they suffer unbearably. Kids between the ages of 1 and 12 years are considered incapable of making such an important decision for themselves and are not eligible for euthanasia.

But according to Verhagen, doctors are already investigating the practice of life-end decisions for kids between the ages of 1 and 12 years. “We think that some children under the age of 12 are well able to make such important decisions”, he said.

He adds that the Netherlands is keeping a close eye on Belgium for developments.

Well, here’s what’s happening in Belgium.

In 2014, Belgium extended the legal right to euthanasia—a right that had been available to persons over the age of 18 since 2002—to children under 18 who are “in the final stages of a terminal illness… understand the difference between life and death rationally… and… have asked to end his or her life on repeated occasions. It also requires parental consent and finally the approval of two doctors, including a psychiatrist.” Last week, the first minor child in Belgium was euthanized by a doctor.

Conservatives have long argued that society’s arrogation of the right to kill the unborn or help kill adults with terminal illnesses is both profoundly wrong and will ineluctably lead to the involuntary euthanizing of those deemed unworthy.

“Progressives” counter that such an argument is a fallacious slippery slope argument. Slippery slope arguments are not all fallacious. What makes them fallacious is the absence of warrant or justification for the claim that dire ends are impending if an action is permitted or permitted to continue.

Evidence for the soundness of the conservative slippery slope argument abounds in many economically developed and ethically impoverished countries.

Princeton University unethical “ethicist” Peter Singer argues that parents should have a one-month post-natal window of opportunity during which to determine the health of their newborns and have them euthanized if imperfect. But why just one-month? Why not two or six months?

Singer believes that since the “moral status” of human infants is no different from the moral status of “non-human animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious,” the same “principles that govern the wrongness of killing non-human animals” must apply to human infants as well.

The infamous Singer himself acknowledges in his book Practical Ethics that we have already started down the unctuous slope:

I do not deny that if one accepts abortion on the grounds provided in Chapter 6, the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong. As I shall try to show in this chapter, however, this is not something to be regarded with horror…. [O]nce we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that…collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific.

Singer evidently believes he can stop the downhill careening by asserting that the presence of self-awareness is the existential condition that determines whether some humans are ethically justified in dispatching of others.

Singer also justifies “non-voluntary euthanasia” of infants by the utilitarian “replaceability argument,” using a baby born with hemophilia for his illustration:

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.

He follows in the oily footsteps of philosopher Michael Tooley who wrote this in 1972 in an article titled “Abortion and Infanticide”:

An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity…. If this view of the matter is roughly correct, there are two worries one is left with at the level of practical moral decisions, one of which may turn out to be deeply disturbing. The lesser worry is where the line is to be drawn in the case of infanticide…. The practical moral problem can thus be satisfactorily handled by choosing some period of time, such as a week after birth, as the interval during which infanticide will be permitted. This interval could then be modified once psychologists have established the point at which a human organism comes to believe that it is a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states.

Through some tortured reasoning about the ethics of torturing kittens, Tooley concludes that it is not membership in the species “homo sapiens” that determines the right to life but rather self-conceptualization as a “continuing subject of experiences and other mental states” and a belief that one is “such a continuing entity” that confers on humans a right to live. Therefore, neither newborns nor humans in the womb—or as Tooley calls them, “parasites”—enjoy that right.

More recently in 2011, two philosophers at the University of Melbourne, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, published a paper in which they advocated for “after-birth abortion.” In the face of withering criticism, they tried to walk back their claim by whimpering, “We started from the definition of person introduced by Michael Tooley in 1975 and we tried to draw the logical conclusions deriving from this premise.  It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y….[W]e never meant to suggest that after-birth abortion should become legal.”

Oh really? Well, here’s what they actually said in their original paper titled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”  which was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

Once humans arrogate the right to determine the value of the lives of others or, as with abortion, when humans predict the future value of the lives of others or the costs to others of the lives of others, we have launched ourselves down a slippery slope that will end in involuntary euthanasia (also known as murder) of those who are deemed unworthy. Once we say that a person’s unwantedness or presumed unwantedness or physical imperfections rob her of her right to exist and justifies her murder, how is it possible to prevent the murders of others whom the powerful deem unworthy? Once we rid ourselves of those pesky notions about the “sanctity of life,” no one is long safe.

Unfortunately, many “progressives,” who are increasingly running the anti-human horror show developing in developed nations can’t recognize a slippery slope when they’re hurtling down one in a greased-up luge.


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