Should Abortionist Be In Jail?

WALSH: A Man Was Sent To Prison For Killing His Unborn Child. He Should Be Released Immediately.

"We have declared unborn babies to be unpersons, lifeless clumps of matter, and we should have to face the implications of that idea."

BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

ByMATT WALSH

@MATTWALSHBLOG

May 21, 2018

A former doctor has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for slipping an abortion pill into his pregnant girlfriend’s tea. He will serve three years of the sentence. He should serve zero years. He should not have been sentenced at all.

What he did was monstrous, of course. He killed a human life. He is a murderer. He deserves to be in prison for the rest of his life. But we are not the sort of society that deserves to put people like him in prison. We have not allowed ourselves the legal or moral basis to do so. We have declared unborn babies to be unpersons, lifeless clumps of matter, and we should have to face the implications of that idea.

You cannot commit a homicide if you have not killed a person. And a "fetus" must either be a person or not a person. The consent of the mother is irrelevant to the question of personhood. A thing is what it is, no matter how anyone feels about it. My dog is a dog. He does not become a person because I love him, or a sack of fur because I hate him. The fact that he is mine has no bearing at all on what he is or isn’t.

If the pro-aborts are right in their view, then this man committed vandalism by destroying his girlfriend’s property. At worst, he committed assault by damaging a part of her body. But homicide? No. Homicide by definition is the deliberate and unlawful killing of a person. An unborn child by definition — at least by the demented, unscientific definition that serves as the entire basis for the Roe decision and the pro-abortion cause for the past 40 years — is not a person.

Which is it? We cannot have it both ways. We should not have it both ways. We only want to have it both ways because, in the minds of many people in our culture, it feels so much worse when a man kills his child. All of the bodily autonomy stuff, the women’s rights stuff, the female liberation stuff, no longer serves as an effective cover. All you're left with is a guy killing a baby. The euphemisms and slogans no longer apply. We reverse ourselves, suddenly, and just for these isolated cases, so that we can preserve our moral indifference.

To hell with that. Literally, to hell with it. If we are going to be a society where babies aren’t people, then let’s be that society. Let’s stop hiding from ourselves. We kill babies here. It is legal to kill babies here. Babies aren’t people here. That’s the ugly truth. If we don’t like it — and we shouldn’t — then let’s change it. If we won’t change it, then let this innocent man out of jail and let him return to his medical practice. He is only a doctor performing a medical procedure, after all. He does not deserve to be persecuted for it.