Quote of the Day (20)

For anyone who missed it, after being waylaid by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, presidential candidate Donald Trump mused briefly about criminalizing the choice to abort a child last week, before doing an abrupt about-face once it became clear he’d stepped into a minefield and had, at least temporarily, united the pro- and anti-abortion crowd against himself.

Dalrock’s is the only explanation I’ve read so far that makes perfect sense.

He says (emphasis mine):

“Trump’s blunder was believing that pro life activists mean these kinds of statements. If they really believed abortion was murder, a woman who put a hit out on her unborn child would merit punishment along with the rest of the murder-for-hire conspiracy. After all, she is entrusted by God to protect this child, and legally she is the only one who can decide to kill it. What Trump didn’t understand until after the interview is these kinds of cartoonish demonstrations are not to be taken seriously. This is what conservatives do, especially Christian conservatives. It is worth noting here that the source of outrage against Trump’s original statement isn’t that he proposed something that was right morally but ill-advised politically.

The pile on from the pro life leaders was a histrionic objection to Trump implying that a woman who kills her unborn child bears some culpability for the child’s death. The official pro life position states that women who have abortions are merely victims ... This is cruel to women, and the cruelty comes from cowardice ...”

One can hardly fault Donald Trump for taking the rhetoric of pro lifers seriously as I’m quite sure he’s got little or no hands-on experience dealing with the movement. That’s not to slam Trump: I know of nobody in politics with the courage to touch the issue with a ten-foot pole. He’s not alone in choosing to die on another hill.

The idea of holding doctors criminally responsible for aborting babies while exempting from all responsibility and labelling as victims the mothers who voluntarily choose to walk into their clinics demanding their services is an astoundingly inconsistent and immoral position.

Compassionate exceptions ought to be made where diminished capacity, failure to attain the age of consent or other factors render the mother genuinely incapable of making an informed decision. But where such factors are absent, it is not just cruel to women to suggest they lack the moral agency to distinguish between right and wrong, it is genuinely insulting.

If this is actually the consensus “Christian conservative” position, it is desperately in need of a drastic re-think.