Same Product. New Bottle.

Five hundred years from now, people will look back on surgical abortions the way
we look back on the butchery of medieval barbers. Like the barbers, we're trying
to help people to the best of our ability. But our ability is growing. So should our wisdom, and our ambitions.

This statement comes from an very long article about abandoning Roe in order to save Roe by William Saletan and was published in the Seattle Times about a week ago.

It's a strategy doomed to failure in my opinion because it relies on contraception and sex education to avoid second and first trimster abortions and make "Roe irrelevant." The abortion industry must surely know their abortion revenue is a function of the amount of sex-ed and contraception can be found in the society at large. Roe might be the license but sex-ed and contraception are the marketing.

Like the writings of so many abortion strategists and defenders, there's always a warped through-the-looking-glass aspect to their arguments. Because so many of them are unwilling or unable to see the very concept of abortion as wrong, they must seek to fix or perfect the unseemly, ugly aspects of abortion. All the while conveniently forgetting the promises of the earlier brand of abortion: Progress. Wealth. Safety. Health. Freedom. Life. Happiness. Yet today here we are comparing surgical abortion to the butchery of medieval barbers. Maybe if we slap a "New! Improved!" label on it people will buy it all over again.

It is a utopian project with a blind faith in the power of the human mind and human reason to make a better, new and improved abortion that will ultimately render it "good" or at least acceptable. Rather than understanding that man is both body and spirit, they put all their faith in the ability of the human mind to dominate the material world, including the body. It is a Manicheist mind-set that pits man against himself.

Manichæism professed to be a religion of pure reason as opposed to Christian credulity; it professed to explain the origin, the composition, and the future of the
universe; it had an answer for everything and despised Christianity, which was full of mysteries. It was utterly unconscious that its every answer was a mystification or a whimsical invention; in fact, it gained mastery over men's minds by the astonishing completeness, minuteness, and consistency of its assertions.

Mr. Saletan believes that our growing "wisdom" and "ability" will improve abortion and create the next promised abortion utopia. Abortion technology in the form of a pill is today's latest and greatest wisdom. Does Mr. Saletan not know that "abortion pills" were around long before surgical abortion? Calling a pill or a chemical "technology" does not change the nature of abortion nor remove the stain of "medieval butchery." The attempt to "set the light-substance [of abortion] free from the pollution of matter" can never happen because it is a conceptual and material impossibilty and the attempt to even do so is moral and mental madness. Abortion in the form of a pill (RU-486 or Plan B) is simply a new bottle for an old product.