Harris-Perry's gone done it again, again ... again.

On the same segment Melissa-Harris Perry so classily showed her support for the pro-aborts in Texas by dangling two tampons from her earlobes, she also made a speech in which she put the abortion debate to rest by proposing that life begins whenever a parent feels like it.  Even as this speech was very short, she managed to express ideas from a conglomerate cesspool of ideologies and talking points, often contradicting herself.   This will be a line by line response to that speeh.

You may want to first watch her speech here.

“When a pregnancy is wanted by the mother and father, their family, their community, even their country, it is easy to think of the bump as the baby...”

That’s because it is a baby.  Actually, the baby makes the bump.

“But not every pregnancy is a fairy tale.  The ultra sound reveals severe birth defects.”

Eugenics.  One very famous eugenicist was Margaret Sanger, the founder of planned parenthood, and saw minorities as inherently inferior.  Even as liberals champion themselves as the party of the minority, they seem not to realize that being in support of abortion is being against the disabled (and blacks) - 90% of Down Syndrome babies are aborted, for instance. There is a blatant contradiction in claiming the disabled have rights that should be protected (and should be given privileges that often violate someone else’s rights) all the while believing that they are so invaluable to society that mothers should have the right to terminate them.

And if it is good for a mother to terminate her unborn child because of its defects, then what does that say about mothers and fathers who choose not to terminate?

“A child is raped and becomes pregnant...”

Only 1-2% of abortions are performed on fetus conceived in rape.  So here we are using a very small minority of women to support mass slaughter.

“Another baby would jeopardize a mother’s ability to feed her living children...”

No, the mother  jeopardized her children by having sex in full knowledge that it could lead to the pregnancy of a child she could not support.  Why should we even have sympathy for women who are barely able to support their current children, but still manage to find time to court and sleep with other men at the risk of becoming pregnant again?

“A woman decides she does not want a child at all...”

That decision should come BEFORE she decides to have sex.  It is not that difficult a concept for pro-aborts to grasp.  The Republican Party is supposed to be the anti-woman party, and yet Liberals happily believe that woman are too incompetent to weigh the consequences of having sex outside of marriage or are too sex crazed to respect those consequences once they have.  Conservatives call women to be responsible for their actions and so naturally, we're anti-women.

“These are different pregnancies...”

No, these are different WOMEN!

Not only has she dehumanized the fetus to be merely a ‘pregnancy,’ but she is trying to qualify pregnancies in illegitimate ways to legitimize treating fetuses differently under the law.  So much for the leftist equality of outcome.  Isn’t it the leftist’s belief that no matter where you began, whether or not you were poor, wealthy, abandoned, abused, that people should all be able to make $20 an hour and live in 200 ft² mansions?  Why should that concept not also apply to the fetus whether it was conceived in rape, has defects, or is the Royal Baby?

“An unwanted pregnancy can be biologically the same as an unwanted one, but the experience can be entirely different”

This is an unnecessary and unjustified qualification.  A pregnancy is objectively a pregnancy.  The subjective experiences of individuals does not negate what is objectively true.  The fetus (which Harris-Perry has cleverly equated with ‘pregnancy) remains objectively a fetus, a living human being, irrespective of how the mother views it.

“Eggs are fertilized, embryos implant, fetuses grow ... but when does life begin?”

Engines rumbles,  wheels turn, the car moves!!  ...but when has the car really started?  Don’t these active actions signify to the observer that a car is started?  Likewise, all these stages of development during a pregnancy signifies to us that the fetus is alive!

“I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents...”

Oh?  Not the community, Harris-Perry?

Here’s the problem:  If parents are the final, authoritative arbiter of life, then they maintain that authority even after the child is born, and passing through a few inches of skin wouldn’t automatically erases that authority beyond your say-so.  The authority to kill a baby while in the womb remains the right to kill babies outside the womb.

Yet we are all well aware that Harris-Perry doesn’t really believe parents determine when their child is alive for what should happen when the mother says their baby isn’t a life and the father does?  Harris-Perry would probably say that the mother ultimately has the choice even if the mother and father were married.  So it would not be the parents who chose when life began, but the mother, making Harris-Perry’s position even more subjective and frivolous.

“...the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents ... but not science...”

Of course, not. Science objectively and unequivocally states that life begins at conception!  That the moment an organism begins to grow, use energy, react to its environment, among other things that a zygote and embryo does, it is alive.  That fact is inescapable and so Harris-Perry must discount science – that thing that proves Global Warming is real and that people are born gay.

“The problem is that many of our policy makers want to base sweeping laws on those feelings...”

No, we want to base them on the SCIENCE! ...on the FACT that the fetus is a living, human being and so has the right to life. 

Children are not the State's ... But They're not Yours Either!

A few days ago, Melissa Harris-Perry was featured on one of MSNBC's “Lean Forward” ads, in which she boldly proclaimed that children belong to their communities rather than their parents.

So far, there has yet to be anyone from the right who actually articulates why children do not belong to their communities, why they do in fact belong to their parents, or if they belong to anyone at all.  Sure, there have been denunciations of her words as being outright communistic – all of which may be valid – but so what?  Glowing Harris-Perry, framed by pink flowers dancing in the sun, conveys the goodness of collective thought in our education system clearly and concisely, and the right’s response is to flail and bleat that such a pleasant woman is evil?  Really?

After all, not only will children outlive their parents, but they can choose to become independent, active members of their community as early as fourteen if they get a part-time job.  The first eighteen years of a child’s life, training and education might completely determine how productive a citizen they will be in the future, so why wouldn't the state take a more active interest in how one raises their child?  Why wouldn’t you and I take a greater interest in how our neighbour raises their child?

The idea that a child in some sense belongs to his/her parent seems like common sense belief; a child is the product of their mother and father, and we own what we produce, thus...  This isn’t necessarily true, but even if it was, conservatives cannot simply rely on common sense beliefs to defend goodness anymore.  For much of America, “Over-taxing the rich to feed the poor is good,” is a common sense belief.  “Education is a right,” is a common sense belief.  Yet if you’re a conservative, you know NONE of these are true ... and you can probably articulate why.

So why is it untrue that a child belongs to the community or collective? Well, if one is a Christian (as conservatives most often are), the answer is pretty simple; your children belong to God, just as you belong to God.  Douglas Wilson, a well-know author and theologian, put it quite nicely when to defend anti-collectivist notions about people, he pointed to the instance in the Gospels when Jesus was asked whether or not it was good to pay taxes to Caesar***.  Jesus famously states:  “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”  But before he says this, he takes a coin and asks whose image is on it.  Of course, it was Caesar’s, so it belonged to Caesar.

Whose image is on your children?  God’s (Genesis 1:27).  And so why don’t our children belong to the community or state?  Because we are not permitted to give what is God’s to anyone but God – especially to Caesar.  Children do not even belong to their mothers and fathers themselves!  God merely gives the father and mother authority over their children to raise them for His work and Glory.

For conservatives and libertarians who are not Christian or for conservatives and libertarians who would rather not refer to religion to defend against the left, the answer is just as simple.  Children cannot belong to the state because under collectivism, the state exists to serve itself, not to serve others.  It will not take our children and produce self-reliant, thinking individuals because what it needs more than anything else are servants - dependent and unthinking.  So if not the state (and if one rejects God's ownership), to whom would our children belong?

Well, the notion that anyone could belong to anyone else contradicts individualism and self-determination.  I assume that for most libertarians especially, not even a parent can rightly own a child.  But we could view the relationship between parent and child not as one where ownership is involved, but one where merely authority and responsibility is involved.  Though individualism mandates that we all be self-reliant, there is still a moral responsibility we have towards each other to insure that our actions do not infringe upon someone else’s pursuit of happiness.

Children are a direct consequence of their parent's actions, and thus the parent has a moral responsibility to insure the pursuit of a child’s happiness is not diminished either by making poor choices in child rearing or through total neglect.  Parents would not own their children, rather they would have authority over them and the duty of insuring their children receive the necessary training and education that will allow them to become productive citizens – not for the sake of the state, but for the child’s own sake.

It will be difficult to counter the idea that children belong to the state with the idea that children belong to God or their own selves because of the great gap stemming from ideological differences between the left and right.  What necessarily follows from socialism and communism, collective ownership and working for the good of the state, is that people too belong to the state and each other.  Unfortunately, conservatives will first have to tear down the collectivist wall shielding the liberal from basic truths before we can really address Harris-Perry’s words.



***I cannot find the interview yet, but I will :*(