Abortions and honor killings: a comparison
Or, who's worse? Moses? Or Tomi Lahren? (2017)
Dear H,
Wisdom is a game of pros and cons, and the controversy over abortion isn't anywhere close to an exception. My reasoning against abortion is that I've seen too many pictures of aborted babies. My reasoning for abortion is I've met too many garbage adults.
Despite this, all moral weight here seems to lean against abortion, mostly because you can't tell a pro-choice woman you wish she'd been aborted. They consider it bad manners; and in all my experience dealing with people they consider it a wish they'd been murdered.
If this is the case, a morally consistent response from them would be “thank you.” After all we broke with our ideals so that they don't have to break with theirs. But they do break with their ideals by objecting, and they do it just as angrily as if they were babies, or Catholics. The whole thing is backward and it makes you despair for humanity — or at least for those of us who have to deal with leftists.
Case in point: a short while ago Tomi Lahren, a blonde known only for being hot and yelling at leftists, got fired by her conservative network for being pro-choice. Despite remaining on the payroll, she proceeded to sue Glenn Beck for (please don't laugh) wrongful termination.
What this means is she claimed to be pro-choice and she wasn’t. She's pro-choice if the choice is being made by a woman. She's against choice if you're her boss. She says she's for liberty when she meant she's against life; and she says you can take a life but only if the life is your baby’s. This is what we refer to in the West as “progress.”
There are of course other ways of getting rid of children. One of Moses’ most controversial laws says, in effect, that if a kid’s so rotten that his parents can't stand him, they can take him to the council and the council can throw rocks at him.
Somehow this seems worse than abortion when it's a million times better. With abortion you have no idea who you're killing. In ancient Israel you knew exactly who you were killing and you hated him. With abortion the child is 100% innocent. In Israel the child was probably guilty. I think they call this an "honor killing.” If this is the case they ought to call an abortion a dishonorable killing*.
Moses' law is fair because it's almost impossible for any parent to come to this point. Everyone knows there are faces only a mother could love. But there are also souls that only a mother could love. And there are souls that even a mother could hate. Moses allowed the person who's least likely to kill a child a right to end the matter and save all of us before it got out of hand. We, on the other hand, call this “barbaric” while letting mothers kill children they're most likely to love.
Yours,
-J
April 13th, 2017
Editor’s Update, 2026: Some of you are reading this and thinking, “J approves of honor killings?!” And to this I would answer no — I merely prefer them to our policy right now. No idea how anyone can be pro-psychopath and anti-baby, but this is the world we live in. Democrats’ motherly instincts are for absolutely everybody but the infants.
As such, I’m not even pro-life. I’m pro-chance. When it comes to executing criminals and lunatics, I’m pro-death. Moses left this up to somebody’s parents. I think it would be better — and in fact, so did our ancestors — to put the death penalty up as an option, and leave it up to a jury.
This leaves a fun question: who would I send on a one-way ticket to meet Jesus? I would expand the death penalty to include all kidnappers, murderers, rapists, child-molesters, robbers, pimps, pornographers, anyone who mutilates the genitalia of children, money launderers, dealers of meth and coke and opiates, doctors who run pill mills, scientists and marketers who lie or hide information about dangerous chemicals and pharmaceuticals, drug mules and coyotes, people who sell national secrets to other countries, anyone who retaliates against legitimate whistleblowers, any public official who refuses to protect the border, career protesters and paid rioters, and people who commit flagrant welfare fraud.
Despite this list, in the light of history I think of myself as lenient on this issue — almost liberal, even. Plutarch writes of Draco, the ruler from whom we got the term draconian, in his Life of Solon,
Under the Draconian code almost any kind of offence was liable to the death penalty, so that even those convicted of idleness were executed, and those who stole fruit or vegetables suffered the same punishment as those who committed sacrilege or murder. […]
Draco himself, when he was once asked why he had decreed the death penalty for the great majority of offences, replied that he considered the minor ones deserved it, and so for the major ones no heavier punishment was left.
Not that crazy of an idea when you see a fatso leaving the shopping cart on the curb.
Still I wonder if Draco’s code was (effectively) more lenient than ours anyway. To prove this, try convicting anyone via jury for jaywalking when death is on the menu — a stance for which many cops would turn a blind eye, his peers would likely rule not guilty, and a man’s neighbors would be likely to falsify records or hide evidence. In the end, extreme rigor and extreme liberty meet. Where almost everyone is on the chopping block, lady justice isn’t just blind on purpose — we find she’s also deaf and dumb.
*My dad refused to fire phosphorous shells on the Viet-Cong because they were sleeping — he passed the honor off to another yahoo on ship. How much worse, in every sense, is cutting a poor baby to pieces in-utero? With the former you can compare it to stealing candy from a baby. But what are you supposed to compare the latter to?
My take on killing the sleeping Viet-Cong is slightly different from my dad’s, and coincides more closely with the Polish mercenary Rafal Ganowicz. In 1967 he was asked what it felt like to take a human life. His answer: “I wouldn't know. I've only ever killed communists.”