Ode to Joy

This week in Chicago, at the Democratic National Convention, the Democrat party, espousing the “politics of joy”, decided to have a van performing free abortions outside their convention hall. Nothing says joy better than killing innocent little babies in the back of a van. But this is the party that celebrates castrating little boys and giving mastectomies to teenage girls, and whose open border policies have led to tens of thousands of children to be human trafficked, so this depravity is par for the course for the Democrats.

On Tuesday at the DNC, while being interviewed on MSNBC, Democrat Governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear doubled down the depravity of the Democrat party when he stated that he wished that a relative of Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance would get pregnant through rape because Vance is stridently pro-life. He said, “make him [Vance] go through this [a pregnancy through rape].” JD Vance responded by calling Beshar a “disgusting person” for even suggesting such an evil thing.

Beshear defended himself in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell by saying, “As a man, JD Vance will never have to face any of this personally, but it’s sad that he lacks the empathy to be able to put himself in a different position.”

It is interesting that he used the word “empathy” because empathy is the one thing that is missing most of all in the abortion debate, and not in the way Beshear used it. It is not that men like JD Vance do not have the empathy to put themselves in the position of the mother, it is that the people who are pro-abortion lack the empathy to put themselves in the position of the baby – the baby who is striving to live, the baby who experiences every ounce of pain inflicted on her during the abortion, the baby who ends up dead. Pro-abortionists completely disregard the point of view of the baby, and that’s why it is so easy for them to view the baby as disposable, as something to be completely discarded. They only see the abortion debate from their own perspective, how it will help them without empathy for the other human life involved. That is where the empathy is lacking most of all.

Pro-abortionists like to make the argument that, ‘if men had babies, then abortion would be a Constitutionally protected right.’ And that statement is probably correct, but that does not mean that abortion is not murdering babies. It just means that men can be self-serving hypocrites. If men got pregnant, they would laser focus on how that pregnancy was affecting them and no one else. But this realization about men sheds no light on the true nature and the morality of abortion, because in the same vein, if men were the only ones who got pregnant, then many of the women screaming for abortion rights would be screaming that abortion is the murder of babies.

That is why the old pro-abortion trope, “no uterus, no opinion” is absolutely absurd. When you are making moral judgements, it is imperative that you remain as objective as possible. You must remove yourself from the situation in order to see how that decision impacts everyone involved, and not just how it would impact you. You must have total empathy for everyone affected by abortion to see the true nature of abortion. So, claiming that the only people who can have an opinion on the morality of abortion are the people with uteruses is removing many objective points of view on one of the most divisive moral questions of our time. In fact, the people who can be the most objective about abortion, are the people who don’t have uteruses because they are more easily removed from the situation, and therefore can objectively empathize equally with all sides.

The woman’s point of view is almost entirely subjective – how does this decision affect me? Not necessarily what is the right thing, not what is the moral thing, but how does this impact me personally. Human beings of both genders can easily convince themselves that something that is immoral is actually moral to get them out of a very difficult and trying life circumstance like an unwanted pregnancy. But when you remove yourself from the situation, when you have no horse in the race, when there are no direct personal ramifications to the decision, you can be much more objective on what the situation is. And when people objectively look at abortion, they will consider both the mother’s point of view, as well as the baby’s.

Pro-abortionists do not want an objective view on abortion because they know they would lose much of their support. That is why they use euphemisms like “abortion”, “reproductive rights”, “fetus” because if they actually called the killing of babies, “the killing of babies”, women deciding whether to have an abortion would empathize with the baby, and most would not be able to go through with killing their own child. That is why the pro-abortionists solely emphasize the woman’s right to choose, and the woman’s control over her body, and how abortion benefits the mother. They want to make the abortion decision as subjective for the woman as possible. That is also why they exclude men from the decision-making process – the father has no say over whether his baby lives or dies.

To further underscore their lack of empathy, pro-abortionists claim that they want to “keep abortion safe and legal.” But when they say “safe”, they only mean safe for the mother, and not for the baby because they have no empathy for the baby. Abortion is the exact opposite of safe for the baby. The abortionist’s clinic is the least safe place on the planet for the baby. Gaza is a less dangerous place for the baby than the abortionist’s office.

When pro-abortionists do show empathy for the baby, it is fake empathy to selfishly justify a woman choosing to kill her baby. They will convince the mother that “your baby wouldn’t want to be born into this situation[poverty].” What they are really telling the mother is that, ‘you are poor, and you don’t want to have to raise a baby in poverty’. Their decision has nothing to do with what is best for the baby or what the baby wants even though they pretend that is does. The baby would choose living in poverty to death because the mother, who is poor, is not killing herself because she lives in poverty. She chooses life in poverty over death everyday of her life. They are espousing the elitest point of view that life in poverty is not worth living.

Pro-abortionists will argue that they can do whatever they want with their body. Which is true, when there is only one body involved.  But when what you do with your body negatively impacts another body, then you don’t have the right to do whatever you want with your body, especially when what you choose to do kills another body. Abortion kills another body. If you can do whatever you want with your body without exception, then why are there people in jail. Every act that sent every prisoner to jail was the person doing something with their body that society deemed was harmful to another or to society in general. So, you cannot do whatever you want with your body. That is why we need to have empathy, to help us understand how our actions could harm others.

Human beings are selfish and human beings will concoct any argument they can to justify acting in their own selfish interest. So, yes, men would ordain abortion as a sacred right if they were the ones having the babies, but that does not mean abortion is right or moral, it means that men are selfish. So, people will contrive arguments to justify murdering a baby if doing so improves their life. They will say that the “baby isn’t a human being, so they have the right to kill it” which is exactly the same argument slave owners used to justify holding black people as slaves and is the same argument that the Nazis used to justify killing 6 million Jews. They convinced themselves that the human beings they were torturing and killing, were not human, and therefore their actions were justified. So, the only way we can truly see abortion for what it is, is if we have the empathy to give humanity back to the baby which the pro-abortionists have stripped from them.

If we, as a society, took the vilest murderer, and punished him by ripping his body limb from limb and crushing his skull, we would all agree that that was too cruel of a punishment for even the evilest among us, yet in this country, that punishment is exacted on an innocent little baby 2,000 times per day, and if you point that out, you’re the crazy one; you’re the evil one; you’re the one who must shut up. The people on the left will protest to save the vicious rapist and murderer from a cruel death, but they want everyone line up in front of a clinic, and have their baby experience the cruelest most painful death there is, and then celebrate it as if it was some twisted form of female empowerment. Ode to joy.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.