The juxtaposition of “pro-life” jubilation at saving embryos without even paying lip service to preserving the lives and health of pregnant women, with their equally full-throated defence of the weapons that slaughter young children reminds me of the opening of a little-known book of satirical monologues and dialogues by Philip Roth, published around 1972 under the title Our Gang. The main character of these sketches was Tricky, his barely veiled caricature of Richard Nixon.
The first dialogue is titled “Tricky Comforts a Troubled Citizen”. The citizen is responding to Nixon’s 1971 statement about the need to restrict “abortion on demand”, because of his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life, including the life of the yet unborn”. The citizen agreed with this position, but was unsure how to square it with Nixon’s decision to show special leniency to Lieutenant William Calley, who had been convicted of murdering civilians at My Lai, in Vietnam, in 1968.
CITIZEN: Inasmuch as I feel as you do about the unborn, I am seriously troubled by the possibility that Lieutenant Calley may have committed an abortion. I hate to say this, Mr. President, but I am seriously troubled when I think that one of those twenty-two Vietnamese civilians Lieutenant Calley killed may have been a pregnant woman.
TRICKY: … We have a tradition in the courts of this land that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty. There were babies in that ditch at My Lai, and we know there were women of all ages but I have not seen a single document that suggests the ditch at My Lai contained a pregnant woman.
Tricky goes on to explain in his lawyerly way that Lieutenant Calley would have had no way way of knowing if the woman were pregnant, and in the state of panic she would have been in it is unlikely to have been capable of communicating that to him.
CITIZEN: But, sir, suppose that he did know she was pregnant.
TRICKY: Well, we are down to… this issue of “abortion on demand”, which, admittedly, is totally unacceptable to me, on the basis of my personal and religious beliefs.
CITIZEN: Abortion on demand?
TRICKY: If this Vietnamese woman presented herself to Lieutenant Calley for abortion… let’s assume… she was one of those girls who goes out and has a good time and then won’t own up to the consequences… and Lieutenant Calley, let’s say, in the heat and pressure of the moment, performed the abortion, during the course of which the woman died… Well, I just have to wonder of the woman isn’t herself equally as guilty as the lieutenant… Consequently, even if Lieutenant Calley did participate in a case of “abortion on demand”, it would seem to me… that there are numerous extenuating circumstances to consider…
Presumably this explains the lack of concern the American Right shows over taking any action to prevent incidents like the recent school shooting in Uvalde. The murdered girls were all too young to be pregnant. No danger that any abortions were committed. That would be, in Tricky’s words, “totally unacceptable”.
Common Infirmities 