Northern Valley Beacon

The physician from Aberdeen said to the young people manning the Campaign for Healthy Families booth at the Brown County Fair, "You people are disgusting."

That was after he so brilliantly displayed some syllogistic thinking. The pattern for his syllogism is:

Men are living creatures.
Dogs are living creatures.
Therefore dogs are men.

His version ran like this:

Humans are living creatures.
Zygotes are living creatures.
Therefore zygotes are humans.

Zygotes can become incipient humans if they are nurtured by someone who desires to take the time, the special effort, and the personal sacrifice to bring them to that point. The good doctor claims that science has changed the definition of a zygote from the "union of two gametes" to a "full-fledged person." He said, "A zygote is a person." We have not been able to locate the scientific literature that makes that assertion, but this M.D. says it is an accomplished fact of scientific knowledge.


The doctor asked how killing babies relates to the healthy families. In the argument and accusations over abortion, one gets the feeling that the anti-abortion ragers are not so much interested in saving life as having a pretext to call someone a "baby-killer." As one of our correspondents pointed out via e-mail, the epithet "baby-killer" takes on the same aspect as when good Germans called Jews "Christ-killers." A semantic need is the real issue. They need a pretext to express hatred and vilification against someone.

Well, the good physician, who eventually left the booth to presumably heal the sick and succor the afflicted, was not alone. The Novstrup family singers were also there. Al and David Novstrup make up the Republican slate for the South Dakota House of Representatives for District 3.

The song they sang was "When does life begin?" Al boomed forth with the chorus, "We KNOW when life begins." The question is probably "When does human life begin?" There is a lot of life swarming all around us. Everytime we swab out the toilet with Lysol, we take thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. Those creatures were with life, until we decided to tidy up the bowl. Murder is committed in the household every day.

Then the Novstrup genius went to work with "When do you get rights?" The gremlin in the background muttered, "When get the honkies get scared enough of you that they'll give them to you." But that was followed with "How do you balance out the rights of the unborn vs. the rights of the mother." The gremlin said, "With the South Dakota abortion ban, the mother has rights? Where? When? How?" The gremlin is right. The South Dakota Abortion ban gives the state all the rights. The mother has no voice in whether she wants to develop a zygote into a human. And she ain't gonna have no rights until she can scare the honkies into allowing her some.

Young David Novstrup piped up with the penetrating observation that an abortion "punishes two people." To which the gremlin interjected, "How long does the punishment go on when a woman is forced to carry a zygote to term when she really does not have the resources for doing so?" Impertinent imp.

Spouse Novstrup said that "Rape and incest were only one percent of all pregnancy cases. That is not enough to matter." Not even to the woman who is forced to carry to term the child of someone she has reason to loathe and despise. Such things don't matter.

The fact is that no one, except a few misanthropes, regards abortion as anything other than a desperate medical measure for women who find themselves in desperate circumstances. Forcing women to develop zygotes into viable humans is a return to slavery, when women were forced to give birth to increase the slaveholdings and wealth of their masters.

The entire anti-abortion movement hinges on their semantic insistence that life begins when sperm meets egg, and sometimes before. This is religious doctrine for some sects. There is also theological grounds for giving women special, individual privilege in deciding how and when to bear children. But those grounds are ignored by certain church groups which are more interested in forcing their doctrine on others.

The biggest problem with the anti-abortion militants is that their claim to caring about saving life rings so hollow. If they cared, they would seem to demonstrate more respect for the living.

You disgusting people, you baby-killers, hear that?



[This acc0unt was taken from notes supplied and verified by Dena, Lindsey, and John.]