Irony

For thousands of years women would bear 6, 8, 10, even a dozen children only to have half or more of them die before reaching adulthood. I've often thought of the effort and care parents have put into raising children and the futility one would feel to lose them. My grandmother lost one baby in infancy, a grown daughter to meningitis, and a grown son to World War II--A third of her children. Many pioneer women gave birth to 12 or more children only to see 3 or 4 reach marriageable age.

All this time, medical science has striven to find ways to combat the diseases and inadequate nutrition that took so many children. We have passed laws and appropriate millions upon millions to provide the necessities of life so that no child should have to go hungry. We have seen various affordable, safe and effective means developed to prevent conception.

How odd it seems, then, that probably THE major issue at the last 6 or 7 confirmation hearings has been the right to abort a child already conceived and apparently healthy. Feminists, like Lady Macbeth, seem to view their ability to bear children as a kind of weakness, and demand that the Supreme Court unsex them, even as they had demanded that the language be unsexed to suit their desires. Like her, they seem to goad the men who serve their ambitions, and insist that they do dirty work to achieve the aims of their ambition.

I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

No such gory and sickening thoughts for modern women, though. They dash the brains and bodies 'ere the babe is born.

This is something true about that play that makes one's blood run cold to think of such an affront to nature.

I think of Ted Kennedy reading his calumnies of Judge Alito, seemingly unwilling or unable to meet his gaze, under the watch of Emily's List, Ralph Neas, Nan Aron and the rest. In time, the Democrats must shake off this curse or succumb as a party, because, like Europeans,there will be fewer and fewer of them brought full term. They will beat themselves to pieces in bitter frustration as another group, worthy or not, supercedes them.