Thomas Friedman’s latest column in the New York Times is a perfect specimen of what Helen Alvaré has termed “the lazy slander of the pro-life cause.”
While Friedman’s editors have corrected his laughable biological error since the column’s initial publication, they have not yet seen fit to remove its expansion of the term “pro-life” to the point of meaninglessness, its conflation of government support with charitable work, or its tendentious mis-representation of the pro-life movement.
The sentence I call tendentious is this: “Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.”
Friedman, like most liberals, seems to think that most anti-abortion Americans stop caring about babies the moment they exit the womb. For a rebuttal of that and other oft-heard but false claims about the pro-life movement, I highly recommend Helen Alvaré’s aforementioned piece on Public Discourse.
Update: Ryan T. Anderson, Greg Pfundstein, and Matthew Schmitz also deserve credit for contributing to Helen Alvaré’s piece. Apologies for my omission.
October 30th, 2012 | 12:47 am
Alvare’s article is about acts of charity. It has little to do with the bulk of what Friedman was saying – that there is a disconnect with opposing abortion in order to save life, yet supporting regressive measures that negatively affect life(as mentioned in the article, like bashing the EPA and opposing even minimal gun control) or endorsing politicians who claim to be anti-abortion but have no scientific knowledge of how pregnancy occurs.
October 30th, 2012 | 7:35 am
See post by Prof. Rick Garnett at mirrorofjustice.blogs.com with link to YouTube video of a feeding clinic for children:
“… notice the crucifix on the wall, and the name of the clinic. It’s a Catholic hospital. The first formally constituted Catholic hospitals date from at least the early part of the 4th century. … The Federal government has been involved in a serious way in health care for what … we know no more than 223 years at the conceivable best. … And Tom Friedman only lately heard about sugary drinks from the mayor of New York. … But Christians and the Catholic Church have been caring for people throughout their lives, feeding them, clothing them, educating them, visiting them in prisons, comforting them in death for 2000 years, whether those they cared for were Christians or not. And Tom Friedman would have the federal government tell Catholic institutions they aren’t Catholic enough or pro-life enough? Nice.”
I think that Father Neuhaus might have been cheered by Dr. Garnett’s post.
October 30th, 2012 | 12:02 pm
It is always amusing to read Mr Friedman’s grotesquely hypocritical views on any subject for in these unhappy days laughter is sometimes beneficial.
His concern for life “after birth” would appear to be a bit scant as he is one of the cheerleaders for the war crimes being committed by our government against its numerous nonexistent “enemies”. For Mr Friedman blowing up innocent Arab Christians and Muslims at funerals, weddings, in chools, etc. is a good thing. And that is why his views on the unspeakable horror that is abortion are so twisted.
Friedman is an apostle of destruction and death and decay.
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