Infanticide!

There, that got your attention! And such is the real purpose of shock words these days – to condense a slur, rally a slogan, and sometimes promote a hidden message. I remember when students would shout “hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today .”

Some issues are tangled, mysterious, insoluble. Abortion and women’s rights _ or potentially crippled-child rights _ is one of the toughest. Definitions are almost impossible. The world refuses to be solved .

For the record, I am in favor of all children, everywhere, being born normal, healthy, and into circumstances where they are well cared for until their late teens. For the record, in our real world, even if babies are born normal and healthy, society often lets them die or suffer from neglect, starvation, war, disease, or other violence. And genetic luck guarantees that many embryos do not produce normally healthy babies. It used to be far worse – nature was never kind .

But “baby killer” is an effective slur. Nobody wants to be so labeled. The problem is that those who use it are – like those anti-war demonstrators – really pursuing a deeper agenda One in which it is the duty of women to produce and raise children and leave the rest of the stuff to men. 

I dislike such people and their agenda. Perhaps one day I too will have to find something simplistic to shout back. Isn’t that really the true problem with our civilization? Not stupidity, not evil, just fatigue at complex, seemingly insoluble, issues .