Making the Prolife Case: The Deadbeat Mom Argument

Here is a recent letter, I (Kevin) had published in the Bedford Bulletin earlier this month. Every literate Christian can do something about the American genocide, abortion, even if it is simply writing a short letter to the editor of his local paper. This letter is an illustration of what Israel and I call the Deadbeat Mom Argument, which Israel basically formulated a couple of months ago, during some table talkin'. 

Be creative, be logically consistent, and be bold. Christ, who is Truth, is on our side, which makes the prolife position one of the easiest to communicate and defend. Regardless of what you do for the cause, do something--like 3,000 helpless, voiceless lives a day depend on it, because they do!

____________________________

Imagine that Bob’s loose behavior resulted in getting a woman pregnant. Mary hadn’t contacted Bob since that one-night encounter. She called Bob to notify him of his responsibilities toward their then-forming child. Bob refused.

Later, Bob received a certified letter; the state demanded Bob take responsibility for his child. Suffering garnishment, Bob changed careers, doing cash-only jobs to avoid having his parental arrearage forcibly taken. Bob was then notified that his income tax refund check would go to Mary and the child. After $5,000 in arrears, Bob looks forward to prison. Meantime, he enjoys his picture being on the state’s “Most Wanted Deadbeat” list.

Most share in common one thing concerning Bobs: We love to loathe them. We consider them losers, irresponsible, immoral, shameful “deadbeats.” This valuation is often well-justified. Our legal system agrees and acts. Parents are morally and legally obligated to care for their children. From child-like intuition to jurisprudential scholarship, we know Bob is wrong.

How about when women decide they don’t want to be mothers? Like Bob, Mary could make her decision the moment she discovers she’s a parent. We’ve been conditioned to celebrate Mary’s decision as a constitutional right to privacy and personal autonomy; we condemn Bob for the same act. Since 1973, over 53,000,000 of these decisions have been made—abortion. The pro-abortion propagandists have driven culture to the absolute dereliction of all moral and rational sense, woefully idiocy. We’ve come to “call evil (Bob’s decision) good (Mary’s decision), and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).

Chiasm in One of Tocqueville’s Best-Known Lines

I believe this figure is intentional. Apart from Tocqueville being a lucid writer with a great command of the pen, it also includes repetitio on “America.” If he wasn’t consciously intending these figurae to express the brilliant aphorism, then he gives us little more than redundancy, which he is not given to do.

A. America is great

B. because America is good,

B. and if America ever ceases to be good,

A. America will cease to be great.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Prediction-Description of the Despotic, Idolatrous Condition of Present-Day American Statism

Here is a—dare I say prophetic—description of the contemporary state of the Union. This comes from the brilliant statesman and socio-political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, from his early- to mid-nineteenth century work Democracy in America. Recently I have had what may be called conversations, using the loosest sense of the term, with some, concerning the idolatry of statism, its inherently religious character, and its reality in our current political landscape. Even among Christians—much more among those baptized in modern emperor worship—the conception that the modern American state has been deified and bears all the qualities and attributes of a religious, perhaps better messianic, status and value in our culture is difficult to swallow. Let dear Alexis’ predictive-descriptive piece express what I evidently struggle to clarify.

"An immense tutelary power is elevated [above the people], which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate.  It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild.  It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves.  It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provided for their security, forsees and secures their needs facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritance; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? 

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen.  Equality has prepared men for all these things; it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even regard them as a benefit. 

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd" (II:IV:6).