Unborn victims of violence

One of the characteristics of an ideology is that it attempts to reduce the fulness of our experience of reality to a single facet. In so doing it effectively falsifies reality. Moreover, when its followers gain control of the political realm, they attempt to force this reduced conception of reality on everyone else, pressuring them to deny the obvious. In the words of Vaclav Havel, an ideology "is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality." It forces people to "live within a lie."

In today's Breakpoint commentary, Chuck Colson addresses the opposition to the Unborn Victims of Violence Act being considered by the US Congress. Opponents are forced by their pro-choice ideology to deny that a violent crime committed against a pregnant woman has two victims. Writes Colson:

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act will allow prosecutors to go after those who injure or kill an unborn child while committing a violent federal crime. The bill would not affect abortion laws, and yet the abortion lobby is trying frantically to kill it. Why?

It’s because they know that a law protecting a Conner or Zachariah [two such unborn victims] changes the entire abortion debate.

Up until now, abortion zealots have successfully portrayed abortion as a hard choice women make only in desperate circumstances. They say the fetus is not really a “person,” that a woman’s “choice” is nobody else’s business.

But who could see pictures of Zachariah and still believe the fetus is less than a human person? Who could witness the agony of Conner Peterson’s grandparents and still believe that the death of an unborn child affects no one but the mother?

Most dangerous of all, for the abortion lobby, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act portrays the baby as a victim, which sets up an unpleasant conflict in the hearts and minds of Americans. If the fetus is a person, how can we take his life indiscriminately? And if it’s illegal for fathers to bludgeon unborn babies to death, why are we letting mothers hire an abortionist to do the same thing?