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It must also be noted that every significant organization in the pro-life movement recognizes a right of abortion to terminate pregnancies which constitute a substantial and imminent threat to a mother's life. The catch is that the termination procedure employed in a particular case should also protect the unborn baby if it is "viable" (has any reasonable chance of survival outside the womb). Prior to viability, failing to end a pregnancy which threatens a mother's life will obviously result in the death of a baby who will die if its mother is killed by her pregnancy – irrespective of the type of method used to end the pregnancy. Said differently, the nonviable child of an imperiled mother will die whether the pregnancy is terminated or not. It only makes sense, therefore, to save the child's mother by aborting her doomed pregnancy. It is the mother's tubal pregnancy, for instance, not her abortion, which seals her baby's fate.
It is lawful in this country to kill even a healthy, full-term unborn baby (see Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747 (1986)) if its mother finds its continued existence "emotionally" upsetting (See Doe v. Bolton 41 U.S. 179 (1973)). At a practical level, this means that any doctor can, at any point in pregnancy, kill any baby of any mother wishing the death of her baby. This is true because the wish to abort is irrefutable evidence of the "emotional" upset which would follow any denial of her attempt to terminate. The goal of this judicial scam is to create in the public mind the misleading impression that abortion is or can be meaningfully regulated in this country.
In any event, life-threatening pregnancies are rare in the developed world and hardly the norm elsewhere. More than 9 out of 10 abortions are purely elective procedures "chosen" by parents who simply refuse to be burdened by the imposition of an undesired child. The issue is not survival. It is the evasion of responsibility; the use of violence to get one's own way.
PETA prattles on about the violence of factory farms which torture, abuse and neglect animals, but where's the outrage over agribusiness poisoning veggies with pesticides and herbicides. This chemical catastrophe produces toxic tomatoes and further marginalizes already oppressed insects and weeds. Is it fair to demand free-range chickens while ignoring the plight of contaminated chickpeas? If meat is murder, what about melons? And why is Earth First! so adamant in its opposition to clear-cutting redwoods but so indifferent to the harvesting of red beets? Are big, old plants somehow more sacred than small, young ones?
Another PETA problem is their frequent spokesperson, Peter Singer. Princeton's distinguished professor of perversion wrote in his 1979 book Practical Ethics, that "Because people are human does not mean that their lives are more valuable than animals." We might counter that "Because plants are vegetable does not mean that their lives are less valuable than animals. But now Singer has gone far beyond the ramblings of a nutty professor. He has even outdone his eugenic pronouncement that the life of a healthy rat is worth more than the life of a sick child (whose parents he believes should be given the power of infanticide).
What follows requires a strong stomach. The San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 2001, in a Debra Saunders piece entitled "One Man's Animal Husbandry," reports that Peter Singer recently wrote an online book review for a pornographic Website in which he defends bestiality. Saunders summarizes Singer's position thusly: "You can have sex with … [animals] but don't eat them." On the problem of securing his victim's "consent," Saunders paraphrases PETA president Ingrid Newkirk: "Singer does not advocate sex that kills or damages animals or requires them to be restrained. Indeed, Singer condemns sex between men and hens because it is 'usually fatal to the hen'." That's consent? That this devotee of debauchery would be so squeamish over trifling depravities like sadism and bondage seems almost quaint. It is truly a "man bites dog" tale (tail?). How prudish his incongruous rectitude must seem to many San Franciscans. On what grounds would this suddenly judgmental professor deny pleasure to the sadomasochistic community of beasts?
Would nonconsensual sex between a man and a woman be acceptable to PETA so long as the woman weren't "killed, damaged or required to be restrained?" Can consent reasonably be inferred from a victim's absence of injury or failure to resist; especially when the victim has only limited ability to comprehend the nature of the act? Singer's animal standard, if applied to humans, is so permissive that it would violate the sexual harassment and sexual assault regulations of his own employer (see http://www.Princeton.edu). In the sexual harassment realm, Princeton prohibits advances toward anyone who has "indicated no interest." How does a sheep "indicate interest" in bestiality? With regard to sexual assault, the university bars sexual contact with anyone "who is unable to consent." Can a goat "consent" to buggery? Would Singer require that lambs, foals, etc., reach the "age of consent" before being considered fair game? Would PETA endorse the creation of a North American Man Puppy Love Association (NAMPLA)?
PETA has issues here and they are far more serious than the imagined contradictions of pro-life beefeaters. It gets much worse.
Although this becomes a bit complicated, on March 12, 2001, in San Francisco, amid much publicity, a homosexual activist named Sharon Smith filed a civil action for wrongful death against neighbors Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller. The latter are married and both are lawyers. They also own two vicious dogs, both of which allegedly attacked and one of which gruesomely killed a woman named Diane Whipple. Noel and Knoller (as lawyers will) quickly added insult to mortal injury by lamely arguing that Ms. Whipple might have provoked the attack by wearing pheromone-based perfume or using steroids. They also speculated that perhaps the victim hadn't done enough to escape the dog which was tearing out her throat. Ms. Whipple was a lacrosse coach at St. Mary's College and Ms. Smith's lesbian lover.
California law does not permit unrelated "domestic partners" to make claims of this sort but the plaintiff argues that the court should not deny her a remedy on the basis that she was not married to Ms. Whipple while prohibiting her from ever being married to Ms. Whipple. Establishing standing in a wrongful death case would hugely advance the homosexual agenda for redefining marriage. Any expressions of misgiving concerning this proposed "reform" would, of course, be hate-filled and homophobic.
Now comes the bizarre allegation that Mr. Noel and Ms. Knoller were training these dogs, at the behest of inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison, to function as attack dogs; perhaps for a ring of drug dealers. Adding to the otherworldly weirdness of this very sad case, Mr. Noel and Ms. Knoller were reported to have later adopted one of the inmates who had bred these attack dogs.
What does this stranger-than-fiction tragedy have to do with PETA and Dr. Singer? In its March 30, 2001 issue, The Orange County (CA) Register published an Associated Press (AP) story stating that criminal investigators now have evidence (including nude photos) suggesting that Mr. Noel and Ms. Knoller were having sex with the killer dogs (this is, after all, The City By The Bay). The article quotes police officer Carlos Sanchez who reports that "…investigators believed the dogs, Hera [female] and Bane [male] were being sexually assaulted by Noel and Knoller. Noel has said the issue is nobody's business [this is, after all, The City By The Bay]." The more liberal Los Angeles Times apparently agreed and discretely censored any mention of interspecies intercourse from its publication of the same AP article.
The point here is that the police aren't treating the alleged bestiality as a private affair among consenting adults (albeit of different species). They see it as rape and must be basing this view on a failure of consent. Would Professor Singer object to this theory of culpability? If so, may we conclude that he thinks animals are entitled to less protection from sexual assault than humans? Does this not out him as a latent speciesist? And if that is his view of sexual assault by humans on animals, what of sexual assault by animals on humans?
The above-mentioned Chronicle article also describes Singer's account of a male orangutan which sexually assaulted a female human. He concludes that since we are all "great apes," sex across the species barrier "ceases to be an offense to our status and dignity as human beings." One might then wonder where the sage of Princeton stands on expanding the legal definition of marriage to include matrimony between man and beast? Would he relegate these relationships to the status of mere civil union? Would PETA denounce opposition to inter-species marriage "reform" by calling it mean-spirited bestiphobia?
On a related topic, since chimpanzees have been filmed eating monkeys, why is it okay for a "great ape" to eat lesser anthropoid primates if PETA thinks the greatest of the "great apes" (arguably man) should be denied meat of any sort, monkey or mutton? A high percentage of animals eat meat with total indifference to such taxonomic niceties as phylum, class, order, family, genus or species. Even those New Age pagan deities, the whales and porpoises, eat fish; whales eat seals; and some whales actually eat other whales. Can they all be wrong? If their carnivorism is normative, why is ours aberrant? If ours isn't aberrant, why is it abhorrent? Could it be because we should know better? Wouldn't that be another example of the arrogant speciesism so shrilly decried by Dr. Singer.
Finally, I am reminded of recent press coverage of a controversy involving a horse breeder whose prized mare was accidentally impregnated by a stallion of lessor lineage. When the breeder sought to protect his derivative reproductive rights with a "choice" to abort this "unwanted pregnancy," animal rights activists howled in protest. Does PETA's professed neutrality on abortion extend only to the killing of unborn children?
Welcome to the abortion wars, PETA friends. And you thought pro-lifers were confused.
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