It’s one of the more interesting facts of Judaism that it requires (or at least strongly encourages) rabbis to be married. This seems rather sensible: after all, what insight can the celibate men of the Catholic church offer into love and marriage?
By the same token, should it be a requirement of high secular office that leaders be not just married, but also, parents? Marriage and child, after all (unless severely dysfunctional), involves at least some degree of self-sacrifice and consideration to the needs of others. Qualities a leader must be able to encompass.
Besides, it’s noticeable that many of the most feckless leaders in the modern west are childless, from Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, to Theresa May, Mark Ruttel, Stefan Löfven, Xavier Bettel and Nicola Sturgeon. The Clintons, as Jim Goad observed, seem to have had their solitary child under sufferance as some kind of career necessity.
Perhaps childlessness has consequences for leadership, or not (after all, there’s still Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau). As German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski observed, “for the childless, thinking in terms of the generations to come loses relevance. Therefore, they behave more and more as if they were the last and see themselves as standing at the end of the chain”.
Then there’s Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and his apparent support for infanticide – oops, “post-birth abortion”.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg refused to state that he did not support infanticide on Thursday during an interview on ABC’s “The View.”
Co-host Meghan McCain highlighted a previous extremist remark from Buttigieg when he suggested last year that a baby could be aborted up until they had their first breath.
You don’t have to be a rabid pro-lifer to feel a shudder of disgust at such a statement. There’s no way in hell anyone could dismiss as a worthless “clump of cells” a newborn that’s just wailed its way into the world. Unless you’re a “woke” Democrat candidate.
After talking around the question, McCain asked, “But what if a woman wanted to, I don’t know, invoke infanticide after a baby was born, you’d be comfortable with that?”
“Does anybody seriously think that’s what these cases were about?” Buttigieg lashed out.
That’s exactly what those cases were about. Ralph Northam stated it explicitly. There can be no dancing around the fact that “partial birth” and “post birth” abortions are the killing of infants as soon as or immediately after they’ve exited the womb. What else can that possibly be called, but infanticide?
Buttigieg responded by refusing disavow infanticide.
“Think, think about the situation, if this is a late-term situation, then by definition it’s one where a woman was expecting to carry the pregnancy to term, then she gets the most perhaps devastating news of her life,” Buttigieg responded. “We’re talking about families that that may have picked out a name, may be assembling a crib, and they learn something excruciating and are faced with this terrible choice…”
dailywire.com/news/watch-democrat-pete-buttigieg-refuses-to-disavow-infanticide
Buttigieg almost has a point, here: too much of the abortion debate, on both sides, tends to be argued on the basis of extreme scenarios. As Ben Shapiro reprimanded a challenger, “You’ve just presented me with the worst possible scenario”. Why not talk about the norm?
Buttigieg is, in fact, trying the same gambit: presenting the most congenial possible scenario to bolster his support for infanticide. But the data suggests that he’s very, very wrong.
Although statistics indicate that late term and “partial birth” abortions are among the least common, evidence also suggests that Buttigieg’s scenario of a “terrible choice” mandated by medical necessity is also far from the norm. Evidence suggests that anywhere between 35% and 80% of these infanticide abortions are “elective”. “Elective” reasons include not finding an abortion clinic or being able to pay for the abortion until late in the pregnancy, not recognising they were pregnant, being undecided about getting an abortion, and disagreeing with the baby’s father about it.
These might be valid excuses for an abortion in earlier stages of pregnancy, but they become less and less morally defensible as the unborn child becomes more and more viable. After birth, even if in the instant of the child taking its first breath, they just become repugnant.
At least the ancient Greeks and Romans were brutally honest enough to dump their unwanted children on the mountainside. “Progressive” politicians, as “Mayor Pete” shows, have no such honesty.
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