Quebec Life Coalition

The problem with George Jonas’ commentary on late, late-term abortionist George Tiller’s murder is that he was so busy writing well and being broad minded that he made an astoundingly silly argument.

The argument is this: Jonas states that he is “not necessarily opposed to abortion” and “not necessarily opposed to killing”. But “nothing justifies” the murder of George Tiller. The question, now, is why the killing of babies is justified while the killing of baby killers is not. For there is no difference in kind, according to Jonas, between the zygote and the 40 year-old: They are both human beings on a path he rightly characterizes as “a continuum from zygote to old-age pension.” But Jonas maintains that he has “no problem with abortion,” because, as he says, allowing parents to kill their children, or, as Jonas’ phrases it in his curiously euphemistic way, “giving parents life-and-death discretion”, is OK, because it “rests on venerable historic precedents.” And then he mentions King Soloman of Old Testament fame and the more recent Spartans as examples of the state "giving parents life and death discretion".

Two questions come to mind: 1) if there is no difference in kind between zygote (and the 30 week-old fetus for that matter), whom mommy can kill with impunity, and George Jonas, the ex-zygote, can mommy kill Jonas now? If not, why not? 2) I would have thought that George Jonas, who styles himself a clear thinker with antennae that are very sensitive to totalitarian thinking, would notice that he had just concocted an argument that will get statists the world-over salivating: does he not see that the institution of marriage is being dissolved, and with it, the very cogency of the concept of parenthood? As (better) argued elsewhere by McGill professor Douglas Farrow, gay marriage has destroyed (at least in the consciences of the citizens of this country) the concept of marriage as a meta-legal reality—and if marriage is now an elastic concept defined by the state, so then is parenthood. After all, comrade, is not the state our “true” parent (as our most “venerable” totalitarian, Plato, states in his Crito)? Have you therefore not given the state, our true parent, a “life-and-death discretion” over all its citizens?