Guilty by Reason of Insanity

by David Limbaugh

  Another dirty trick arose in an unlikely context. Citing two unnamed sources, a May 2018 McClatchy article reported that investigators were looking into a scheme in which the Russians laundered money through the NRA to help the Trump campaign. The report claimed an NRA lawyer named Cleta Mitchell was aware of the ploy, but Mitchell denied any knowledge of it. She noted that she wasn’t even working for the NRA anymore, which forced McClatchy to issue a correction to the bogus story.56 Through congressional testimony by former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr, it later became clear that the source of the false report was Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion GPS, the firm that drafted the discredited Steele dossier claiming Donald Trump conspired with the Kremlin.57 Although the entire story fell apart, in August 2019 the Federal Election Commission’s Democratic chairwoman advocated investigating the supposed money laundering scheme based solely on allegations reported by McClatchy.58

  When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence contacted Mitchell about her contacts with Russian entities, she told them the story was “completely fabricated and concocted by Glenn Simpson & Co. You should be pursuing them for perjury and for making false statements to congressional investigators.” Mitchell told The Federalist that she heard nothing further from the committee after that. “So some scumbag like Glenn Simpson can get the FBI to open an investigation by just making things up?” Mitchell exclaimed. “It is appalling. And frightening.” “Mitchell is right,” wrote The Federalist contributor Margot Cleveland. “Simpson and others who pushed false claims of Russia collusion to the FBI and DOJ should be prosecuted. The failure to do so will only embolden political operatives and establish that there is no downside to reporting fraudulent information to the FBI.”59 It is indeed horrifying that political operatives can fabricate stories out of whole cloth and launch investigations into political opponents.

  In the next chapter, we’ll examine how extreme and morally bankrupt the left has become on the issue of abortion and its continuing pattern of discrimination against Christians.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Shouting Your Abortion While Attacking Christians

  It’s horrifying that we are rapidly approaching the kind of culture that God ordered the Israelites to wipe out when he finally allowed them to enter the Promised Land—a culture of rampant immorality, idolatry, and child sacrifice.

  The left used to concede that abortion was an unpleasant affair, even if their denial that an unborn baby is a human life made that illogical. If an unborn baby is merely a clump of cells, an abortion is just a clinical procedure with no moral component. With such a low opinion of unborn babies there is no reason to make abortion rare, yet that was the position of Democrats until recently—abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

  So if they didn’t believe an unborn baby is a human life worthy of protection, why did they insist abortion should be rare? Perhaps it was cognitive dissonance—they subconsciously knew an unborn baby is a human life and were trying to mitigate the evil while still preserving a woman’s unfettered autonomy to terminate the child. Or maybe they just cynically pretended, for political purposes, that they sought to minimize abortion to deceive those who might be uncomfortable with it.

  Despite their protests, pro-abortionists did nothing to make abortion rare. Furthermore, abortions are never safe for the aborted baby and often harm the mother, psychologically and emotionally if not physically. The left has always been pro-abortion, not pro-choice. They resist any restrictions on abortion, operating with a paranoid fear that any concession would be a slippery slope leading to the outlawing of abortion and forcing women to return to back alleys.

  So jealously did leftists safeguard abortion that it served as a sacrament of their secular ideology. They conspired with the multi-million-dollar abortion industry to expand the number of abortions. Since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, there have been an estimated 60 million abortions in America1 (the vast majority being for nonmedical reasons),2 which would have been impossible if one political party opposed the procedure and the other was trying to make it rare. If they were truly pro-choice, they would inform pregnant women contemplating abortions about all the risks of the procedure, including psychological and emotional harm, and advise them on adoption as an alternative. To make responsible choices people must be fully informed of all their options.

  “WHEN DOES HUMAN LIFE REALLY BEGIN TO MATTER?”

  Advancements in ultrasound technology have produced real-time 4D images of babies in the early phases of pregnancy, making it even more difficult to deny unborn babies are human beings. Upon watching them, some pro-abortionists have been converted on the spot. A short video posted by Jonathon Van Maren of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform shows a perfectly formed eight-week-old baby arching his back and moving his arms and legs in his mother’s womb. It begins with this statement: “This 8-second video of a first-trimester baby tells you everything you need to know about how wrong abortion is.”3

  A baby’s heart is beating at six weeks post-conception and fetal movement of the limbs begins at about 7.5 weeks, with more complex movements like thumb-sucking and yawning occurring around fourteen weeks.4 Maureen Condic, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Utah, testified to a congressional committee that unborn babies have the capacity to feel pain as early as eight weeks.5 At seven weeks the preborn baby is 10,000 times bigger than at conception and has developed tiny buds for arms and legs. At eight weeks, not only does the baby have limb movement but all her major organs have begun developing and she’s the size of a raspberry. At nine weeks her toes are visible, and all the essential organs are formed. At ten weeks tooth buds are formed, and the baby can flex from her elbows. Preborn babies between eleven and thirteen weeks are the size of a lime, begin to grow fingernails, and have tongues, ears, and nasal passages. They are sometimes already capable of stretching and doing somersaults.6 Hearing can occur within twenty-three weeks of gestation.7

  These are human beings, not clusters of cells. Gallup polling shows that 60 percent of Americans support the legality of abortion during the first trimester.8 But how many in that 60 percent would hold fast to their position if they could see these images and videos—and if they were aware of the scientific facts?9 Admittedly, some people have the opposite reaction, which further proves the effectiveness of these kinds of images—a pro-abortion feminist college student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was arrested for assaulting a member of Created Equal, a pro-life group, for showing graphic photos of aborted children.10 I believe pro-life advocates should continue showing such images despite the fear of offending people. If these images are offensive, how much more so is the reality they depict? We shouldn’t elevate people’s sensitivity above the right of the innocent unborn to life, and if graphic pictures awaken people to the horror of abortion, then we should use them to save lives.

  For decades pro-abortionists have lived their contradictions and masqueraded as equal-opportunity dispensers of compassion, with empathy toward women and love and concern for the unviable tissue mass. Today, apparently emboldened by its overall Trump-era onslaught, the left has become less circumspect and started aggressively embracing the culture of death, with some leftists brazenly defending abortion even while conceding it involves killing a human being. They now champion abortion as something in which women should take pride. This is a stunning development. Self-congratulation for killing one’s innocent offspring is a level of spiritual evil too horrific to contemplate, and yet that’s where much of the left currently resides, as witnessed by activists wearing T-shirts boasting of their abortions and book authors glorifying the practice. One Reddit user proclaimed she had an abortion the previous week just “because I wanted to.” “I have never been pregnant and consider myself a fairly responsible person,” she wrote. “… I also don’t want to have something control my life that I have made every considerable effort to avoid.”11

  The pro-life organiza
tion Live Action cites a number of abortion proponents who have publicly admitted that abortion ends human lives. Ann Furedi chillingly writes, “We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life.… [T]he point is not when does human life begin, but when does it really begin to matter?”12 Yes, when, indeed?

  Writer Naomi Wolf once described her agitated response, when pregnant, to a person challenging her about whether she was carrying a baby. She responded, “Of course it’s a baby. And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be between myself and God.” Likewise, Judith Arcana said, “I performed abortions, I have had an abortion and I am in favor of women having abortions when we choose to do so. But we should never disregard the fact that being pregnant means there is a baby growing inside of a woman, a baby whose life is ended. We ought not to pretend this is not happening.”13

  In a sex-ed video, even Planned Parenthood admits that an unborn child is a baby.14 The narrator instructs parents how to respond to their children if they ask where babies come from. “You can say ‘A baby grows in a parent’s belly and comes out of their vagina,” responds the narrator. Later, he says, “Most men have very tiny seeds, called sperm. If sperm and egg meet, they can grow into a baby.”15 It’s surprising that the nation’s premier abortion provider could bring itself to admit this simple biological fact. But what exactly happens to that “baby” during an abortion? A separate Planned Parenthood video on the abortion procedure describes it briefly and vaguely: “During an in-clinic abortion, a doctor, nurse, or other health care provider empties your uterus using gentle suction and sometimes other medical tools.” What precisely is being emptied from the uterus is left unsaid, and viewers get little hint from the video’s graphics, which depict a straw-like device inside a sketch of a uterus removing two wavy red lines while soothing elevator-style music plays in the background.16 When the horror of what an organization is doing is so intense that it can’t even fully describe it, it may be time for the group to rethink its actions.

  “THE MUSIC OF MURDER”

  There are many other instances of abortion activists or clinical workers admitting an unborn baby is a human life and, in some instances, that abortion is actually murder.17 Yet the left is moving us ever closer to a death culture, as exemplified by an Ohio mother singing a lullaby her baby “gave” her in the waiting room before she aborted her. She later sang the lullaby at a ceremony blessing an abortion clinic. Pro-life witnesses of the creepy event commented, “Watching this mother sing the lullaby to those gathered is haunting. This tune became the music of murder for one baby, and those assembled celebrated in hopes it would become the same for countless other children.”18

  The pro-abortionists’ exclusive focus on the mother’s rights, which stems in part from their militant feminism, allows them to rationalize the killing of innocent babies including, of course, female babies. Any encroachment on the mother’s unfettered right to murder her unborn baby is seen as an assault on women’s rights. From a spiritual perspective it is a stunning outworking of pride, a self-absorbed focus that wholly ignores the baby’s life. Because they are promoting a lie, they have to marshal other lies to support their indefensible position, such as claiming they are protecting the mother’s health—though late-term abortions are almost never necessary for that purpose because delivering a baby by C-section is faster and safer than killing her in a two-day late-term abortion.19 They also define “mother’s health” expansively, to include situations that involve no physical threat to the mother.

  Abortion advocates employ other euphemisms to package their advocacy in more palatable terms. NPR issued a “guidance reminder” directing journalists to use (and avoid) certain terminology when reporting on abortion, including: use “intact dilation and extraction,” not “partial-birth abortion”; use “medical or health clinic,” not “abortion clinic”; use “doctor who operates clinics where abortion is performed,” not “abortion doctor”; use “fetus,” not “unborn baby”; and use “abortion rights opponents,” not “pro-lifers.” The goal is to sanitize and depersonalize the language.20 Whoopi Goldberg’s response to comments from former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley illustrates the unreality of pro-abortionist thinking. When Haley said that pro-choice advocates demand uniformity and that’s not real feminism, Goldberg took offense. “See to me, you taking choice from people is anti-human.… I don’t say that everybody has to believe, but I say you want to have choice, I don’t want you in my coochie… and you don’t want me in yours either.”21

  Activist judges employed word fictions in Roe v. Wade to manufacture a federal limit on the states’ right to regulate abortion by divining a right to privacy in the so-called “emanations” and “penumbras” of the Constitution. Abortion advocates couch the debate in terms of the mother’s autonomy over her own body, wholly ignoring the other human being involved. They describe abortion as involving the mother’s “reproductive health,” though it has nothing to do with reproduction, which has already occurred, except to terminate it; it rarely relates to “health,” as by definition it destroys the baby’s health; and as noted, it is rarely done to protect the mother’s health, as honestly defined. And while some on the left grudgingly acknowledge an unborn baby’s humanity, others still describe the unborn human life as an unviable tissue mass or clump or cluster of cells, in a conscious effort to dehumanize the baby.22

  The abortion industry also plays word games to paint pro-life advocates in a negative light. Consider these comments by the former head of Planned Parenthood, Dr. Leana Wen: “It’s insulting when people describe their anti-choice stance as pro-life. What I do, is promote life and the well-being of women, and families, and communities.… I’m a physician. I went to medical school. Everything I’ve ever done is to save lives.” Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptism University and a cultural commentator, was aghast at this declaration. “Now, just consider the evil of that statement, the evil in the fact that she made the statement, the evil frankly, in the fact that it was published in the mainstream media without any acknowledgement of the horror of what she had just said,” said Dr. Mohler.23

  In response to congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood in 2015, Amelia Bonow defended the organization on Facebook. “I had an abortion at Planned Parenthood and it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, I felt nothing but relief… and I’m a good person,” said Bonow. “My abortion made me happy.” Lindy West supported Bonow with a tweet using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion. West and Bonow, along with Emily Nokes, published Shout Your Abortion, a book of personal essays in which women describe their abortion experiences. In an eight-minute video promoting the book, Bonow is shown promoting abortion to children. “You go to the doctor, and they put this little straw inside of your cervix, and then inside of your uterus, and then they just suck the pregnancy out,” said Bonow. “It was just like a crappy dentist appointment or something. It was just like, ‘Ah, this is like a body thing that’s kind of uncomfortable,’ but then it was over, and I felt really just grateful that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.”24 The magnitude of this lie is staggering. From a Christian perspective, lying to children about the gravity of abortion is especially troubling for the same reason abortion is troubling: we are to protect the innocent. As Jesus taught, “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:2).

  In an exchange with a boy who asks why not choose adoption instead of abortion, Bonow says, “I feel like if I am forced to create life, I have lost the right to my own life. I should be the one to decide if my body creates a life. Even if you give a kid up for adoption, you still like have a kid out there somewhere.” She isn’t forced to “create life”—the life
has already been created when a decision to abort is made. And terminating the child is not deciding not to create; it’s ending an already-created human being. The notion that she should be entitled to end her child’s life because she doesn’t want to be bothered by the thought of having “a kid out there somewhere” reveals, in stark terms, how twisted pro-abortion thinking is. It takes the idea of a mother’s convenience to stratospheric levels. When the boy asks Bonow what she believes God thinks about abortion, she replies, “I think it’s all part of God’s plan”25—reminiscent of the serpent telling Eve to go ahead and eat of the tree in the middle of the garden because “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4–5).

  “WHAT IS BORN IS HER OWN CONFIDENT AGENCY OVER LIFE”

  Lindy West appeared on The Daily Show to discuss Shout Your Abortion and her efforts to remove the abortion stigma. She described the book as “just people telling the truth about their experiences, experiences we’ve been taught to feel shame about and apologize for, which has really been engineered by the evangelical right.” West explains that the writers share their stories about various abortions, including those by women who desperately wanted to be pregnant and some by women who’d had multiple abortions. “Anti-choice people are not trying to stop abortion,” said West. “They’re trying to legislate who can and cannot have abortions. Because conservative politicians—their wives, and mistresses, and daughters are always going to be able to go get an abortion somewhere. Really, all anti-choice rhetoric does… is keep people trapped in poverty and drowning in poverty for generations. That’s the goal. If it wasn’t the goal, they’d spend their time and money on comprehensive sex education, free birth control, free contraception, and all the things that pro-choice people do spend their time on that actually do affect the abortion rate.”26 You see, even abortion is a function of the Marxist class struggle.