On April 27, 2009 Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer wrote an article, “In families’ tragic deaths, a hint of paternalism,” addressing the cause of two horrific whole family murder/suicides perpetrated by fathers. These two were only the latest in a string of similar events across the country. Ms. Reimer got right to the point in her comments:
It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t stress. It wasn’t mental illness. It hit me the minute I heard the news — it was ownership.
She made a good case for her position. What surprised me was that Ms. Reimer, an ardent abortion rights advocate, has never made the obvious logical connection between abortion and ownership and the malignant maternalism it exemplifies. When it comes to abortion, the mother asserts ownership and the power of life and death. She owns. She chooses. Ownership is one of the core arguments made by abortion rights advocates. They couch it as “self ownership” (“my body”), despite the fact that it really is about ownership of another life.
Abortion is all about ownership of another. Isn’t it about maternal ownership and the power to kill another? And not just any other, but the most intimate other. But, abortion, unlike paternal homicide, leaves no gruesome crime scene for the police and the community to deal with. The bodies are smaller and disposed of by accomplices with medical degrees, often men, paid by other men complicit in the killing of their children. Sometimes it is the grandmothers and grandfathers who facilitate the killing of their grandchildren.
For every horror story we hear about fathers killing their wives, their children and themselves during this harsh economic time, we know there are hundreds more unseen killings going on in the abortion mills of America.
So we need to ask ourselves. Do you think you own somebody? Who thinks they own you? Your father or mother, husband or wife? The State? Who owns you? These are life and death questions, temporal and eternal. The wrong answers lead to death, physical and spiritual. A lot of Americans are failing the test. The bodies, large and small, visible and invisible are piling up.
Who owns you?
