Does your legislator kill babies? For decades, conservatives have denied prenatal care to poor women; as a consequence, millions of babies have died or been born with debilitating birth defects.

Now these conservatives are about to perform another abortion. By clinging to their hypocritical morality rather than face an inconvenient reality, healthcare reform may well die a-borning.

It is the height of hypocrisy to insist on a right to protect the unborn while denying a responsibility to care for the born. If, as many social and fiscal conservatives insist, society has no responsibility to provide even basic healthcare to it citizens, by what illogic do they claim a right to insist mothers bring a child into such a barbaric society?

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That’s not hyperbole, compared to every other industrialized democracy, our healthcare system is barbaric. Conservatives may preach and pose, but the proof is in the providing as to where a life is more valued.

Yet conservatives insist they do value life, value it from the instant of conception. Let us leave aside the argument of when life begins, but let us once and for all be done with the nonsense that all life is equally sacrosanct.

A question posed in Stem Cells and Sophie’s Choice puts the lie to that notion: If your house was on fire and you could save only your baby or a Petri dish with seven eight-celled zygotes, would you trade one life for seven potential lives? Of course not.

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Soldiers have always been forced to make such life and death decisions, and in modern warfare the sacrifice of innocent life is euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage”. The fact that we mourn the death of four-thousand of our soldiers while largely ignoring the death of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians makes it all too obvious we do not think all life is equally sacrosanct.

Christian conservatives should also be reminded of the biblical account wherein Abraham reluctantly agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac. As preachers have long argued, it matters not that Abraham was spared having to make that sacrifice; the lesson is that he was willing to sacrifice his son for what he believed was a greater good.

If duty calls us to sacrifice the born under certain circumstances, doesn’t it call us to sacrifice the unborn, however regretfully and reluctantly, under certain circumstances?

Studies have shown that when abortions increase crime decreases, and the inescapable conclusion is that unwanted children place not only a heavy burden on their family, but on society as a whole. We can lament that fact, but we ought not deny it, or the implications for every aspect of our society.

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Conservatives have not followed the logic of their misguided morality, preferring to hold to their simplistic formulation that abortion is always murder, and those involved with it are murderers. The first question they should be made to answer is this: If abortion is murder, who should be charged with what crime?

If as they claim, doctors who perform abortions murder babies, should doctors be convicted of pre-meditated murder? Were that the case, doctors would not perform abortions, and desperate women would once again be forced into the clutches of back-alley butchers.

As is widely acknowledged, outlawing abortion does not end abortion; it only makes outlaws out of desperate women.

And if these women are made outlaws, what should they be charged with? Premeditated murder? And if they are convicted, who will care for their other children while they are imprisoned? Will conservatives provide for children they have made motherless with their misguided morality? History says no.

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Social conservatives claim to despise such moral ambiguity, but they seem to have no such revulsion about moral ambiguity on C Street, where they congregate and congratulate each other on being among The Chosen, where they hide out and protect each other from the consequences of their sins with lies and payoffs.

Even legislators who reluctantly acknowledge a woman’s right to choose, insist tax dollars can’t go to fund abortions because it would compromise their morality. Are they willing to extend the same standard to others whose morality is compromised when tax dollars go to fund policies with which they disagree?

What of tax dollars that go to fund ill-advised wars that cause the death of thousands of innocent civilians? What of tax dollars spent on renditions and torture and assassinations? What of tax dollars wasted on no-bid sweetheart contracts? What of tax cuts for the wealthy in the middle of two wars?

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In any case, the protestations of these mediocrities are little more than posturing, given that so many of them have long been whoring for health insurance companies and other corporate clients, and the few that haven’t done so routinely wrangle for political favors in exchange for their vote.

Gentlemen, we know what you are – and we also know you’re just haggling about the price. So use us as you will -- and you surely will – but please, spare us the posing.

 ©2009 Tom Cordle