Dear Colby: Huh?

It could be me. Those vacation days have a way of softening the noodle (I blame Chimay; nobody ought to make beer this good). But I must say I have very little idea what Colby Cosh is saying in this piece.

I am amazed a hundred times a year that pro-life Christians get away with claiming that they stand on eternal principles when it comes to abortion, even though, if you prod them, they will start talking rot about DNA (whose existence and nature somehow went undisclosed through centuries of religious revelation) and will admit that it was the progress of scientific understanding which obligated them to suddenly promote abortion in the panoply of sins, circa 1968. They faced a choice concerning which principles they chose to modify under the pressure of technological change, and opted for the direction that allowed them to signal resistance to modernity. Their stance is about as deserving of deference as the Western Church’s 12th-century ban on crossbows, and no more tenable.

I guess it shows how much I don’t go out, but I have never been confronted with rot about DNA while discussing abortion-related issues (“a hundred times of year”? Gosh, Colby, where do you hang out?). Most of the pro-life folks I know are pretty keen on modernity – at least, the parts of it that gives us flush toilets, laptop computers under $1,000 and awfully cool gadgets like the “smarter smartphone” I just got. I’m also cool with crossbows.

I admit I don’t go to great lengths to justify how I became pro-life (or, as I prefer to call it, anti-casual-abortion). It’s quite simple, really: As a rule, it is wrong to end the life of innocent human beings. And I side with Rod Bruinooge whe he says it’s at best bizarre that a country would outlaw the sale of my own individual body parts but allow me to terminate the life of an unborn child at any point in a pregnancy for any reason whatever.

[cross-posted to PWPL]