The rebuttal by Phoebe Adams published in The Suffolk Journal prior to spring break is a quintessential example of the pro-abortion debate playbook. In her rebuttal to my article titled, “Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats have heartlessly condoned infanticide,” when Ms. Adams is not leaving out information that contradicts virtually every claim she makes, she is creating strawman arguments and assuming motivations for my opinions that I don’t possess.
I’ll begin with this: the definition of infanticide that I used in the article may not have come from the same source Adams uses, the Oxford English Dictionary, but it is the verbatim definition of infanticide from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (n. the killing of an infant). Adams either didn’t bother to do thorough research as to where my definition came from, which a simple Google search would have accomplished, or is intentionally deceiving the reader in order to bolster her argument and discredit mine. I acknowledge that there are multiple available definitions, but taking the literal definition of infanticide from Merriam-Webster is not a deceptive “scare tactic” as she suggests.
Adams states that “The only person who can comment on a person’s right to an abortion should be the person who’s considering getting that abortion and their primary caregiver.” Here we have found the real problem she has with the original article — I’m a man talking about abortion. I only have one question to ask in response to this. If Adams believes that men should be excluded from the abortion debate, why should she be allowed to discuss war and foreign policy, a topic that uniquely affects men because of the military draft?
Adams’s claim that I left out information about the Reproductive Health Act (RHA) is hypocrisy of the highest order. Of course I left out the fact that New York passed the law to decriminalize abortion; it bears no relevance to the new policy the RHA creates.
As Adams states, “The actual circumstances surrounding an abortion in New York that are supported by the RHA are ‘that an abortion may be performed by a licensed, certified, or authorized practitioner within 24 weeks from the commencement of pregnancy, or there is an absence of fetal viability, or at any time when necessary to protect a patient’s life or health,’ according to Section 2 of the bill.” Exactly! The RHA legalizes abortion up to the moment of birth not just to protect the life of the mother but also for the vacuous reason of a “patient’s health.” As mentioned in the original article, the Supreme Court Case Dalton v. Bolton (a companion ruling to Roe v. Wade and the basis for the definition of “health” in the RHA) describes health factors as “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.”
That makes the murder of fully formed infants in the womb legal for highly treatable health conditions such as depression and anxiety and for unthinkable reasons such as familial inconvenience. Perhaps Adams is ignorant of this fact, but the more logical explanation to this glaring omission is that Adams leaves this out because it undermines her false argument that the RHA permits abortion only if the unborn child directly endangers the mother.
The strawman Adams creates in response to the moral argument against late-term abortion is laughable. In the original article, I compare murdering an adult for reasons other than self-defense and its universally accepted immorality to the murder of unborn children for reasons other than self-defense, which pro-abortion advocates find permissible. To say that I “threaten prison sentences” for women who have abortions is a poor attempt at ascribing motives to the argument that do not exist. No pro-life advocate believes we should imprison women who have abortions, including myself.
If Adams thinks that the description provided of late term abortion, which includes in graphic detail the dismemberment of babies capable of feeling pain — is a “scare tactic” — then good. She should be horrified of the barbaric reality that the RHA creates.
Instead of making a cogent argument for the murder of fully viable unborn children, as the newly passed RHA in New York permits, Adams resorts to the pro-abortion lobby’s patented debate playbook of deceive, defame and misrepresent.
