In an article on these pages last week I wrote about Nigerian Bishop Emmanuel Badejo’s distress at the Obama-Clinton policy of supplying the Nigerian government with the weapons and intelligence necessary to fight Boko Haram if and only if the administration were permitted to export to Nigeria what the Bishop described as a “cultural imperialism that threatens to erode our cultural values.”
The Bishop was talking about the administration’s abortion agenda. “I take it all back to the agenda of population control. That’s my theory. Anything that can reduce the population. There has been an inordinate alarm about the exploding populations in Africa. And anything that can be done to decrease or limit the growth of the population in Africa is quite welcome,” said the Bishop. I suggested in my article that whether by abortion or murder, the administration was intent on reducing Africa’s population.
Saturday morning, as if on cue, the Washington Post’s lead editorial once again took up the call to force abortion on Nigerian women, endorsing it as “the medical care that is their right.” To push its agenda, the Post blasts the 1973 Helms amendment which stipulates that foreign aid may not be used “to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” While nothing in these words prohibits funds being used to terminate pregnancies of rape victims, the Post claims—without showing— that it has been interpreted as such.
The editorial describes how Islamists are using “rape as an instrument of war” in Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, South Sudan “and other countries.” Presumably, the Post believes that this horrific threat can best be countered by opening a string of abortion clinics across the Middle East and Africa. To bad if they’re killed, so long as the survivors get abortions, whether they want to or not.
The supreme hubris is that the Post assumes that the world shares its values, that the highest aspiration of every woman the world over is access to abortion.
But is it? While the editorial describes one displaced persons camp as containing over 200 impregnated women, it does not quote a single one as expressing the desire for an abortion. “Relief officials said they believed the number of those bearing the unwanted children of militants to be far higher [than 200].” But to be carrying an “unwanted” child is not the same as wanting to abort it. And these women are not clamoring for abortions. If they were, we’d surely be hearing about it.
A friend of mine described to me how disturbed she was when, as a young child, her friends called her “an accident” because she arrived somewhat unexpectedly to a family where the next youngest child was 17 years her senior. In tears, she asked her father whether it was true that she was “an accident.” “Accident, schmaccident,” her father replied. “You came, we loved you.”
What if, for Nigerian women, a baby is a life, to be loved and cherished no matter how the pregnancy came about? Suppose, as Bishop Badejo says, “Africans are not wired that way. [Suppose] for the African, life is sacred.” Suppose it’s not abortion that is the “right” that these women want. Suppose what they want is the right to retain their own values, the right to be free of Western cultural imperialism.
In the end, after reading this editorial, I had to ask, what has liberalism wrought? We see horrific images of beheadings, torture, rape, murder, burning villages, children missing, and our only answer to it all is our clarion call to “abort the babies.” Confusion now hath surely made his masterpiece.
