One may never say that he favors performing medical experiments on unborn boys and girls. This intellectual schizophrenia is perpetually present in the pronouncements of our culture's liberal arbiters. Knowing this, many liberals try denying that abortion destroys human life by denying that the fetus is human. To admit its humanity is to acknowledge that they have been betraying liberalism, and much else as well. Betraying liberalism is precisely what liberals have been up to.
People possess hopelessly animalistic impulses.
So said the Freudians. Their throroughgoing pessimism about human nature and redemption somehow persuaded many liberals to exchange an optimistic belief in progress for a dreary death ethic. This they merged with a Malthusian obsession with population growth as depleting rather than producing wealth, with each person seen as the problem, rather than the solution, concerning poverty and other ills. Thus emerged the dark belief that death must be a solution to humanity' s woes, that for some to live, others must die. In this zero-sum view of existence, abortion could be seen as the responsible thing to do.