"The Suicidal Aspect Of Their Moral Reasoning."

Today on the First Things blog, Nicholas Frankovich continues an argument supporting the thesis that choosing to support abortion rights introduces a kind of suicidal germ:

We know what abortion does to the aborted. To the aborting it does the psychological equivalent. “Do unto others . . .” is a principle that moves along a straight and narrow path and, please note, in both directions. As I would have others do unto me, I ought to do unto them. And so if I have already done unto them, I am now committed to wishing the same for myself. If I abort my unborn child, well, that’s nothing I would deny my parents had the right to do to me.

Self-hatred is what I end up with when I carry to its logical conclusion the proposition that abortion rights are morally necessary, that justice demands them. I repress that thought because self-hatred hurts. I sequester it in a mental sac, as the body will sometimes form an abscess to contain an infection. If you puncture it in the course of one of those uncomfortable exchanges people are always having about abortion, the toxins will spill into my bloodstream, whereupon I will instinctively spin my wheels to try to convert them into something anodyne. I will say I choose abortion because I esteem myself enough to choose not to suffer and, moreover, because I love my child and choose to spare him too. I choose to spare him the peculiar set of hardships he would suffer by being born into the unique set of complex circumstances that would define his difficult life.

Here's the whole thing.