Salon.com featured a piece by Mary Elizabeth Williams–in which she makes a pro-abortion argument while emphatically affirming her belief that a fetus is a living human being—with a stunning trumpet of a headline: “So What if Abortion Ends Life?” So, fetuses are human beings. But, so what? “All life is not equal,” Williams chillingly asserts, and a baby-in-utero, fully human and alive is, in her words, “a life worth sacrificing.”

Flannery O’ Connor told a friend, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say,” and it is the same for me. Last week saw me bed-bound, dealing with a bug that left me more addle-brained than usual, and in perusing my phone and tablet, I kept coming across the most interesting stories to ponder on my bed. Unable to sit up and write, though, I could not know what I thought.

I recalled G. K. Chesterton’s fantasy of lying in bed with a colored pencil suitable for ceiling-writing, and wished for a low ceiling and one of those big, soft-leaded pencils we were given in kindergarten—the kind that helped us learn to control our letters and, perhaps, our subsequent thoughts and words—so that I might corral my reason around one theme that kept popping up in my surveys. Each time I encountered the statement, or a variation upon it, its glare seemed so obvious to me: “yes, this is the next approach, the next challenge . . .” And yet–like a dream one cannot quite catch upon waking–the fully-developed idea would evaporate before I could get a hand on its misty tail.

The repeated thesis was simply this: “so what?”

In a three day period, I encountered three variations of this oddly innovative argument. Testifying on the deadly attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deployed it against a U.S. Senate Committee in order to divert attention from the single hardball thrown her way. Asked why the administration spent a week blaming American deaths on a little-seen video and reports of a “spontaneous protest”, when the true circumstances could have been known “within hours.” Clinton blared, “What difference at this point does it make?”

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Just what are you going to do about it? The next day, Salon.com featured a piece by Mary Elizabeth Williams–in which she makes a pro-abortion argument while emphatically affirming her belief that a fetus is a living human being—with a stunning trumpet of a headline: “So What if Abortion Ends Life?”

******

So, fetuses are human beings. But, so what? “All life is not equal,” Williams chillingly asserts, and a baby-in-utero, fully human and alive is, in her words, “a life worth sacrificing.”

******

A day after William’s piece, Derek Penwell hauled out the same question for theHuffington Post, with the headline: “‘So What?’ The Nightmare Christians Should Be Having.” Penwell begins by relating a recurrent nightmare in which he presents a paper, which is received by another with a shrugging, “so what?”

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