So today we must confront the fact that the American people seem at present prepared to elevate to the apex of the executive a couple of faith-addled embryo-embracers. It is right, therefore, to consider a country constrained by the sort of abortion and contraception policies condoned by the dynamic duo of John McCain and Sarah Palin, who would place the egg upon an altar.
To do so it is not necessary to re-examine the US in the age before Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. A more recent example is available. That would be Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, a reign terminated on Christmas Day of 1989. In Ceausescu's Romania, "life" was protected from the moment of conception, as McCain and Palin would protect it here. In Ceausescu's Romania, a woman was permitted to abort a fetus only if her very life were in danger; McCain and Palin would here permit an abortion only under such a circumstance.
So how did that work out, there in Romania?
Determined to boost the population of Romania from twenty-two million to thirty million by the year 2000, [Ceausescu] virtually outlawed abortion and contraception. The result was a surge in the number of unwanted children, a jump in the infant mortality rate, and the deaths of thousands of women who attempted illegal abortions every year . . . .
In 1966, a year after Ceausescu came to power, Romania adopted legislation providing for prison terms of up to five years for illegal abortions. An abortion was permitted only if a woman had already had five children. In 1986 the law was tightened further to ban abortions for any woman under the age of forty-five unless her life was endangered. There were severe penalties for doctors carrying out illegal abortions. These draconian restrictions were combined with a failure to create suitable living conditions for raising large families. Many women who were unable to face the prospect of having more children, and were too poor to bribe doctors for illegal abortions, attempted to self-abort. Others had the children only to abandon them later.
Under Ceausescu the Bucharest Municipal Hospital dealt with an average of three thousand failed abortions every year, including two hundred women who required major surgery. Many other women were too frightened to report to the hospital. The head of the hospital's gynecological section estimated that well over a thousand women died in Bucharest every year as a result of bungled abortions. Gangrene of the uterus and permanent sterility were frequent complications.
It is well to remember that until shortly before Ceausescu was driven from office, sent fleeing across the countryside, captured, "tried," and executed, he was often lionized by righties in the West: Richard Nixon praised his "profound understanding of the world's major problems"; he was knighted by the Queen of England. Ceausescu was seen more clearly by Mikhail Gorbachev, who referred to him in private as "the Romanian fuhrer," and to his face condemned him for isolating and terrorizing his own people.
Sarah Palin, proud graduate of Newt Gingrich's indoctrination camp for young conservatives, GOPAC, may be presumed to share Gingrich's fondness for orphanages.
There were certainly orphanages in Ceausescu's Romania, necessitated by the country's harsh penalties against abortion and contraception. What the inmates of these institutions thought of their leader, and of their confinement, became clear in the hours after Ceausescu lost his spot at the top.
When news of Ceausescu's overthrow reached the orphanage, staff and children went from room to room, tearing down his portraits. Some girls even gouged his eyes out[.]
"You saw what Ceausescu did," shouted Titza Batesatu. "He killed children; he shot children. He only pretended to love you, but in fact he shot you."
The same is said today, of George II, by the more than 4000 encoffined Americans he condemned to death in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the countless Iraqi and Afghan children he interred beneath the earth. And, if enabled by the American people to pursue their jihad against the 21st Century, the same will be said of McCain and Palin. For those two are not "protectors" of life. They're diggers of graves.
(From Never In Our Names. Also available in red.)