The reference to ninjas is tucked inside Simcha Fischer’s otherwise apolitical posting of a Loretta Lynn housewife song:
It seems like a pretty good follow-up to the March for Life, doesn’t it? You know, that day when hundreds of thousands of ninjas march to show their support of women and babies. I say “ninjas” because they somehow slip by the attention of the media — amazing! It’s like they were never there. And yet they get the job done.
Our local March for Life, however, was not entirely ignored by the media. Our free entertainment weekly, which doubles as our incisive political reporting weekly*, made mention of the event: Our intrepid reporter tells us that the March happened, and then utterly topples the foundations of the Pro-Life movement, by pointing out that all those aborted babies would have grown up to be criminals anyway.
Not his idea, he was citing Levitt & Dubner in the very famous Freakonomics. (The hardcover was published William Morrow, 2005. You can buy other versions now, of course.) The book doesn’t make any moral prescriptions, by the way — economists general don’t. But it really does set forth the theory that the drop in the crime rate that occurred in the 1990’s was the direct result of Roe v. Wade. The idea being that the really bad mothers know they are really bad mothers, so they abort their children rather than raising them up to a life of crime. And 18 years later, you and I reap the benefits of that instinctive act of preemptive genocide.
If only all those marching ninjas had known!
But all mockery aside, our reporter got to the bizarre heart of the Pro-Life movement: We actually believe that even the children of ne’er-do-wells should not be summarily executed. We are willing to take the risk that you, child of poverty, decadence, and a very broken home, may or may not live out the hope embodied in your cute little baby smile.
Radical freedom. The idea that the right to life belongs even the children of those other kinds of people. The idea that having lousy parents is not, in itself, a capital crime.
And so I’m thankful to our reporter for giving us such a clear vision of the divide. We see how those who want to apply the abortion chapter of Freakonomics to public policy feel about the human race: What’s a few million dead bodies, if it lowers the crime rate?
Which explains why you would need thousands upon thousands of ninjas, if you wanted to go head-to-head with a regime like that.
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*I am not kidding about the politics — in addition to vast coverage of bars, restaurants, and services with 1-900 phone numbers, it really is the only local paper that does investigative reporting. And we wonder why the mainstream newspapers are failing.