When I was about ten years old, my Dad brought me a book from the library. It was thin, hard covered, with a funny looking cover illustration depicting various farm animals. It was titled Animal Farm and was my first introduction to satire. Later, in college, I was assigned to read an essay by Jonathan Swift, titled A Modest Proposal. It is along these lines of satire that I endeavor to write a parable of my own, in order to point out a grand fallacy in the thought process of a very vocal portion of Americans.
It is well known that many vegetarians refuse to eat meat, or meat products, because it requires taking the life of an innocent animal. Thence the slogan “Meat is Murder”. I however, have developed an idea that would allow cattle marketers to circumvent that resistance and open up a new corner of the market, in addition to reducing the cost of raising beef, pork or mutton. The idea simply stated is this: The farmer simply takes a pregnant cow, pig, or sheep, near the end of her term, sends her into premature labor, and butchers the calf before it takes its first breath. This meat would then be available for ready consumption by vegetarians, as, after all, the calf was never really alive.
I daresay that most people upon reading this would find my proposal particularly disgusting and ludicrous, yet consider my interpretation of this satire:
Every day in America, the Land of the Free, the Land of Liberty, thousands of human children are being legally murdered before they can take their first breath. Proponents of this slaughter argue that the child is not really alive until it is completely born. Strangely enough to me, the same people that would protest the use of unborn calves as meat commend and condone the daily slaughter of human beings, as a woman’s right. While preparing to write this blog, as an assignment, I reviewed several websites, and came across an ad that really opened my eyes to the priorities of our Nation. The ad questioned, “Will you be pro-life after she is born?” and went on to say that if a person was not willing to devote equal time to fighting war, poverty, homelessness and ‘our planet’s degradation’, then they should stop defining themselves as ‘pro life’. I want to ask the American people, how is it that the primary right for a child to exist, unmolested, and defined as a person can be put on equal footing with saving the rainforests and taking political actions to improve the standard of living for adult persons. I definitely agree that it is a sad and terrible thing that people are living in poverty, but at least they have been allowed to live! Please, this debate is not about political action, it is about defining the unborn as a person with the same existing rights of protection that are allotted to adults. I ask a question posed by many fellow supporters of these unborn children: why are sea turtle eggs protected by the government, but Human embryos are legally used in genetic experiments? Why is it a crime to fight pit bulls, but legal to dissolve an unborn human in saline? Why do people consider veal a disgusting product of animal cruelty, and support stem-cell research that obtains its experimental material from the bodies of aborted babies? Why will people chain themselves to trees to prevent logging operations in the Amazon, and vote for candidates that approve government funding of abortions? What is wrong with us? When Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal he was speaking out against the treatment of the Irish people. His essay was based on the idea that the Irish were being treated like animals, and he used this satire to shock people into hopefully realizing what they were doing. What is most amazing to me is that in writing my little paragraph of a satire, I had to compare animals to people, because people are more easily moved by the plight of beef cows than by the slaughter of unborn children. And we say we have made progress?
