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It was only a matter of time: In today’s Chicago Tribune, columnist Dennis Byrne takes offense to the flawed and over-the-top “after-birth abortion” paper I noted in the Bleader on March 2. (Steve Chapman also invoked it in a Tribune column, March 15.) To Byrne, who will never have to worry about getting pregnant, this philosophers’ exercise in argument explains so much that’s wrong with “today’s self-absorbed culture.” To me, who has been, it looks more like Jonathan Swift’s 18th century baby-eating satire, “A Modest Proposal.”
Byrne concludes with a revision of Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed with the right to life, only if the rest of us decide it to be so.”
All men, indeed.