Let's be surgeons, Caius . . .

Diogenes again, here, commenting on the November Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling:

Michelman and Kissling take it as obvious that the Democratic Party's cautious inclusion of a few pro-lifers is a cynically contrived political feint and wholly contrary to its “principles”: those who respond are, in the Leninist sense, “useful idiots” momentarily needed to scrape together an electoral majority but of zero long-term consequence. Kissling moreover has repeatedly and convincingly pointed out that ‘reducing abortion by reducing poverty’ is a ruse: handy for electing progressives but entirely without statistical grounding in fact.

Michelman and Kissling are putting the question squarely to the Democratic Party: “Look folks, you have blood on your hands. There’s no denying that fact. So you have to remind yourselves ceaselessly that you are surgeons, and that the blood on your gloves comes from waste tissue in an operation you were proud to perform. If, on the other hand, you should forget yourself, or weaken, or even momentarily feel a pang of regret, that blood will testify against you for the remainder of recorded history. It just can’t happen.”

As Shakespeare's Brutus says to his co-conspirator, Caius Cassius:

Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
. . . gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
. . .
And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em. This shall make
Our purpose necessary and not envious:
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be call'd purgers, not murderers.

Just so. It is surgery we're performing here, remember that. Except that Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling emphatically do not what the pro-abortion movement to "seem to chide 'em" -- for, as Diogenes so perceptively recognizes, to chide is to acknowledge that something more ominous that surgery is going on here.