The right to silence
The right to silence
The tragic case of Ta'Kiya Young shows what the state-sanctioned murder of the unborn actually looks like.
The common refrain from the so-called Right to Life movement is that legal abortion, a safe medical procedure, is the equivalent of the state-sanctioned murder of “unborn children” — a recent parlor trick upgrade from their typical talk of “unborn babies.”
Next year, they might allege that abortion is the state-sanctioned murder of “unborn Ohio State quarterbacks.” But that’s a topic for another day.
Anti-abortion activists are quick to pronounce that “All Lives Matter.” But to them, no lives matter more than those of the unborn. It’s the greatest sin that they use to wash away the other, lesser sins of the Republican Party, which is why they conflate a safe medical procedure with infanticide, an act that’s already criminalized by our penal code.
It all ties back to the original ruse of the movement, as laid bare in a quote from Methodist pastor David Barnhart that I have used before in these pages and still think about a lot:
“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.
You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone.
They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
Pregnant mothers also belong to that group of people under the bus for the unborn. After all, criminalizing abortion would only be a death sentence for some expectant mothers.
But the hypocrisy also shows in literal cases of the state-sanctioned murder of the unborn, as we’ve seen in the aftermath of the execution of 21-year-old Ta’Kiya Young, an expectant mother with two young sons, who was fatally shot by an unnamed Blendon Township officer on August 24th for the alleged crime of stealing liquor from a company that made $4.13 billion in profits in 2022.
Here is how Brian Steel, the Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge #9, described the scene.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Officers must make split second decisions during tense and chaotic situations. While most people will never be placed in such a position in their lives, our officers have been faced with these impossible circumstances with increasing frequency. This summer, we have had two separate calls for service in which suspects have shot officers during these encounters. The men and women of law enforcement place their lives in jeopardy every day when they go to work. Though the public and the media typically only think of guns as deadly weapons, the reality is that guns are not the only danger that these officers face. A vehicle can be just as deadly as a gun. An officer, who is threatened by an individual attempting to run them over with a vehicle, has the right to defend themselves from a deadly threat.
But regardless of the circumstances, the death in this case is heartbreaking. The Lodge expresses its condolences to the family for its loss of this young woman.
Brian A Steel
Unfortunately, police, who it must be said volunteered for their job, have a long and storied history in Columbus (and throughout America) of distorting the truth and outright lying to defend the criminal actions of their fellow members.
Last month, for example, 10 people got shot in what police described as “a mass shooting” in the Short North. No suspected criminals have been charged, and, a month later, we still don’t know how many of those victims were shot by police. My guess is a sizable majority of them.
But let’s concede that Ms. Young, for some reason, decided to steal a couple of bottles of liquor from Kroger despite there being no evidence that she did.
It’s hard for me to envision a scenario where anyone, let alone a pregnant woman, deserves to be extrajudicially executed by a suburban cop in a parking lot, though I’m sure that wouldn’t be hard for the deranged law-and-order types who also fantasize about using their god-given Second Amendment rights to kill federal agents.
It’s curious, then, that 72 hours later, we still haven’t seen any footage from Kroger. Nothing from inside the store nor anything from the surveillance towers that Kroger keeps in their parking lots to identify shoplifting suspects.
Police claimed that “the earliest” body camera footage would be released later today. We’ll see about that.
As of now, we have nothing but the word of the cops, and anybody reading this far on a Monday morning knows how much that is worth in scenarios involving another extinguished Black life in our streets.
We may never even know the name of the cop that executed somebody on the public dime, since area cops are now laughably hiding behind Marsy’s law as victims of crime as a way to circumvent transparency.
But it’s telling that the right-to-life extremists that will once again attempt to convince Ohioans to vote against their own interests in November, can’t even issue a statement on the fatal shooting of a young, pregnant mother at the hands of an agent of the state—let alone organize a protest of the violence.
Maybe it would be different had Ma’Kiya Young had the sense to be born white in America. Seeing as didn’t, the right-to-life silence around her death reminds me of the anti-abortion movement’s roots in white supremacy that date back to the founding of America.
I’m sure anti-abortion advocates would consider that last part unfair. That’s probably because they have never considered the history of their movement. If they had, it’d be easy for them to understand why they don’t have the same energy for a dead Black pregnant woman executed over alleged petty theft that they do for a cluster of cells in a stranger’s uterus.