Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

JAY: No, it’s much simpler than that. The guy can’t be allowed to get away with murder. Period. The government shouldn’t execute him, because the government shouldn’t be in the business of taking people’s lives. It has to be an individual. Which is me. If what I do causes an upheaval, okeydoke. The sooner we get our comeuppance, the sooner we stop being a world bully, and the sooner the dying stops. You know what’s totally fucked us up? Morally?

BEN: What?

JAY: Abortion.

BEN: Ugh. Don’t you have enough to think about?

JAY: No, this is very much a part of it, because I think one reason this country is so totally messed up and in the viselike grip of these brownshirts and these radio wackos right now is because the left decided, Okay, here’s our big issue, “reproductive rights.” Well, it’s not a good issue at all, and it introduced an inconsistency into the liberal position, a huge inconsistency that the right then exploited, and will continue to exploit until the left is destroyed. If the Democrats weren’t so bullheadedly pro-abortion we wouldn’t be in Iraq now.

BEN: How’s that?

JAY: Because Bush wouldn’t have won. Bush won because gentle-hearted people heard the fakery, the falsehood. “Pro-choice.” It’s audible.

BEN: So what’s your position? Make it illegal?

JAY: It’s illegal already. I mean, if it’s a couple thousand cells, the size of an aphid, well, fine. Ladybug, okay. Water strider? Hmmmm. But then very quickly we’re talking about something the size of a mouse, and that’s important. The size of a mouse. A mammal. Then our protective instincts come into play and our instincts say, Hey, this is a vulnerable innocent creature and we can’t just suck it out of its burrow and let it die there on a steel tray. It should be protected under the laws of the country.

BEN: What’s the law now? I have to tell you I don’t think about this much. I avoid it.

JAY: The law now is basically that you can have an abortion if the baby would die if it was born.

BEN: I see.

JAY: And the pro-choice fact sheets say things like eighty percent of abortions are performed when the fetus is less than two and a half inches long. That’s about the size of the Indian in the Cupboard. Why would we think that because it’s two inches long we can kill it? Dr. Seuss knew what he was talking about.

BEN: What do you mean?

JAY: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

BEN: God, I bet you’re popular at parties.

JAY: The right wing is right on this, I’m telling you. This is murder. It is. You don’t have to be a Christian extremist to see it. Millions of women get pregnant in this country every year. Do you know how many of them allow a person in a white coat to kill their babies?

BEN: I really don’t want to debate this with you. It was better when we were talking about assassination, honestly.

JAY: We are talking about assassination. The objections to war are poisoned by this hypocrisy. About twenty percent. Twenty percent of all pregnancies in this country end up being aborted. That’s hundreds of thousands of infants.

BEN: Fetuses.

JAY: Not fetuses! “Fetus” is a scientific word that’s deliberately chosen to be ugly so that the remorse of killing will not attach to it. Infants.

BEN: Nnn.

JAY: If it’s an aphid, fine. When they’re as big as a mouse, when they’ve got hands, they deserve our protection. They’ve become civilians.

BEN: Nnn.

JAY: That’s the link. I’m marching with all these people against the war, and I’m screaming, “Hey Bush, what do you say? How many kids have you killed today?” And it’s true, the blood is on his hands, so you scream it and scream it, but then it kind of sticks in your throat, you know? Because you look around at the screaming people in the crowd and you know damn well that they would shun you, they would turn all their fierceness and their fury on you if they knew that you believed that abortion was murder. They would! You know I’m right.

BEN: People get fierce about this, Jay, because, you know—

JAY: What?

BEN: Because in the old days women died.

JAY: Ah.

BEN: There were desperate women who went to back-alley doctors who did terrible things. And they died.

JAY: Because there were evil doctors and incompetent doctors, and people who pretended to be doctors but were really killers, who harmed desperate women, therefore we must continue to permit the deliberate killing of the unborn? What kind of an argument is that? That’s not an argument, that’s a piece of shit!

BEN: No, it’s not a piece of shit.

JAY: Yes it is. It’s like saying, Because Saddam gassed his own citizens, we had to drop bombs that would kill his citizens so that he could be removed from power.

BEN: I don’t see that they’re parallel at all.

JAY: What the left is all about is equality before the law. If you’re arrested for DUI, you can’t have your father fix it for you. You can’t send a cruise missile into a restaurant because you think a dictator is having dinner there with his family. And if you’re pregnant and you would rather not be, you can’t hire somebody with a suction machine to destroy your kid. It’s as simple as that. The laws of the land apply to evil people, to good people, to old people, to unborn people. That’s why babies are so beautiful, we feel how vulnerable and helpless they are. The medical profession has cut this link. They’ve sterilized our instincts.

BEN: People I know very well have had abortions.

JAY: I’m sure that’s true.

BEN: I know them very, very well. They’re not happy about it, they grieve over it.

JAY: Grief, now that’s truth — they’ve got something there.

BEN: Well, they grieve. That’s all I’ll say.

JAY: You remember Sarah, the one with the bracelets? The doctor said she probably couldn’t get pregnant because when she was young she’d had two abortions. Scar tissue. Now, she suffered over that. Don’t you think some of the kids, the soldiers, over in Iraq who get caught in some sudden riot and fire off a round, and then they see that they just shot some six-year-old boy who’s now dead on the sidewalk, don’t you think they’re going to grieve later on? Some of them? Try to figure out a way to tell themselves that their life is part of some larger good even though the most memorable thing they ever did was to shoot that boy dead in the street? Don’t you think they’re going to feel guilt?

BEN: Some of them will.

JAY: They definitely will. It’s wrong for the government to do that to people, to put them into a position where some of them will do things that are obviously totally wrong and that they will recognize to be wrong later. And it’s wrong for us to allow women to live with that grief for the rest of their lives. That was their one child, maybe. Maybe that was the baby that they were meant to have, and there weren’t going to be any others.

BEN: You’ve obviously thought a great deal about this, and that’s fine, and what I would recommend is that you — well, you know what I’m going to say.

JAY: What?

BEN: I was going to say, Why don’t you get yourself a notebook, one of those little composition books with the marble design on the covers, and write all this down? Just for your own personal clarification.

JAY: It’s intertwined. I get jittery when I try to write, I go here, I go there. I have to emit the words at normal talking speed. To somebody. When I go “Word, word, word, word” it doesn’t make any sense. That’s why they leave me. I wear people out.

BEN: Are you able to read at all?

JAY: Some, sure. Not like I used to, but sure, I go to Barnes & Noble, absolutely. I went a couple of weeks ago, had a cup of coffee. God, I’m parched. Shouldn’t we break out a couple of these little bottles? Clinky clinky?