Friday, March 27, 2020

Cuomo's Surprise

At a press briefing Tuesday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo delivered himself of something of a shocker. In making the case that the government should spend whatever it takes to mitigate the Covid-19 crisis he stated emphatically that,
My mother is not expendable, your mother is not expendable and our brothers and sisters are not expendable, and we’re not going to accept the premise that human life is disposable, and we’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life. The first order of business is to save lives, period. Whatever it costs.
The governor, a Democrat (and a Catholic, no less), apparently defines human life as something that magically commences at birth because he certainly isn't very concerned about pre-natal human life. This is the governor who last year signed legislation allowing for babies to be aborted up to the time of birth if the health of the mother was at risk.

Of course, "health of the mother" is a very elastic term which means whatever the mother and her doctor want it to mean. If a mother will be deeply upset if she has to carry the baby to term that could be construed by a sympathetic doctor as a mental health rationale for terminating the pregnancy. The New York law, called the Reproductive Health Act, essentially permits abortion on demand at any time in a pregnancy.

This is also the same governor who in 2014 declared that anyone who believes that human life is not disposable and that cost should not be a concern in saving human lives is not welcome in the state of New York. He referred to such people as "extreme" conservatives because they hold to the inarguable biological position that an unborn child is both human and alive.

Cuomo considers these folks extreme because they believe that those human lives deserve prima facie protection, just like Cuomo believes the life of his octogenarian mother deserves prima facie protection.

In the mind of Andrew Cuomo, some human life is evidently more expendable than other human life.