The million-dollar question
By Michael Moriarty
web posted July 31, 2006
Last week, I was interviewed by Márvio dos Anjos, a reporter for Folha de S. Paulo. During the conversation, I suggested that his paper undertake a survey in the enormous Paraisopolis favela (slum) or in Rio's famous City of God shantytown. The survey would ask the first 100 people: "Would you rather have been aborted, or had the chance to spend your life in Paraisopolis?"
I awoke the next morning, knowing that one of the informal survey respondents might want to kill me for even asking the question… such has been known to happen in the favelas.
Assuming no one in Rio or São Paulo would want to risk their lives over that question, I decided that if some Brazilian corporation put up $1 million to carry out the survey, I would volunteer – risk my life, in other words – to do the following:
One thousand dollars goes to each of the first 100 people who answer the question either way. That leaves $900,000 for me. I think it's a fair fee for risking my life. Of course, I would go with bodyguards because I want to live! Yes, I would, as the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas suggested: "Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!" I would pay the survey respondents out of my salary, and more than $1,000 would be paid to each bodyguard because those guys are risking injury as well.
The response to my survey would tell me whether God is a Capitalist or a Eugenicist, and if the Brazilian favela dwellers approve or disapprove of abortion. These are the people that the overpopulation-mongers in a norte figure would be the ones most likely to support government-subsidized abortion.
Oh, by the way, inner-womb videos have generally shown that gestating infants, even in the first two trimesters, struggle while being executed. They rage against the end of their brief life.
The growing consensus fostered by the global media seems to be that legal abortion will be instituted everywhere, including Brazil, where it is still illegal. They even allow abortion in Italy, for God's sake! Imagine, if you will, an abortion clinic, concealing behind its cinderblock walls the slippery bloodbath floor, over which loom doctors in masks spattered with the blood and tissue of freshly dead fetuses… just a few steps from St. Peter's Square.
The progressive Catholic theologian Gary Wills builds a case that the Passion was a drama set up by Christ with the willing cooperation of Judas: kind of an ensemble play in which Jesus agrees to be crucified and Judas agrees to commit suicide – a very novel and highly Islamic version of the Greatest Story Ever Told. Christ still had to live through Gethsemane, the night in the garden overlooking Jerusalem in which he imagined everything that would happen to him and sweated blood doing it – perhaps an agony worse than the Crucifixion itself. Gary Wills, in his book, What Christ Meant, canonizes Judas, even declares him a saint. I suppose any distortion of Holy Writ is possible among Progressive Liberals and Liberation Theologians intent on furthering their abortion-happy agenda.
You may recall Hillary Clinton running around the world, shaking hands with the poor and photographing them, such as the picture in her autobiography Living History that shows the despondent face of a teenage prostitute dying of AIDS in the Philippines. Clinton of course infers the question: "Don't you think she would have been better off aborted?"
Well, I think it's time to ask that million-dollar question.
Advocates of unfettered abortion have used the fashionable issue of women's rights to get a foot in the door in the same way that Nazis used Aryan rights to set up Jews, Gypsies and Slavs as the first guinea pigs for adult human experimentation in concentration camps.
Now, the Million Dollar Question I will pose to residents of Paraisopolis or the City of God, if asked and paid to do so, will be: "Is poverty so bad a condition that you would have preferred to have been aborted rather than know anything at all about life?"
Or perhaps I should phrase it as follows: "Would nothingness have been preferable than your poverty-stricken life?"
If the answer is a resounding "no", the Pro-Choicers would counterattack, questioning the validity of these findings. Well, the numbers might show that humans would rather live than be aborted. However, the Liberal-dominated media would spin the event into one of Catholic manipulation, painting Brazil as a dupe of Pope Benedict XVI, portraying him as a gangster on a throne.
Yeah, that sounds about right... a bit crude but… oh well, I guess we pro-Lifers are crude. Life itself, as the Progressives repeatedly point out in Africa, the Philippines and South America, has always been so messy!
They're here to clean it all up!
An abortionist's vacuum cleaner is what they've started with. It's one thing for the maid to break a family heirloom while cleaning, but 1.5 million dead gestating infants a year in America alone? That goes beyond carelessness. That's mass murder!
And they call us pro-Lifers crude! 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Mary Christmas and Force of Impact. Moriarty is also running for President of the