A new article at NBC News completely flips reality about the recent bombing at a California fertility clinic, comparing the assault to attacks on abortion facilities.

Titled “Bombing at IVF clinic should be a security wake-up call for fertility centers, experts say,” the story by Elizabeth Chuck ignores the fact that the Palm Springs atrocity, in which the bomber died and four bystanders were injured, was perpetrated by a self-proclaimed anti-humanist who believed that bringing children into the world is wrong. The bomber, Guy Edward Bartkus, left behind a manifesto proclaiming his goal was to “sterilize this planet of the disease of life.” He was, in short, not a pro-lifer by any measurement, but the radical opposite.

Media reports like this one illustrate the now, near-ubiquitous challenge of what-aboutism, where what should be a sustainable consensus against violence from any quarter is converted into a tit-for-tat about one side or the other of public debates seeming to excuse such actions by its allies. The truth is that there is violence today on both sides of many hotly contested issues, and it is also true that most proponents of various causes reject such tactics as extreme. Maintaining this moral consistency has proven to be very difficult, but the facts about the prevalence of violence remind us of the urgent need for balance and self-restraint in what has become an aggravating blame game.

Take some of the most notorious criminal acts of the last several years. Besides the attack by Bartkus, as Wesley Smith notes in a must-read article at National Review, there has been a wave of antipathy to human existence in both the intellectual press and on the street. Smith cites an incident in 2010 where an assailant at the Discovery Channel demanded that the television service stop “encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants.”

Smith goes on to recap articles from the last few years in prestigious publications like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Medical Ethics that cast a relentlessly bleak picture of human existence and call for the end not only of policies that encourage childbearing but for any childbearing at all. In 2012, a planned mass shooting at Family Research Council was thwarted by the heroic action of building operations manager Leo Johnson, who sustained a serious wound when a man angered by FRC’s stances on sexual conduct invaded the FRC headquarters.

Far from isolated incidents, these kinds of crimes can become commonplace as a result of news events extremists label intolerable. Last month, a California man bent on killing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh pleaded guilty to attempted assassination, blaming his actions on the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion on abortion and other judicial actions he believed were responsible for the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. In the wake of the high court’s June 2022 ruling in the Dobbs case, attacks were launched against nonprofit pregnancy help centers across the United States. Varying in severity, and with fortunately no loss of life, an estimated total of more than 100 assaults occurred on centers and churches across the United States. Apprehensions and prosecution of individuals responsible were rare under the Biden administration but did occur under the federal FACE Act.

None of this is to say that opponents of abortion and objectors to other public policies have been immune from committing similar deeds. The individuals imprisoned for peacefully blocking access to abortion facilities may have been selectively prosecuted and disproportionately punished, but there is little question they violated the same federal law that protects pregnancy help centers and churches from illegal acts. Over the long history of the abortion debate, the killing of abortionists has occurred in Colorado, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, and several other states. Director-actor Clint Eastwood made the film “Richard Jewell” about a security cop who was wrongly prosecuted after he foiled a bomb attack on the Olympic Village in Atlanta. The actual perpetrator, one Eric Rudolph, was identified and convicted in 2005 for his role in the bombing of a gay nightclub and an abortion facility in Birmingham, Alabama, years earlier. He is serving multiple terms of life imprisonment for these actions.

Understanding why individuals resort to violence, and why more individuals now justify that resort, including when actions occur on the scale of the Black Lives Matter riots and the January 6, 2021 incursion into the U.S. Capitol, is a vital question of our time. It is a sad condition when one hears the first reports of a violent incident, a Tesla exploding outside a Las Vegas hotel or a car bomb outside an IVF facility, and immediately waits for news whether the perpetrator was “one of ours.” Because the truth is, people who abandon the law and resort to these actions, whatever their motive, are never one of ours, whether they are anti-natalists or militant pro-lifers or race partisans or election deniers. The temptation to which NBC News succumbed with trying to tie Bartkus to opponents of various IVF practices is another chapter of the continuing tragedy of what-aboutism.

It is vital that debates about ethical matters, especially those as potent as abortion and test tube babies, proceed without the injection of point-scoring masquerading as insight. On the eve of the release of expected policy recommendations on IVF from the Trump administration, the choice is not merely between massive public funding of this practice or endorsement of the Guy Bartkuses of the world. The choice is between rational, principled, public debate and a collapse into governing by fear, intimidation, or neglect.

It does little to defend democracy when smaller numbers than ever turn out to exercise it at the ballot box. The more passionate and portentous the issue, the more essential this commitment to peaceful change becomes. Add to the brew the fact, obvious from recent elections, that the United States is a sharply divided country on some of the most fundamental questions: what is a man or woman, who is a human being, are the disabled equally valuable, what is marriage? The side of these questions that not only makes the better argument but also appeals to our better nature, that eschews violence of action or rhetoric, that moves with compassion and clarity, is the side that can, and will deserve to, prevail.

Meanwhile, as Wesley Smith so persuasively demonstrates, the strain of nihilism running through today’s intellectual culture is far deeper than that of one madman who was bereft of fatherly presence or civil guidance. Today’s isolated and violent souls are increasingly fed by isolating ideologies for whom human doom is always just around the corner. Our most prominent journals would do well to do some couples therapy over their attraction to such thinking and stop publishing so much rancor, not because they do not have the right to do so but because it isn’t right to do so. The human future is only as bleak or bright as we are willing to make it.