I'm not going to try to emulate the professional writers and try to address the issue in comprehensive detail. I'll just point you to where others have already done it well, as in this column by Ann Coulter addressing the need to change the law, not just "hearts and minds". She points out, rightly in my opinion, that an issue of life and death that is this divisive in the country needs to be a matter decided by representative democracy, not judicial fiat. Let the people vote! My opinion, after years of study and activism on this issue, is that the current status of abortion policy (available in all 9 months, for almost any reason, paid for by federal taxes if necessary) would not survive a public vote, and for good reason. It's an egregious affront to respect for life and it's entirely untenable.
Of course, in the week of the anniversary of Roe, the slogans and euphemisms were flying. Hillary Clinton began the pandering in one of her speeches designed to "move her to the center" to position for the 2008 presidential election. She said
"We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women."
In that, we agree. We just radically disagree on how to deal with the issue. Make no mistake, Hillary Clinton is a hardcore abortion-at-all costs supporter, as demonstrated by her actions in public over the years. As was her husband, President Bill Clinton, who's first action on his first day in office was to immediately sign five bills to broaden the access to abortion. His first act, on purpose, to reward his most vocal supporters - the extreme abortion on demand for any reason activists.
Honestly, I find the whole issue of abortion slogans tiresome. How many times do we have to dissect the empty, deceptive, and misdirecting slogans of the abortion peddlers? Really, it's so easy to do that it's tiresome. Let's take a couple, for example:
Bill Clinton: who announced that he would like abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare". Ooohhhh. Have you stopped swooning at the total compassion and reasonableness of that wonderful statement yet? Then let me ask you two questions:
1. If abortion is just the removal of a clump of tissue, as abortion peddlers have argued for so long, analogous to a tonsillectomy and with absolutely no moral issues involved - then why do you care if it's "rare"? Do you care how many appendectomies are performed every year?
2. If, on the other hand, an unborn baby is a baby, a life deserving of the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that our country was founded on - and an abortion is the premature forced taking of that precious life by brutal force of a suction or saline abortion - then why do you only care that it is "safe, and legal"?
The vast majority of the activists on the other side of the rally carrying their "keep your rosaries off my ovaries" signs or waving coat hangers have never thought through those issues. But they are so very self-righteous in their zeal to make the death of an unborn baby as cavalier and meaningless and widespread as possible.
Other slogans are equally ridiculous platitudes designed to depersonalize the issue to hide the moral issues or to sound compassionate when they are in fact murderous. Let's take one more, for example:
Planned Parenthood's slogan: "Every child a wanted child". Fine. Wonderful. Compassionate. Progressive, even. Let's all hold hands and sing Kum-ba-ya. Oh, wait a minute. Given that Planned Parenthood is the single largest provider of abortions in the United States and that a majority of the 1.5 Million unborn babies end their short life on earth in a Planned Parenthood facility, shouldn't honesty in advertising require them to finish the thought: "...and every unwanted child a dead child - no questions asked at our facility for only $350 cash on the barrelhead". That's brutal, but it's true and it would at least be honest.
By the way, I toured a Planned Parenthood facility once. I called the United Way to ask them about exempting PP from my annual UW donation, and the perky and zealous activist that answered the phone offered to arrange a personal tour of the clinic for me to keep me from exempting them. I took her up on it and got a personal one-on-one tour by the director of the local clinic. During the tour of the death-mart, in the midst of all of the talk about how all of the abortion counseling was done by a qualified "nurse-practioner" (no doctor on board, what happened to all of that talk about abortion being between a woman and her doctor?), I asked the director if she referred patients to DCFS or other agencies for placement of the child for adoption. She was visibly baffled by the question, had no idea what the adoption options were, and assured me that DCFS did not do adoptions. I assured her, as a father who has adopted two children from DCFS, that they certainly do. So much for choice.
Instead of fighting the whole fight in this one column, let me just make it personal and declare my bias. I believe everyone, certainly the activists, bring a personal bias to this issue because it is a very personal issue. And just the sheer numbers of abortions in this country, 35 plus million in 32 years, make it inevitable that everyone has some experience with the issue: miscarriages, abortions as the woman or as the male or friend who counseled on the decision, parents and grandparents who were active or helpless accomplices, etc. Everyone has a reason to have an opinion. I have all of the standard moral and religious reasons, which are substantial and intellectually reasonable, but I also have a personal bias. So here's my bias:
My wife and I were childless for the first thirteen years of our marriage. Many attempts, many miscarriages and the trauma that accompanies that. We eventually set our hopes on adoption. Like many of the 1.5 million couples in America at any given time who are hoping to adopt, I saw the disconnect in the 1.5 million abortions at the same time that there are parents desperate to adopt. In the meantime, we became foster parents to help the many children in the system who need a home. In the course of fostering, we adopted two very special and precious boys who are alternately wonderful and trying. But they are always a blessing. And it hasn't escaped my attention that their two birth mothers, in the midst of their stressful and dysfunctional birth circumstances, opted to give birth. And even through everything these children went through, they are alive. And I thank God often for that. Had those two moms wandered into the clutches of a Planned Parenthood counselor, they very well might not be alive. And I can't fathom how that's an "enlightened choice" of an enlightened country. You tell me.
There's a building two blocks down from the office building I work in. It's non-descript and bland, barely marked. There's a parking lot in the back. And this week, the anniversary week of Roe v. Wade, like almost every week of the year, I will look at this building on my way out to lunch on Wednesday's and Thursdays and observe that the parking lot in the back is full. The real life, tangible, fruit of the abortion peddler's work. 70 desperate people filling the parking lot each week to slink in the back door with cash in hand. 35 precious babies on Wednesday and 35 precious babies on Thursday, each and every week, who will not live to meet their peers, or the couples who are desperately waiting to raise them. And I take that very personally. And yes, occasionally you will find me in respectful prayer out on the sidewalk of that horrible space.
I know that abortion is a sad and tragic and desperate choice for a woman. I know that, really I do. In this I agree with Hillary. I just disagree that we have to leave women in this desperation and provide them murder as a solution. Really, have we sunk so low as a people that this is our solution? Are we that morally bereft? That is the question for our generation. The great moral test that we face, as other generations have faced moral question before us. We are failing the test.
My choice, my answer to the test, is to work hard to support the abortion "alternatives" like Crisis Pregnancy Centers who support women in the choice to have the child and to find a way to make it work. (I find that most "pro-choice" shouter don't even know that the CPC's exist, or have a twisted view of their function). My question for each of you is: why is this an "alternative"? Why isn't this the preferred choice of a moral people?
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