So what if abortion ends life?

I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice

Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word “life.” Life! Who wants to argue with that? Who wants be on the side of … not-life? That’s why the language of those who support abortion has for so long been carefully couched in other terms. While opponents of abortion eagerly describe themselves as “pro-life,” the rest of us have had to scramble around with not nearly as big-ticket words like “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” The “life” conversation is often too thorny to even broach. Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.

As Roe v. Wade enters its fifth decade, we find ourselves at one of the most schizo moments in our national relationship with reproductive choice. In the past year we’ve endured the highest number of abortion restrictions ever. Yet support for abortion rights is at an all-time high, with seven in 10 Americans in favor of letting Roe v. Wade stand, allowing for reproductive choice in all or “most” cases. That’s a stunning 10 percent increase from just a decade ago. And in the midst of this unique moment, Planned Parenthood has taken the bold step of reframing the vernacular – moving away from the easy and easily divisive words “life” and “choice.” Instead, as a new promotional film acknowledges, “It’s not a black and white issue.”

It’s a move whose time is long overdue. It’s important, because when we don’t look at the complexities of reproduction, we give far too much semantic power to those who’d try to control it. And we play into the sneaky, dirty tricks of the anti-choice lobby when we on the pro-choice side squirm so uncomfortably at the ways in which they’ve repeatedly appropriated the concept of “life.”

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

We’re so intimidated by the wingnuts, we get spooked out of having these conversations. We let the archconservatives browbeat us with the concept of “life,” using their scare tactics on women and pushing for indefensible violations like forced ultrasounds. Why? Because when they wave the not-even-accurate notion that “abortion stops a beating heart” they think they’re going to trick us into some damning admission. They believe that if we call a fetus a life they can go down the road of making abortion murder. And I think that’s what concerns the hell out of those of us who support unrestricted reproductive freedom.

But we make choices about life all the time in our country. We make them about men and women in other nations. We make them about prisoners in our penal system. We make them about patients with terminal illnesses and accident victims. We still have passionate debates about the justifications of our actions as a society, but we don’t have to do it while being bullied around by the vague idea that if you say we’re talking about human life, then the jig is up, rights-wise.

It seems absurd to suggest that the only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady’s vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better. Instead, we let right-wingers perpetuate the sentimental fiction that no one with a heart — and certainly no one who’s experienced the wondrous miracle of family life — can possibly resist tiny fingers and tiny toes growing inside a woman’s body. We give a platform to the notion that, as Christina Locke opined in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, “motherhood had slyly changed us. We went from basking in the rights that feminism had afforded us to silently pledging never to exercise them. Nice mommies don’t talk about abortion.”

Don’t they? The majority of women who have abortions – and one in three American women will – are already mothers. And I can say anecdotally that I’m a mom who loved the lives she incubated from the moment she peed on those sticks, and is also now well over 40 and in an experimental drug trial. If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.

My belief that life begins at conception is mine to cling to. And if you believe that it begins at birth, or somewhere around the second trimester, or when the kid finally goes to college, that’s a conversation we can have, one that I hope would be respectful and empathetic and fearless. We can’t have it if those of us who believe that human life exists in utero are afraid we’re somehow going to flub it for the cause. In an Op-Ed on “Why I’m Pro-Choice” in the Michigan Daily this week, Emma Maniere stated, quite perfectly, that “Some argue that abortion takes lives, but I know that abortion saves lives, too.” She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of “Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream.” Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if_abortion_ends_life/

Hardness of Heart and the Celebration of Abortion

In 1995, feminist leader Naomi Wolf called for a pro-abortion movement “that acts with moral accountability and without euphemism,” noting that, “With the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences — two ethical, one strategic: hardness of heart, lying and political failure.” That hardness of heart was fully manifest in the profane video produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

But let’s go back to October 16, 1995, when the New Republic published Wolf’s remarkably candid article entitled, “Our Bodies, Our Souls.” Wolf made reference to “Dr. Joycelyn Elders’s remark, hailed by some as refreshingly frank and pro-woman but which I found remarkably brutal: that ‘We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus….’”

She explained that “Second Wave feminists reacted to the dehumanization of women by dehumanizing the creatures within them. . . . Yet that has left us with a bitter legacy. For when we defend abortion rights by emptying the act of moral gravity, we find ourselves cultivating a hardness of heart.” And she urged that abortion must be treated with “grief and reverence.”

In stark contrast with that attitude, the Center for Reproductive Rights released an online video which is so obscene that author Eric Metaxas writes, “When I first watched this ad, I thought, this HAS to be a spoof. It employs the ugly racial stereotype of a smooth-talking [black] predator celebrating his freedom to use women at zero cost to himself: Hey, baby, hook up with me—and then go have an abortion. Are they kidding? No; this was no spoof.”

The “smooth-talking predator” is actor Mechad Brooks who sits in a chair holding a red rose in one hand and a drink in the other, saying to the camera (as if speaking to his spouse), “All these years so many people said we’d never make it. They’ve been trying to tear us apart. . . Put limits on you, on me, on us.” And then, Metaxas notes, “he roars with laughter,” a sardonic, mocking laughter at that.

“We’re going to be standing right by your side, today, tomorrow, and the years to come,” he continues. “Because that is how much you mean to me, baby.” And then, once more, the laughter.

To repeat: This was not intended to be a sick joke or a demented spoof. This was meant to be taken seriously, presumably by the same kind of people who shouted their approval of abortion at last year’s Democratic National Convention. Let’s celebrate the slaughter of 55 million babies in the womb, especially in the African American community!

Metaxas quotes Ryan Scott Bomberger, an African-American pro-lifer who runs the Radiance Foundation, who noted that, “With the black abortion rate as high as it is and black fathers as absent as they are, it’s just sick to see Mehcad Brooks shill for the number-one killer in the black community.”

More graphic still are the comments of Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who asked what her uncle would do “if he’d lived to see the contents of thousands of children’s skulls emptied into the bottomless caverns of the abortionists’ pits?”

Naomi Wolf wrote that, “The pro-choice movement often treats with contempt the pro-lifers’ practice of holding up to our faces their disturbing graphics. We revile their placards showing an enlarged scene of the aftermath of a D & C abortion: we are disgusted by their lapel pins with the little feet, crafted in gold, of a 10-week-old fetus; we mock the sensationalism of The Silent Scream.”

Yet, she asked, “How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. Free women must be strong women, too: and strong women, presumably do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.”

In light of these comments, I would like to make a simple proposal. The repulsive video described here has been pulled by its producer, but if someone can find a copy of it (legally), perhaps they can remake it, interspersed with these very images Wolf describes, terribly disturbing images which are now readily available online. Then let’s see if a single pro-abortion leader in the world will even attempt to minimize the horror of abortion.

Wolf argued that, “Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position and consolidate the support of the center.”

Let every American look at the pictures of these ripped up and mutilated babies and ask if it is possible for there to be an “abortion rights” movement that operates “within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility.” And let every American ask what kind of human beings (and what kind of organization) could mockingly celebrate the slaughter of the unborn.

Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire, and his latest book is The Real Kosher Jesus.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2013/01/29/hardness-of-heart-and-the-celebration-of-abortion-n1500011/page/full/

Stand For Life

Editor’s note: Dr. Adams will speak at Christ Church Lutheran Church in Phoenix, AZ on January 19. The speech, which is part of the Voices for the Voiceless “Redefine” Conference, will begin shortly after the conference opens at 8 am. Dr. Adams will then go to Minneapolis to speak at the Minnesota Youth for Life Conference on January 21. The all-day conference will be at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

A former student recently emailed that she was disappointed that I had gotten so heavily involved with the student pro-life movement in recent years. She said she could remember a time when I had a love for defending free speech rights. Her email was somewhat unfair as I am still defending First Amendment rights (did she read my last column?). Also, I have been involved in pro-life advocacy since I became a columnist in 2002. In fact, my very first published column was on the topic of abortion.

In the event my former student is reading this expression of anti-abortion advocacy, I would like to enumerate the reasons why she – a pro-lifer herself – should have been involved in the student pro-life movement when she was in college. The following are also reasons why all pro-life students should be actively pro-life:

1. The Societal Diminution of all Human Life. The pro-abortion choice movement has produced a general devaluing of human life that can only be corrected by a strong pro-life movement among students. How many of you were shocked by the acquittal of Casey Anthony? I was certainly angry but I was not shocked. She wanted to party and to date without being weighed down by the responsibility of motherhood. I believe she killed her little girl in order to live a life of convenience. The evidence clearly points toward her unmitigated guilt. But tens of millions of women have done the same thing since Roe v. Wade. No wonder the Anthony jury seemed bored throughout most of the proceedings. No wonder she walked despite the evidence. Her kind of guilt is commonplace.

2. The proximity of the threat. The culture war is raging in America. There are battlefields everywhere but none as large or contentious as the university campus. This is where the immensely profitable non-profits make a lot of their money off abortion. They are marketing their services to your fellow students. Therefore, simply by virtue of where you are, you can make a greater difference if you are willing to cut against the current.

3. Momentum. A May 2009 Gallup Poll found 51% of Americans calling themselves pro-life. Gallup began asking that question in 1995 and this was the first time a majority of Americans identified themselves as pro-life. Pew Research Center did a survey around the same time showing that only 46% believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That was down from 54% the previous year. Therefore, I would urge pro-lifers to become activists because they would be joining a winning team. In so doing, they could help accelerate these positive trends.

4. State and Individual Neutrality. The state cannot be neutral on abortion. It either a) recognizes that the unborn are human and have a right to life or b) permits killing them. Since our government has taken the public policy position that the unborn are not afforded the same rights as toddlers – including the right to be free from dismemberment – you need to take a public policy position, too. That means becoming an activist, not being a pacifist in the midst of a war on the unborn.

5. Propaganda and Passivity. Pro-choice arguments are so bad that they cannot survive scrutiny. They must be confined to soliloquy, rather than subjected to debate. For example, the “back alley abortion” argument suggests that we must make killing children safe or else adults might be killed in the process. Abortion choice advocates warn that “thousands” would be killed in back alleys if abortion were once again illegal. This is the way they justify legalizing the murder of millions. The logic is twisted and the facts are wrong. The Centers for Disease Control reported that only 39 women died from illegal abortions in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade. Put simply, propaganda is activism. And it is only effective when repeated endlessly in the presence of the passive. So we must all be active in combatting this deadly information.

6. Men’s Liberation. Men tend to be more supportive of abortion than women. That is why it is more accurate to call the so-called abortion rights movement a men’s liberation movement – as opposed to a woman’s liberation movement. Abortion liberates men by allowing them to sleep around without fear of consequences. It frees men from fatherhood and allows them to exploit women. So we need more male activists. Next time someone says “men have never had abortions, so they should not be commenting on it” say this: “women have never played in the NFL, so they should not be sportscasters.”

7. Underlining Causes. People will tell you that you should never become an activist seeking to make abortion unacceptable or, heaven forbid, illegal. Instead, they say you should focus on underlying causes. Rape has underlying causes. Should we make it legal and instead try to treat its underlying causes? Come to think of it, spousal abuse has underlying causes, too. We would never elect a politician who ran on a platform of making it legal for a man to beat his spouse. But we routinely elect politicians who run on a platform of saying it should remain legal for a woman to kill her baby. As you young people would say, “that’s messed up.” Indeed, it is. That’s why we need activists.

Reading this column, you may have noticed that all of my observations to this point have been brilliant. I’ll have more brilliant observations in my next book, “Up from Humility.” But the brilliant observations in this column have not been mine. In fact, each and every one of them was stolen from a new book called “Stand for Life” by John Ensor and Scott Klusendorf.

I highly recommend John and Scott’s new book. You can pick it up on Amazon for less than the price of two tall skinny lattes or a single ticket to the late show. By the time you are finished reading, you’ll be ready to take your first steps as an activist fighting for the right of the unborn to take their first steps.

Stand for Life is more than just aptly titled. It’s a real life saver (and I mean that literally). Of course, that’s just my humble opinion.

Mike Adams

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Letters to a Young Progressive: How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand, due out in April..

http://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2013/01/14/stand-for-life-n1487194/page/full/

 

NC Judge Denies Pro-Life License Plates, Calls for Pro-Choice Alternative By Katherine Weber , Christian Post Reporter

In a decision issued last week, a North Carolina judge ruled that  the state may only issue pro-life themed license plates if it also provides  pro-choice license plates as an alternative.

“This court concludes … that the state’s offering of a Choose Life license  plate in the absence of a pro-choice plate constitutes viewpoint discrimination  in violation of the First Amendment,” U.S. District Court Judge James Fox said  in his Dec. 7 ruling, as reported by The Associated Press.

Additionally, Chris Brook, legal director of the American Civil Liberties  Union, which filed the 2011 lawsuit regarding the plates, called Friday’s ruling  “a great victory for the free speech rights of all North Carolinians, regardless  of their point of view on reproductive freedom,” according to Fox News 8.

A spokesperson for the North Carolina Attorney General‘s Office said Dec. 10  that she was unsure if the state planned to appeal the ruling.

The plates were initially approved during the state’s 2011 legislative  session under the title Bill 289, with Rep. Mitch Gillespie (R-McDowell)  sponsoring the bill.

The legislature reportedly blocked six separate amendments that offered an  alternative license plate option for those who are pro-choice, which included  “Trust Women. Respect Choice,” and “Respect Choice,” according to WGHP-TV.

The American Civil Liberties Union then filed a lawsuit to block the plates  in Sept. 2011, arguing that the license plates were a viewpoint-discrimination  violation because they did not offer a sponsored alternative to the pro-life  plates.

At the time of the lawsuit’s filing, Judge Fox ordered a temporary block on  the production of the plates until legal action was determined.

The 376 North Carolina residents who applied for the plates, which cost $25  each, received refunds.

Rep. Gillespie told CNN affiliate WRAL-TV that he would strongly push for the attorney  general to appeal Judge Fox’s decision.

“Every case is different. They could rule differently,” Gillespie told  WRAL-TV regarding the outcome of an appeal.

“There’s a very good debate over whether it’s viewpoint discrimination,” he  added.

Gillespie went on to say that he strongly opposes the pro-choice alternative  to the license plate.

“I’d be willing to sacrifice this before I’d be willing to vote for that.  Personally, I couldn’t do it,” he said, adding, “My personal convictions on this  are strong.”

The “Choose Life” license plate is currently available in 29 states,  according to the Choose Life America website, the organization that  created the license plates and forwards proceeds from each plate sale to  pregnancy counseling centers.

http://global.christianpost.com/news/nc-judge-denies-pro-life-license-plates-calls-for-pro-choice-alternative-86482/#JwCgYgxUQZ5pmXAI.99