Abortion backers operate on illogic
By Stephen Cathers
Published: Thursday, April 29, 2004
This weekend, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched upon the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in the euphemistically named "March for Women's Lives."
Their numbers (half a million to 1 million) were certainly impressive, but little else about the march was.
Displaying a maturity level on par with that of junior high students, many of the protesters delighted in making slogans with vulgarities (why spell "country" when you could cleverly leave out the "o"?).
At a pre-march rally, Rep. Maxine Waters, displaying a level of vitriol that looked moderate compared to that of many of the marchers in a post-Dean Democratic Party, said that Bush could "go to hell."
Others wished that the president would have been aborted. But beyond the spectacle of grown women and men congratulating themselves for making naughty slogans about leaders named Bush and Dick, the rally revealed a radical movement that is further than ever from the mainstream and untouched by moral or logical concern.
As a disclaimer, there are certainly morally and logically serious people who are pro-choice.
They take into consideration the life of the fetus and argue logically about it.
This is not about them. Rather, this is about the national pro-abortion leadership (National Organization of Women, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, etc.) and its vocal faction of supporters, who can be recognized by their self-centeredness, unconditional support for all abortion and amazing imperviousness to logical thinking and reasoned debate.
These people, the ones lobbying in Washington and marching with vapid, vulgar and veraciously challenged slogans, never saw an abortion they didn't support.
Those who sang along to a performance of "Not Every Sperm Deserves to Live" deserve to be labeled pro-abortion rather than pro-choice and ought not have the audacity to pretend otherwise.
While these protesters certainly do not comprise the whole of the pro-choice movement, they are the ones in control of it.
The pro-abortion movement springs from a virulently self-centered individualism.
A look at the rhetoric of the march reveals the moral perspective of a 2-year-old: Everything is "me, my, mine." Slogans such as "My Body, My Choice" have no room to consider the life of the unborn child. Indeed, that particular slogan sums up so much of what is wrong with the pro-abortion movement. There's no consideration of the human life that is destroyed by abortion. The only focus is the woman.
Pro-abortion groups never seem to get around to talking about unborn children. Everything is centered on what the woman wants.
There's no debate about fetal life. For a march so centered on abortion, there was precious little discussion of it. The only topic was "choice."
Abortion advocates never want to move beyond the word "choice," because to do so requires actual debate and critical thinking about when a human life deserves protection, something they've shown a remarkable propensity for avoiding.
Of course, there can be no debate about when life begins. An embryo is undeniably human life from the moment of conception. Rather, the debate is about when personhood begins, because at that moment human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including the right to life.
Pro-lifers believe that personhood and life begin simultaneously, and thus no right of privacy for a woman could ever trump an unborn child's right to life, any more than a mother's right to privacy could justify her in killing a newborn child.
On the other hand, pro-abortion advocates often claim that they're "personally opposed" to abortion, but, since people disagree about when personhood begins, the government shouldn't "legislate morality."
As far as credible excuses go, this is insulting in its illogic. To grasp the absurdity inherent in this position, imagine someone claiming that they personally believe blacks have civil rights, but, since people have differed over whether blacks have rights, the government shouldn't try to "legislate morality" by protecting them.
While pro-abortion advocates may claim they haven't taken a position on when personhood begins, their actions speak much louder than words: In every case they take the position that a baby is not a person until birth.
Look at their reaction to President Bush's signing of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act at the beginning of the month.
Before this became law, a criminal who harmed or killed a pregnant woman in a federal crime could only have been charged for harm done to the woman but could not have been charged for harm done to her unborn child. The UVVA corrected this oversight by making clear that a fetus is indeed a human being and thus a legal victim of any crime committed against it.
The law carved out an exception for abortion, in compliance with Roe v. Wade.
While this law was not controversial among the American public (four of every five people supported it), the pro-abortion lobby once again demonstrated its slavish devotion to abortion and vigorously opposed the act. Most people recognize as morally and logically laughable the belief that a fetus in the ninth month is somehow less of a person than a newborn babe, but abortion advocates are steadfastly committed to it.
Horrified that any unborn child might be legally classified as a person, Sen. Dianne Feinstein offered an amendment that would have codified the falsehood that a crime against a pregnant woman has only one victim.
The amendment would have created penalties equivalent to those in the UVVA for criminals who attacked pregnant women, but only because a pregnancy was interrupted.
The dishonesty of the amendment exposes the way that abortion advocates' commitment to abortion effectively immunizes them against critical thinking.
For instance, suppose that they actually believe that no fetus is ever a person. In that case, how on earth could they propose to punish a criminal for harming a non-person as harshly as if he had harmed a human being? It would be like sentencing someone who killed a dog with the punishment for murdering a human being. The injustice of the proposition is shocking.
If, on the other hand, pro-abortion leaders do believe that at least some fetuses are human beings, they are willfully trying to legislate what they know to be a lie in order to preserve a "right" that would be untenable otherwise. Neither scenario speaks well of them.
While abortion advocates often call pro-lifers "religious extremists," they are in fact the ones committed to an extreme position with religious zeal.
While they often say government should stay out of abortion, they then turn around and demand that taxpayers fund abortions as part of "health care" for the poor.
They fight so that any woman may immediately abort her child at any time for any reason using any procedure, with taxpayers footing the bill if necessary. This is, to put it mildly, far out of the mainstream.
Despite continual pro-abortion efforts by activists, the percentage of pro-life Americans continues to grow.
According to a just-released poll by Zogby International, the sizeable majority of Americans, 56 percent, take pro-life positions, believing that abortion should only be legal when the life of the mother is at stake or in cases of rape or incest, or supporting even more restrictions. A study commissioned by Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood, found that seven out of every 10 women want stricter limits on abortion, and a majority would ban it in almost all cases.
On the other hand, only 13 percent of Americans support the completely unrestricted abortion policy that NOW, Planned Parenthood, NARAL and other pro-abortion groups advocate. Ironically, the "women's movement" has set itself in opposition to the majority of women.
These facts shed light on the never-ending court battles over abortion.
Since the American people are nowhere near supporting the extreme pro-abortion agenda, abortion advocates have to make sure that democracy is never permitted.
The next time you hear the Democrats lambaste Bush's judicial nominees for opposing Roe v. Wade, know that they must do that, for they're afraid of what might happen if people were able to vote on the issue.
Unrestricted abortion rights depend upon illegitimately denying the American people the right to choose their own laws regulating abortion.
So just remember this the next time you hear pro-abortion protesters talk about extremists against choice: They're inadvertently describing themselves.
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