Posted on 12/15/2006 7:27:11 AM PST by Lesforlife
Friday, December 15, 2006
A growing split in the pro-life community Posted: December 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Ed Hanks © 2006
In the wake of last week's U.S. House vote on the Fetal Pain bill, several magazines, blogs and pro-life websites have begun to discuss a growing split in the pro-life community over bills like this that attempt to slow or regulate abortions, but not stop them.
Some such divisions can be detrimental to a cause. Others can finally crystallize the issue and energize the movement.
The debate over incremental anti-abortion laws, versus working toward the goal of stopping abortion altogether, is a necessary crisis of conscience for pro-lifers. Its resolution will determine the future of abortion in America.
(Column continues below)
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
The Fetal Pain bill consisted of two parts. The first part would have required abortion doctors to advise pre-abortive mothers that by the 20th week of pregnancy there is evidence their baby will experience excruciating pain from the procedure.
One drawback, even in the first part, is that it equates human abortion to animal cruelty – a dehumanizing comparison.
Still, it points to the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958 as an improvement over how humans are treated in the womb, and there is a natural word association between "humane slaughter" and "human slaughter." A mother is forced to consider that her own child is about to be tortured to death, and that a civilized society treats even animals better.
Many pro-life groups, including National Right to Life and most of its 50 state affiliates, supported the bill for this reason, believing that mothers would decide against an abortion if they knew their baby would feel pain.
But Colorado Right to Life, the American Life League, Operation Save America and several other pro-life organizations opposed it because it didn't stop with the positive goal of exposing the awful truth of abortion.
Part two of the bill negated whatever benefit a baby would gain from a description of excruciating pain by offering a way out. It required abortion doctors to offer pain medication for the baby before the abortion – so the baby would feel no pain.
Not only does part two legitimize the abortion – by saying it's perfectly OK to kill the baby, provided these restrictions are met – but it also relieves the moral pressure accomplished by the first part. "Your baby would experience pain, but once I inject this anesthesia it becomes a simple, painless procedure." Tidy. Guilt free. Not any different from putting a cat to sleep.
By offering a way out – a painless, "compassionate abortion" – it makes pain the issue, rather than the principle. For that reason, many right-to-lifers believe this particular version of fetal pain legislation would actually have increased the number of abortions.
If abortion takes the life of an innocent, unborn child – as no life activist disputes – then an abortion is just as wrong with or without pain medication. Would it have been less abhorrent for the Nazis to kill Jews if they had medicated them first? Absolutely not!
In the early 1800s, most Northerners said, "I'm personally opposed to slavery, but the Supreme Court says it's legal so I have no right to tell another man he can't own a slave." So the anti-slavery movement accepted the "legality" of slavery, and instead worked within the system to regulate it and limit its spread.
They saved slaves a few at a time, but the regulating and limiting of slavery allowed a cold rationalization. By freeing slaves "where and when" they could, anti-slavery activists felt like they were making a difference, even as millions of men, women and children suffered in chains in the South. They made no real progress toward eliminating slavery as an institution.
Finally, in 1830, a man named William Lloyd Garrison demanded change. He said depriving an innocent man of freedom is evil, and slavery is a crime against God and humanity. He said slavery is always wrong. He called on Americans to abolish slavery everywhere, rejecting any compromise.
By arguing that compromise only undermined freedom, Garrison faced slanders and petty attacks from abolitionists who preferred compromise. But he won hearts and minds. Those who agreed with him grew to 10 and 25 percent until Americans finally elected an abolitionist president who finally freed the slaves. A compromise agenda might instead have perpetuated slavery for decades.
Abortion is a barbaric practice, just like slavery. Lessening its barbarity won't make it easier to rid ourselves of this evil. It will only prolong the suffering.
Changing the direction of America's pro-life movement from defeatist incrementalism to the righteous indignation of abolition will be difficult. It took Garrison 30 years. However, far more Americans are pro-life today than were anti-slavery back then.
It's a mathematical truism that if each step only takes you halfway to your goal, you will never get there. By addressing specific, limited cases, incrementalism fights on ground chosen by opponents of life and lends credibility to pro-abortion arguments. Instead, pro-lifers should be playing to their strengths.
Only absolutism abolished slavery once and for all. Only absolutism will end the evil of abortion. Like anti-slavery abolitionists, pro-lifers have principle on our side. We should defend life as a civil and human right.
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"On Message: The Pro-Life Handbook"
Ed Hanks is a freelance writer, operates the website www.abortionisslavery.org, and is president of Colorado Conservative Action and the Conservative Renewal Authority.
To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53382
It's going to take a Constitutional Amendment to clarify the Constitutional protections for life and against genetic discrimination (in employment, insurance, etc.).
I hear that the March Of Dimes' has lately been promoting abortion as a way of reducing birth defects.
It makes no more sense for different states to define "life" differently (permitting abortion or denying it) than for different states to define "a person" differently (permitting slavery or denying it).
It has been true for a long time that the March of Dimes insures that "Every baby is a health baby" in the same way that Planned Parenthood insures that "Every baby is a loved baby".
They murder the rest.
Thank you for the post.
I'm no fan of abortion but what do you say when they bring up the "ten year old impregnated by rape" argument. I'm stuck at that one...
You could say "leave it in God's hands" but who would believe it? One dead ten year old is all it takes to destroy that call.
Aye, if morality was easy to practice there would be an abundance of it by now...
I hate that Fetal Pain Bill. You know why? Because it went BEYOND just requiring abortionists to tell that their babies will feel pain before they're aborted.
It'd also let the doctors give the mother a choice of whether or not to give the baby painkillers before he's aborted.
What's that? If anything, that might only make the mother feel better about what just happened. "At least there was no pain for him."
They should've stopped at "your child will feel pain" and that's it.
Pro-Life/Moral Absolutes ping!
It is either a life or it isn't.
Life should have ultimate protection.
Deciding that its OK to snuff *some* lives, expecially for an arbitrary reason, is counter to our constitution.
Those who claim to be pro-choice, but against abortion are just plain liars and often work for companies that make millions snuffing out little children in the womb.
...there are numerous people (about all of my relatives among them)who would have little issue with making an argument that most women seeking abortions do so because their health is endangered, that there was rape or incest involved, that there was this and that...precisely because the moderate pro lifers will say 'oh well, then, there you are, perfectly agreeable to the procedure'. However, in actuality, it would be difficult to support those arguments using any logical statistics...far more credible is the situation of young women caught in premarital relations that leave them with this 'problem'...on a liberal radio talkshow I once listened to, a number of these women came forth to gush about how they were given their lives back after aborting, that they were thus free to live again, and how could anyone but insane curmudgeons militate against it...quite disturbing, really, though I will at least credit them for their honesty...
Actually it doesn't "equate human abortion to animal cruelty", and as a firm pro-choicer that's why I find it appalling that this debate is even needed. If I show up at a vet's office with a sick or healthy pet that I want to have put to sleep, the vet would lose his/her license for asking "Would you like to pay extra to have that done painlessly, or would you prefer the budget option even though it may involve brief but excruciating pain for your pet?" That's EXACTLY what this bill was proposing.
The notion that some addle-brained crack whore should be offered the option of saving a few bucks on her abortion by depriving the late-stage fetus of anesthesia, so she can spend the money on a few more vials of crack instead, is just plain sick. Both pro-choicers who oppose a blanket anesthesia requirement because it adds a "restriction" to abortion law, and pro-lifers who oppose that because it might make some women more comfortable about having abortions, are saying "Better that thousands more late-stage fetuses that are being aborted feel pain, than that we lose an inch of ground on our political agenda". They're no better than the aforementioned crack whore, in my opinion.
Fetal anesthesia for any fetus large enough to feel pain should be mandatory, period.
The Americans with Disabilities Act should do more to protect them. Thus the need for explicit Constitutional protections through a sanctity of life amendment.
Those women exhibit how it is a selfish act, a permanent solution to a temporary "problem". Something they do to protect them from public embarassment.
But what is to be embarassed about? Having a child borne by a man they don't really love? Not understanding their options for surgical and hormonal sterility? Their loose sexual morals?
None of these are the child's fault.
The irony of it all is that the woman's willful destroying of her child out of convenience is also very degrading to women. Of course, how can we expect fools to realize when they are being fooled?
'...when the bring up the "ten year old impregnated by rape" argument. I'm stuck on that one...'
I have heard most of the political and emotional rationale for the exception arguments and though they are seductive, they are not convincing. From the political perspective, one might suggest that there is a better chance of getting anti-abortion legislation passed when exceptions are allowed and I have no reason to doubt that assertion. From the emotional angle, we all have heart-felt sympathy for the victimized mother.
There is a powerful reluctance to force a woman to continue her physically demanding and emotionally draining role in the most divine function of God's nature when the initiation of that process was without the mother's normally assumed consent. We would be assigning to her the responsibility to carry into this world a new soul who will be a seemingly unholy combination of her own self and of a man who is either freighteningly unknown or sinfully familiar.
There is, of course, the almost inescapable temptation to assume this new person will somehow not be good because the genetic code of a rapist was used in his/her construction. Or that the new person will somehow not be complete because of the potential for physiological problems to arise when daddy is grandpa.
Adoption is always an option when the post-birth burdens outweigh the natural desire of the mother to nurture a child which is, after all, still half her.
On any scientific or logical rationale, assuming human life has value, I would ask two questions:
-Does it continue to grow and change via natural biologic process? - If so, it is alive.
-What will we call this new life form if the process is allowed to complete? - If the answer is 'human', then it has rights.
The term "birth defect" has long seemed to me incorrect and potentially misleading. The child's physical development may be defective (i. e., abnormal), but not its birth. And I've long suspected that the leading lights of the March of Dimes were not in opposition to abortion as a pre-emptive "remedy," inasmuch as the focus of concern is lodged in the word "birth" rather than the developmental condition of the baby.
Ergo, no support for the March of Dimes.
Exceptions can never be allowed. Once we allow one exception, then the door is opened for other exceptions, and then any right to life law would be so watered down as to be worthless. If a 10 year old is impregnated, it is always rape, and the abortionist is bound by law to report this to the authorities, but it seldom happens.
I agree.
Don't know if they're actively promoting abortions, but for years they've pushed amniocentesis as a way to screen for birth defects. If folks can be convinced that they don't want to be "burdened" with a disabled child, and opt for a abortion, the number of disabled children being born goes down by one. Sure helps the averages, doesn't it?
That's one big reason I haven't supported the March of Dimes for the last 20 years.
Hard casees make bad laws. The instances of 10 year olds being impregnated by rape are extremely rare. Not that many 10 year olds are biologically to the point where they CAN become pregnant, but besides that, a pregnancy is disturbing enough for a child that age, imagine what the burden of knowing that she has killed her own child will be. EVERY woman has a reaction to an abortion. Many try to downplay it, and say that they were relieved, and it was the best thing they could have done. But they don't want to admit the pain they still suffer because of it, because that in some way will make them continue to feel guilty, or they will feel like they're betraying the 'sisterhood' or some such nonsense.
Some people try to make the argument that a 10 yr. old can't possibly raise a baby; it's a specious argument, of course she can't. But she could be convinced of the wisdom of bringing the baby to term, then letting a couple who wants a baby, but can't have one of their own, have the child to raise. She will be able to understand, though it will hurt, in the long run, she'll know she gave her baby life, and the very best start in it.
I'm not one who makes an exception for rape and incest. It's not the baby's fault, why should the baby pay with its life for the actions of its parents? No one is forcing any woman to raise the child; again, let the child be adopted. Lots of folks waiting out there for babies to adopt.
This year they even had a contest between various groups where the losing department heads had to serve the winning group pizza.
All the giving was up front and public. I know I might of looked like a jerk for not giving a "dime" to March of Dimes but I just kept low-key unless anyone asked and then I'd tell them why.
One dead ten year old is all it takes to destroy that call.
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