A survivor speaks out against deadly compassion

CAMPAIGNING in New Hampshire in 1996, Presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan was questioned about his anti-abortion stand during an appearance at a Manchester high school. Did he believe, a student asked, in permitting abortion in cases where pregnancy is the result of rape? The candidate's answer was characteristically blunt. If anyone should be put to death because a child is conceived in rape, he said, it should be the rapist and not the unborn child.

No doubt some were outraged by the answer, but no one should have been surprised by it. It's the kind of answer we've come to expect from the feisty conservative columnist and commentator. For we all know that Buchanan, reactionary old devil, is lacking in "compassion."

The students, in all likelihood, had never heard of a woman named Rebecca Kiessling, a Michigan attorney who delivered the keynote address at the March for Life in Concord last weekend. She was adopted at birth and began as a teenager to try and find out who her birth mother was. When she was 19, her mother contacted her and a meeting was arranged. Rebecca soon learned the whole horrifying story of how she came to be.

Her mother had been on her way to the store, she related, when a man with a knife jumped out of the bushes. "He abducted her, took her to a field and brutally raped her in every way imaginable," she said. "That's how I was conceived."

In today's "compassionate" America, the rapist, had he been apprehended, tried and convicted, would have done time in prison and likely undergone treatment and "rehabilitation" at the expense of Rebecca's mother and the rest of the taxpayers of Michigan. Rebecca would have been put to death. She was conceived, however, a few years before the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and abortion was still outlawed in Michigan. In that era of "back-alley abortions," Rebecca's mother had agreed to be taken blindfolded to an unknown destination, there to have her pregnancy "terminated."

But there was a snowstorm that night and the trip was postponed. ("God's mandated waiting period," Kiessling calls it.) It was a trip her mother never made. She decided instead to have the child and give her up for adoption.

Kiessling does not take lightly what her mother went through in giving her birth. But her life was not ended by that ordeal. She was able to pick up the pieces and move on. "She has a wonderful husband, a beautiful home and she and I have a wonderful relationship," said Kiessling, who as an attorney in the practice of family law has been both personally and professionally involved in difficult cases of unwanted pregnancy. She and her husband adopted a baby boy, now 23-months-old, who was conceived by his 16-year-old mother at a "rave party."

"We named him Caleb because we want him to have the courage to stand up and speak out, like Caleb in the Bible," she said. A baby girl adopted by the Kiesslings, whom they named Cassie, died of medical complications when barely a month old.

Kiessling is not deterred by those who argue that supporters of the right to life should not "impose" their beliefs on the whole of society. She is mindful of those whose lives have been ended by the abortionist's knife, imposed on them in the womb. She knows how close she came to having her own life aborted by the kind of "compassion" that has left bodies of babies in dumpsters and landfills. For her, the issue is neither abstract nor academic. She marvels at people who are "pro-choice," but will tell her they're glad she wasn't aborted.

"What, I deserved to live, but 40 million others didn't?" she asked, citing the estimated number of abortions since Roe v. Wade. "I can't accept that!"

She expresses frustration with pro-life politicians, including President Bush, who would make exceptions in cases of rape.

"Here's a pro-life person I want to be proud of," she said of Bush. "And yet he would say that." She has a challenge for anyone whobelieves conception by rape is a good reason for aborting an innocent child.

"You should be able to look me in the eyes and say, "I think your mother should have aborted you," she said. "I would never say that to anyone — that if it were up to me, you would be dead." It sounds like Rebecca Kiessling hasn't been enlightened by the pro-abortion ideology. She hasn't been educated right.

Also from the Union Leader editorial page ...

What might Victor Hugo say about abortion?

IMAGINE the frustration a woman my age might have felt scanning the crowd assembled in Washington last Tuesday. School kids, clergy, senior citizens, and comfortable-looking middle aged married couples filled the streets to protest Roe v. Wade's 29th anniversary, pumping signs in the air that read "Stop All Abortions" and various other pro-life demands.

"How would you know what it's like to need an abortion?" an average woman my age might have seethed silently at this sight. "You, with your attentive husband and respectable checking account balance? Or you, the third grade Catholic school girl from Ohio, what do you know about the real world yet? You, Grandma, who grew up in an era when nice girls didn't have sex until they got married, and they got married at 18? You, Father, with your vow of celibacy, rosaries and megaphone? And all of you MEN? When have any of you men ever known the dread of waiting for the results of a pregnancy test, when you didn't intend to conceive? When you played by the rules of responsible society, used birth control, and it unjustly failed you?"

Point well taken. Only a woman who has suffered an unwanted pregnancy — or has weathered the "scare" of one — could possibly know the desperation and despondency of someone seeking an abortion. Anyone who thinks women get abortions because they want to is mistaken. They get them because they are sure they have to. They learn there is something growing inside them that will take over their lives in nine months, but they don't have the financial, familial, or emotional strength to see it through. They want so badly to die themselves that killing the other human who has taken up residence inside them seems like an acceptable way out.

It's true many of these marchers will never know the desperation of women with unwanted pregnancies. But just because their gender and age may allow their convictions to go untested doesn't mean those convictions are invalid. The experience of desperation does not always enhance one's moral clarity; in fact, quite the opposite.

At different points over my 28 years, advocates of "choice" have tested me hypothetically: "What would you do if you found you were pregnant? What if you were raped? You wouldn't have an abortion? You wouldn't want the option of an abortion?"

"Absolutely not," is my disingenuous reply. My more honest reply goes like this: "You're right. I have no idea what I would want to do in such a desperate situation. I would be distraught and frightened. I might want to have an abortion. I might be glad abortion became the law of the land the year I was born, so that it is available to me without question in any stage of pregnancy.

"But if I were distraught and frightened for a reason other than pregnancy, I could imagine myself doing a wide array of things. I could imagine myself robbing a bank or mugging an old lady. I could imagine myself lying and cheating. I'd wish lots of evil things were legal and at my disposal. I hope if I'm ever in such a desperate situation, someone will help me out of it before I do wrong."

The night after the march I rented "Les Miserables," and thought long and hard about Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed his sister's children. It was horrible that no one empathized with his desperation or offered him help. It was horrible that he was imprisoned for nearly 20 years for such an understandable offense. But the solution to Valjean's problems was not legalized stealing.

Just like the solution to the reproductive problems of women in my age group is not legalized murder. It is along the lines of what Victor Hugo asks for with "Les Miserables": A softer-hearted public standing ready to diffuse desperate situations. Willing to adopt the unwanted babies of all races. Willing to house and clothe the young girls who give birth to them. Willing to tend to their health care needs pro-bono. Willing to help them finish school and find jobs.

In 1796 France the miserable might have been those who felt it was necessary to steal to survive. But in 2002 America, is there any creature more miserable than the one who thinks she must kill her unborn baby to get out of a desperate situation? After 29 years of Roe v. Wade telling her just that, isn't it time we take better care of her?

Bernadette Malone Connolly is the former Editorial Page Editor. She writes an occasional column for the Sunday News.

"...the dread of waiting for the results of a pregnancy test, when you didn't intend to conceive? When you played by the rules of responsible society, used birth control, and it unjustly failed you?"

She forgot the ultimate form of birth control...ABSTINENCE...The choice to have sex a responsibility and when anyone decides this is what they want to do they HAVE to be ready to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And I do not believe this day and age that anyone old enough to choose to have sex doesn't understand where babies come from.

".. They want so badly to die themselves that killing the other human who has taken up residence inside them seems like an acceptable way out."

Makes it sound like the child inside of her is a parasite, a disease or an illness to be gotten rid of like a bladder infection.

We have a member of our family who had a baby a four years ago, when she was about seventeen. Year before last she found out she was pregnant, it was only then that her parents found out the reason for the behavior that had been bothering them for the past few months, she had been attaked by a man and raped. She had refused to acknowledge the fact that she may be pregnant until she her mother made her go to the doctor because she wasn't having her period. She was into her third trimester by then so for the remaining months of her pregnancy she insisted she wasn't going to keep the baby, after the baby girl was born her parents ask her to look at her and hold her one time before she left the hospital. Finally she did. She realized something then a lot of other women don't when they have that human life killed, that child (no matter how she was conceived) was a human and just as cute and cuddly as the first baby she had. She didn't come out with the rapist's face on her little body and she doesn't serve as a daily reminder of the rape, she is her child, yes admitedly half of the baby's genetics are the rapist's but the other half are the mommy's and she loves her baby.

I know I have never gone through the experience of rape, and hope to God I, or anyone else never have to. But one thing I have experienced is thirteen years of the terrible pain of infertility. Finally I did conceive, but there are many others out there that never do. That pain stays with them all of their life. Wonder how some of these women would like to experience that!

Until the pro-life cause unifies around the "no exceptions, no compromises" pro-life stance, we will remain in reality "pro-abortion, with exceptions." And anyone who is pro-life, yet fails to see the connection between contraception and abortion, has failed in their proper self education in the reality of abortion.

From "The Connection between Contraception & Abortion" by Prof Janet Smith:

Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the US Supreme Court decision that confirmed Roe v. Wade [U.S. decision to permit abortions] stated “in some critical respects, abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception… for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail”.

The Supreme Court decision has made completely unnecessary, any efforts to “expose” what is really behind the attachment of the modern age to abortion. As the Supreme Court candidly states, we need abortion so that we can continue our contraceptive lifestyles. It is not because contraceptives are ineffective that a million and a half women a year seek abortions as back-ups to failed contraceptives. The “intimate relationships” facilitated by contraceptives are what make abortions “necessary”. “Intimate” here is a euphemism and a misleading one at that. Here the word “intimate” means “sexual”; it does not mean “loving and close”. Abortion is most often the result of sexual relationships in which there is no room for a baby, the natural consequence of sexual intercourse.

To support the argument that more responsible use of contraceptives would reduce the number of abortions, some note that most abortions are performed for “contraceptive purposes”. That is, few abortions are had because a woman has been a victim of rape or incest or because a pregnancy would endanger her life, or because she expects to have a handicapped or deformed newborn. Rather, most abortions are had because men and women who do not want a baby are having sexual intercourse and facing pregnancies they did not plan for and do not want. Because their contraceptive failed, or because they failed to use a contraceptive, they then resort to abortion as a back up. Many believe that if we could convince men and women to use contraceptives responsibly, we would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and thus the number of abortions. Thirty years ago this position might have had some plausibility, but not now. We have lived for about thirty years with a culture permeated with contraceptive use and abortion; no longer can we think that greater access to contraception will reduce the number of abortions. Rather, wherever contraception is more readily available, the number of unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions increase greatly.

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