Posted on 10/17/2014 7:53:31 AM PDT by wagglebee
Recently on the website In These Times, writer Sady Doyle comes right out and says it: “I like abortion.”
Lest anyone think Doyle is being taken out of context, consider that the title of her article is, “Abortion Isn’t a Necessary Evil. It’s Great,” and the subtitle is, “Progressives should admit it: We like abortion.”
This comes on the heels of Janet Harris’ widely shared Washington Post column, “Stop Calling Abortion a Difficult Decision.”
To no one’s surprise, Slate (“My Year As an Abortion Doula”) and HuffPo have also recently had their own Let’s-present-abortion-as-sympathetically-as-we-possibly-can articles. And, very revealingly, America’s leading How to Get Used by a Man Manual—namely, Cosmo—has really been ratcheting up its cheerleading for abortion in 2014.
Writing at The Federalist, Dr. Rachel Lu has a must-read article responding to this recent spate of pro-choice—nay, pro-abortion—articles in which she notes:
An abortion story has an intrinsic narrative problem. Here’s the thing: an abortion just can’t be a happy or inspiring event. The best you can shoot for is boring, portraying the abortion as an event no more noteworthy than a haircut or, at worst, an appendectomy. But if it’s emotionally significant at all, its importance is negative. If there were a convincing way to glamorize the killing of the unborn, Hollywood would have found it already.
But most abortion stories are not exactly boring. They’re just extremely, extremely sad.
Lu also writes:
The object of the abortion story is (ostensibly) to move beyond this bare assertion of rights. Abortion supporters want us to accept that abortion can be a good, right, and reasonable choice, even for people who are not, for example, in the midst of life-threatening pregnancies.
Writing at First Things, Wesley Smith makes a prediction:
I expect that in the coming years abortion rights supporters will execute a tactical retreat that admits the humanity of the unborn, conjoined with a strong counter-offensive dismissing the moral relevance of that biological fact. What matters, advocates will increasingly assert, is the state’s guarantee that women’s reproductive desires are fulfilled—with abortion viewed as a positively good way of doing so. Pro-lifers had better quickly discern how to counter the new candidly explicit pro-abortion advocacy.
Smith’s use of the phrase “candidly explicitly pro-abortion advocacy” is on the mark. But at the same time, I’m not sure how novel it is.
An uptick? Yes. But totally new? Not quite.
We’ve seen counter-demonstrators show up at our events with “Abortion on demand and without apology” signs for several years. And in their more candid moments, even some abortion providers themselves have, under the cover of anonymity, admitted for some time now that they are emphatically “pro-abortion,” and even that they “love”—yes, “love”—abortion.
What is new, however, is that such sentiments were formerly expressed only on the fringes of the pro-abortion-choice movement, but they are now becoming mainstream. Once again, to quote Dr. Lu:
Safe, legal, and rare is so 20 years ago. Now we’ve moved on to the in-your-face, “I wanted my baby dead and what do you have to say about it” phase.
To be sure, logic and intellectually solid pro-life argumentation have a key role to play in responding to the increasingly common phenomenon of The Sympathetic Abortion Story and the mainstreaming of unapologetically pro-abortion rhetoric.
But so too, let us not forget that now more than ever, the pictures of actual abortion victims are indispensable to our pro-life efforts.
Our opponents want the average person to think of abortion not just as something to be tolerated, but as something good. Needless to say, they definitely don’t want people to think about the unborn babies who are victimized by abortion. Indeed, they don’t want people to think abortion has any victims in the first place.
Which is precisely why we must continue to show the pictures of abortion victims in the public square, for nothing elicits sympathy like pictures of the victims of injustice.
The pro-abortion-choice movement will continue to re-exploit women who have had abortions by giving them a platform to tell their unspeakably sad stories, all in an attempt to make us forget that every abortion takes the life of a baby.
We, for our part, won’t let them get away with it, and we will continue to show pictures of the victims whose lives are taken so violently—the only baby pictures they will ever have.
Reprinted with permission from Pro-Life Action League
Abolitionists publicized pictures of the atrocities of slavery, pictures of the horrors of the Holocaust were shown around the world, the media turned Americans against the Vietnam War with pictures and the list goes on and on. We are shown pictures of violence all the time, if pictures of slaughtered babies upset people, maybe they will start demanding an end to the bloodshed.
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I agree.....wholeheartedly...but I’ve never been able to hold those pictures when protesting......it’s just me.
One of the contradictions of abortion apologists is the fact that they will refer to the abortion/decision as tough, traumatic, difficult, etc.
If their fundamental claim that the baby has no human identity, has no moral value, no political rights, etc., and is of no greater moral value than a wart or pimple or load of poop, then they should NOT claim that an abortion decision is difficult, tough, traumatic, etc.
Some of these pictures are so gruesome I fear they continue to dehumanize the babies even more as icons of horror rather than lives with value. There is some newer artist that I recall that seems to capture the preciousness of the babies and the horror. I think one picture is like a cut off baby hand or something.
Truly, I have seen more pictures than I can count......I have been on the front lines....
I know pictures are effective.........this is our American Holocaust
...just like seeing the gruesome pictures from the WWII Holocaust
.....but don’t ask me to hold one
I avoided telling my sons about abortion when they were young. Our family loves babies and derives great pleasure from their cuteness. I did not want them to even know that people in the US kill many babies.
Finally, the school introduced abortion to them as if it was a wonderful “women’s right.” They were horrified when I explained exactly what abortion involved. I showed them the pictures so no one could trick them into believing it was not a real baby until it was born.
I was able to tie into the abortion nightmare to the reason our family does not make babies until we are ready and able to take care of them. Being males they would have no choice if they got a girl pregnant and she decided to kill the baby because she did not want to be a mother. One of them was conceived when I was using birth control but their dad and I were very happy about it because we were married, ready and able to be parents and God had a baby for us to parent in His timing.
I think the point of the article is for everyone connected with the pro-life movement to get over their own revulsion enough to allow the showing of those pictures to the ignorant people who think abortion is no big thing. Sometimes a photo is the only way to break through their denial.
When people on the right are so morally offended by sin that they suppress the evidence of it where it could convict the unconvinced, they are not helping. I'm not suggesting you personally are trying to suppress it. But it's not hard to imagine that most pro-life groups have tacitly agreed not to show the grim photos out of respect for the dead children themselves. Meanwhile, progressive morons go on telling adolescents that the "products of conception" are "just a mass of cells." People need to see the truth.
Lovely post, SaraJohnson. Good job with raising sons right.
I totally agree with you.
The European Holocaust was denied until people saw the evidence .....(& that is why German townpeople were made to walk through the camps after liberation.)
This is the very reason pictures of dead mangled, torn apart babies are suppressed .....because ostrich people would have to admit the truth.
Good job!
people need to see the truth so they know they were lied to and realize that we murder children in the womb.
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