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In Their Own Words: Pro-Lifers Aren't the Only Ones Who Call Abortion Killing
Townhall.com ^ | November 30, 2015 | Scott Klusendorf

Posted on 11/30/2015 6:07:44 AM PST by Kaslin

Well, that didn't take long. Within hours of the Colorado shootings, abortion-choice advocates were placing blame squarely on the shoulders of pro-lifers. Apparently, we're guilty of "violent" rhetoric; that is, claiming that abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being and that rhetoric is fueling acts of terror against abortion providers.

"Do we really think that there are no consequences to claiming that abortion is murder," writes Jessica Valentiin The Guardian. "Can we stop pretending that pro-life lies don't have an effect. We know why this [attack] happened. Clinic workers who put their lives on the line every day know why this happened. Because of hate, because of lies, and because words matter. We must demand that the violent radical language and lies about abortion stop."

Let's review the basic pro-life argument:

P1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

P2: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.

P3: Therefore, abortion is morally wrong.

Pro-life advocates defend that syllogism with science and philosophy. The scienceof embryology establishes that from the earliest stages of development, you were a distinct, living, and whole human being. You didn't evolve from an embryo. You once were an embryo. Philosophically, pro-lifers contendthere is no essential difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today that justifies killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying you could be killed then but not now.

Where in that pro-life argument is there any suggestion pro-lifers should open fire on abortion doctors? Instead of refuting the moral logic of the pro-life argument, abortion-choicers resort to personal attacks that do nothing to refute the pro-life view or establish the abortion-choice one. That is, even if pro-life rhetoric leads to violence, that fact would do nothing to refute the pro-life argument that abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.

Setting aside for the moment that no one outside the shooter knows the true motive for the Colorado killings, or even if he was targeting abortion providers, here are three undeniable facts:

1. Within moments of the shootings, pro-life organizations everywhere were all over social media condemning the killings and asking prayer for the families of the victims.

2. The police officer killed defending civilian's Planned Parenthood employees was a Christian pastor whose church opposed abortion. (I know; I spoke there several years ago.)

3. Pro-lifers aren't the only ones who call abortion intentional killing. So do abortion-choice advocates. If pro-lifers are to blame for their alleged dangerous rhetoric, what about these leaders from the other side?

Dr. Warren Hern, author of Abortion Practice, the medical text that teaches abortion procedures, tolda Planned Parenthood conference: "We have reached a point in this particular technology [D&E abortion] where there is no possibility of denying an act of destruction. It is before one's eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."

As far back as 1970, a candid editorialin California Medicine, a journal sympathetic to abortion, highlighted the use of deceptive language: "Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected."

· Ronald Dworkin, in his book Life's Dominion, saysabortion deliberately kills a developing embryo and is a choice for death.

· Faye Wattleton, former President of Planned Parenthood, told MS Magazine in 1997, "I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus" ("Speaking Frankly," May/June 1997).

· Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist author and abortion supporter, writesin the left-wing New Republic that so-called pro-choicers deceive themselves with dehumanizing speech. "Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death."

· Feminist Camille Paglia is even more bluntin a 2008 Salon article: "Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue."

Maybe our problem isn't rhetoric, but behavior. Abortion-choice activists know abortion is killing. They just won't live with that truth.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: abortion; language; murder; plannedbutcherhood
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1 posted on 11/30/2015 6:07:45 AM PST by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

>>Clinic workers who put their lives on the line every day know why this happened.

Why do they put their life on the line? Do some of the babies they murder fight back?


2 posted on 11/30/2015 6:15:03 AM PST by Bryanw92 (Sic semper tyrannis)
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To: Kaslin

What did the ‘cans’ do to justify the shooting in the parking lot?

This wasn’t an attack by a pro-life advocate, no matter how the Leftists want to spin it.

The shooting began before he sought shelter inside the PP offices.


3 posted on 11/30/2015 6:18:08 AM PST by a fool in paradise (The goal of Socialism is Communism. Marx and Lenin were in agreement on this.)
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To: Kaslin

Why do left-wing extremists wage a war on science?


4 posted on 11/30/2015 6:20:35 AM PST by a fool in paradise (The goal of Socialism is Communism. Marx and Lenin were in agreement on this.)
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To: Bryanw92

No planned parenthood was even attacked. WTF are they talking about?

Are they seriously trying to lie about that CO bank robbing gone wrong with the guy running into the PP to hide from the police?

He didn’t shoot anyone in the PP clinic as far as I know.


5 posted on 11/30/2015 6:21:16 AM PST by FreedomStar3028 (Somebody has to step forward and do what is right because it is right, otherwise no one will follow.)
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To: Kaslin
Clinic workers who put their lives on the line every day know why...

And yet not one employee of PP was injured!!!

6 posted on 11/30/2015 6:35:03 AM PST by ontap
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To: FreedomStar3028

>>Are they seriously trying to lie about that CO bank robbing gone wrong with the guy running into the PP to hide from the police?

I’m still waiting to see some proof that this was the case. So far, it’s just the Right hoping it was a bank robbery and the Left hoping it was an attack on PP. Too many agendas. Not enough facts released yet.


7 posted on 11/30/2015 6:36:19 AM PST by Bryanw92 (Sic semper tyrannis)
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To: ontap
Clinic workers who put their lives on the line every day know why this happened.

I thought clinic workers "put their lives on the line every day" (kill fetuses) so they can buy Lamborghinis.

8 posted on 11/30/2015 6:39:45 AM PST by Sooth2222 ("In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." - Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859))
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To: Bryanw92

IMO, BOTH sides still miss the point: Yet ANOTHER fruit-loop loose upon the streets, because the LEFT closed down all the facilities, whom took his psychosis ju jour out on the people whom could not defend themselves/others, being illegally disarmed by GOVT. This time, at/near a location that KILLS the unborn, aided by GOVT, with taxpayers funds, based off a ruling by the courts (aka GOVT), in conflict with its (govt) reason for being instituted BY the People.

Anything else is just adding verbosity to hide the point.


9 posted on 11/30/2015 7:42:29 AM PST by i_robot73 ("A man chooses. A slave obeys." - Andrew Ryan)
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To: Bryanw92

There were reported shots fired BEFORE he ever entered the Planned Genocide clinic. If you plan on attacking and killing INSIDE a Planned Genocide clinic, then you would probably wait to start shooting, until you were were inside.

More importantly, none of the people shot were Planned Genocide employees or patients.

So, how was this a Planned Genocide attack?!?


10 posted on 11/30/2015 7:46:50 AM PST by ExTxMarine (Public sector unions: A & B agreeing on a contract to screw C!)
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To: ExTxMarine

>>More importantly, none of the people shot were Planned Genocide employees or patients.

Can you post a link to something that confirms those facts? I can’t seem to even find a list of names much less their locations when they were shot.


11 posted on 11/30/2015 7:57:16 AM PST by Bryanw92 (Sic semper tyrannis)
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To: Bryanw92

The local Planned Genocide director has stated these facts.

Look it up, yourself!


12 posted on 11/30/2015 8:02:12 AM PST by ExTxMarine (Public sector unions: A & B agreeing on a contract to screw C!)
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To: ExTxMarine

>>Look it up, yourself

I hope it was a bank robbery too, but I’m not going to jump to conclusions that fit my desires. I did look it up. There is no confirmed reports.


13 posted on 11/30/2015 8:11:34 AM PST by Bryanw92 (Sic semper tyrannis)
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To: ExTxMarine
Look it up, yourself!

Those are words used by someone who hasn't looked it up themselves. If you had, you'd just post a link.

14 posted on 11/30/2015 8:19:24 AM PST by Fundamentally Fair (Pictionary at the Rorschach's tonight!)
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To: Fundamentally Fair

I did look it up.

And the Planned Genocide released a statement stating that none of their patients or employees were the ones killed or injured. There are two different news stories that specifically state that the clinic released such a statement.

If or anyone else can’t find it, then you aren’t looking very hard.


15 posted on 11/30/2015 8:32:39 AM PST by ExTxMarine (Public sector unions: A & B agreeing on a contract to screw C!)
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To: ExTxMarine

You’re wrong. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3338319/Cabin-dwelling-recluse-Planned-Parenthood-gunman-held-anti-abortionist-views-officials-claim-revealed-rambled-baby-parts-police.html

Got something else to contradict what I posted above? Post it or shut up.


16 posted on 11/30/2015 8:40:43 AM PST by FourtySeven (47)
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To: ExTxMarine
I did look it up.

Then be a Friendly Freeper and post a link.

17 posted on 11/30/2015 8:46:06 AM PST by Fundamentally Fair (Pictionary at the Rorschach's tonight!)
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To: Fundamentally Fair

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/27/reports-active-shooter-barricaded-planned-parenthood-office-colo/76455300/

Here’s one. Where the clinic says their staff members are all accounted for.

I will see if I can find the second one.


18 posted on 11/30/2015 8:57:01 AM PST by ExTxMarine (Public sector unions: A & B agreeing on a contract to screw C!)
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To: ExTxMarine

Well at least half of their patients were not killed or injured.....


19 posted on 11/30/2015 9:02:16 AM PST by Mom MD
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To: ExTxMarine

Thanks. I appreciate the link.


20 posted on 11/30/2015 9:13:03 AM PST by Fundamentally Fair (Pictionary at the Rorschach's tonight!)
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