Posted on 09/01/2006 4:47:00 AM PDT by Caleb1411
HOW DO PEOPLE BECOME PRO-LIFERS? What turns people into passionate foes of abortion and related issues like euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research? I'm not referring to those who supported the pro-life position because of their family upbringing or religious faith or because of a political requirement as, say, a Republican candidate in a red state. I'm talking about people who, as adults or mature teenagers, were either pro-abortion or basically indifferent to the issue. Then something changed their mind, prompting them to take up the anti-abortion cause. Perhaps they began defending the pro-life position without realizing they'd flipped. In any case, what caused the change? What happened?
The answer can be found in the experiences of five people: Ronald Reagan, Henry Hyde, Ramesh Ponnuru, Wesley Smith, and myself. And their stories, I think, are roughly representative of what a multitude of others went through as they came to embrace the cause of saving unborn children. The five experienced two things in common that should be easy to spot as we look at their five cases.
Let's begin with Reagan. In his first year as California governor in 1967, the legislature passed a bill to legalize "therapeutic" abortions. It was an issue Reagan hadn't thought much about and he was torn over whether to veto the measure. Many Republicans in legislature strongly urged him to sign the bill. And so did aides on his staff, including conservatives Ed Meese and Lyn Nofziger, who later followed Reagan to Washington. Reagan was assured it would result in only a handful of abortions.
His instinct was to veto the bill and the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles urged him to follow that course. But he signed it into law. Reagan was disturbed by his decision, however, and continued to think long and hard about abortion. The bill, according to Lou Cannon in Governor Reagan, "permitted more legal abortions in California than occurred in any other state before the advent of Roe v. Wade." Reagan's worst fear was realized.
By 1980, Reagan had changed his mind and become a firm opponent of abortion. He insisted on a pro-life plank in the Republican platform for the first time. In 1983, he published a passionate pro-life essay, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. It turned out that signing the abortion bill in 1967 was the only political mistake that Reagan ever admitted.
HENRY HYDE had been a member of the Illinois legislature for five years when he first was confronted by the abortion issue. It was the early 1970s--before the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion-on-demand nationwide. Hyde was asked by another legislator to co-sponsor a bill easing the state's ban on abortion. And he was receptive.
When he read the proposed legislation, however, his thinking changed. Hyde, too, had never given much thought to abortion. But suddenly he had to. And the result was he wound up rejecting, rather than sponsoring, the pro-abortion bill and leading the successful opposition to it on the floor of the Illinois assembly.
Hyde was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974 and quickly became a leading pro-life voice. In 1976, he won enactment of legislation barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. Thirty years later, the Hyde Amendment is still the law of the land.
RAMESH PONNURU, a writer for National Review who grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, remembers as a teenager "not wanting to be a pro-lifer." In America, he told me, "it's just easier to be pro-choice. You're running with the tide."
In 1991, people he knew in Kansas City joined the Summer of Mercy anti-abortion protest in Wichita. The demonstration drew enormous media attention and the protesters were reported to have created a tense standoff, a near-crisis. Ponnuru followed the event closely enough to know that the protesters were "about as tense as a church picnic." In fact, his friends who took part "were the kind of people who go to church picnics."
The effect of the Wichita demonstration on Ponnuru, miles away in Kansas City, was profound. That summer, he thought about the morality of abortion. And by the time he entered Princeton at the end of the summer, he was a full-blown pro-lifer. Since then, his opposition to abortion "has deepened every year." And this year, he published Party of Death, a compelling account of the Democratic party's emergence as a strongly pro-abortion party.
AS A LAWYER and colleague of Ralph Nader, Wesley Smith was an unlikely prospect to become a pro-lifer. He got there in an unusual way that led him to become America's leading critic of euthanasia, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research.
A little over a decade ago, a friend of Smith, a 76-year-woman named Virginia, committed suicide. She had often talked about killing herself, telling Smith and other friends how painless, gentle even, it would be. They had tried to talk her out of it, but to no avail.
After her death, Smith went to her home in California and found stacks of literature by advocates of euthanasia, particularly the Hemlock Society. And he recognized some of things Virginia had said in the literature, such as tales of people supposedly enjoying death. Smith was appalled and it altered his thinking and his career.
Soon he was devoting more and more time to writing and speaking against euthanasia--until it became a crusade and his full-time work. Nader asked him at one point why he was "doing so much on euthanasia." Smith explained the issue to him. This led to a controversial statement by Nader during his presidential campaign in 2000. While in Oregon, he denounced the state's assisted suicide law as "Oregon's shame."
FINALLY, THERE'S MY OWN EXPERIENCE. For years, I rarely gave abortion a passing thought. That an unborn child was killed often as a matter of convenience--well, I just never thought about that. As a reporter for the Evening Star newspaper in Washington in 1973 covering the Roe v. Wade ruling, I considered the issue a legal matter, not a moral one.
The rise of the anti-abortion movement in the late 1970s and Reagan's stand on abortion caught my eye, but only a political matters. Then my wife Barbara's obstetrician recommended she have amniocentesis when she was pregnant with our third child. This involves injecting a fluid into the womb so the unborn child can be examined for problems or defects.
We'd heard amniocentesis referred to as a "search and destroy mission" that often led to abortion in the case of a child with birth defects or Down's Syndrome. This caused us to think about what we would do in such a case--really to think seriously about abortion for the first time. As it happened, our child was fine. But as we left the doctor's office, my wife and I agreed she'd never do amniocentesis again. And she didn't when she became pregnant again three years later. Without recognizing it immediately, we had become pro-lifers.
So think for a moment about these five experiences: Reagan's deciding on signing an abortion bill, Hyde's mulling whether to co-sponsor a pro-abortion measure, Ponnuru's watching as the Summer of Mercy unfold, Smith's reading pro-euthanasia tracts as his dead friend's home, and our--my wife and I--adverse reaction to amniocentesis. One common thread is obvious. All of us, because of the circumstances we found ourselves in, were forced to think about the taking of a life and what that means in both practical and moral terms. Most people avoid thinking about troubling moral issues like abortion or euthanasia. We couldn't.
And the other common thread is that something happened to make us choose life and choose it firmly and reject death. I think it was our conscience that intervened or, if you prefer, the basic human instinct that favors life over death. Or it you are a Christian, as I am, it was God.
Now I'm sure there are many exceptions to our experience. Not everyone who contemplates abortion or euthanasia is bound to take the intellectual path that five of us--six, including my wife--did on the way to becoming pro-lifers. But I suspect there are many more than like us than not. And many more to come.
Normal people can figure out the difference.
Now, go chase your tail with someone else.
Despicable.
The only way you have to "become" a pro lifer is if you have never applied one of the greatest gifts God has bestowed upon his children..... that being reason.. to the issue.
There is no way a rational thinking person can conclude that terminating an innocent human life, for reasons of pure selfishness or convience is a defensible position.
I actually remember what made me pro-life. I read Anais Nin's diaries. I was repulsed by her attitude towards her stillborn child (whose abortion was drug-induced). It was chilling. My mind reacted violently against it.
The libertarian view on abortion shows the absolute absurdity and hypocrisy of the Libertarian party.
Liberty by its very definition is "freedom from oppression".. for someone to claim their liberty gives them the right to opress... not only opress, but opress in such a heinous way as to deny the innocent its inalienable right to life.. is a bastardization and perversion of the very concept of liberty.
You cannot argue your liberty gives you the right to engage in the most heinous act of oppression there can be, that of denying the inalienable right to life to an innocent human being. That is utter hypocrisy, and intellectionally dishonest and it shows just one more time that the modern "libertarian" party does not know or care about liberty.
"Libertarians" are nothing more than spoiled children trying to codify their selfishness behing some greater ideology, sadly.
You'd better watch out, that is a "despicable off topic lie." (And don't start thinking that the FACTS as laid out in the Libertarian Party platform have anything to do with it!)
I considered myself pro-choice up until my early twenties. I became a pro-lifer the day my wife miscarried what would have been our first baby. It was a few weeks into her pregnancy. Not once did we ever refer to "losing the fetus". We lost a baby.
Nice try. I have yet to meet a Libertarian that defends the shooting of another on the grounds that it's "none of my business". In fact, just the opposite. So, in your attempt to make a point, you distort the truth. It is true that some(/most) Libertarians hold a pro-choice position. But it's also true that some don't. The latter you have turned a blind eye to.
I am a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party and I am Pro-Life. I can be both because I believe that life starts at conception. For that reason, I believe that an abortion is an assault on the life of another human being. Such acts of aggression I am vehemently against. More to the point, I believe that defending one man from the aggression of another falls squarely within the realm of "my business." That said man has not yet traversed a birth canal is irrelevant.
That is why the vast majority of libertarians never do that. But that won't keep people from lying about it and trying to high-jack the thread from it's real topic to their favorite obsession,,,hating liberty.
The thread is about people in error coming to their senses, not about personal agendas of obsessed posters.
hahah... Sorry, but if there is one topic that torpedos the "Libertarian" party claim that they stand for something other than selfishness its their stand on Abortion.
You cannot use Liberty to justify oppression, yet that is EXACTLY where the "party" stands on this issue... there is no gray area for them to hide in on this one.
I have challenged "Libertarians" many times to try to explain this obvious hypocrisy and blatant bastardization of the very concept of Liberty here and elsewhere, and none can do it. There is just no way..
There are certain inalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the Persuit of Happiness.... They are in that order for a reason, you must have life to even care about liberty, you must have liberty to PURSUE, not to achieve but to PURSUE happiness... "Libertarians" are about nothing more than their own selfish "PERSUIT" of happiness and to hell with the prior two rights if they get in the way.
You cannot scream you are a proponent of liberty and say that liberty allows you the right to deny the innocent the inalienable right to life.
The "Libertarian" party cannot be taken seriously in its claims of higher purpose, and not simply attempting to justify spoiled childish behavior until it resolves this complete hypocisy in its platform.
You cannot intellectually defend the horrific opressive act of abortion and use liberty as your crutch to do so. That's a complete afront to the very concept of liberty.
Its not about what an individual "Libertarian" would do, its about what the party platform states, and as a Party, it cannot be taken seriously in its claims for Liberty above all, when its platform justifies the most heinous act of oppression their is by arguing ones Liberty allows it.
Until the Libertarian party deals with this truth, they cannot and will not be taken seriously at any level, because this gaping intellectual hypocrisy will not go away.
When I was younger and abortion became a sacrament in the late 60's and early 70's I was always uncomfortable with talk of abortion. It made no sense to me for folks to be killing their babies.
What radicalized my views were my wife, the science and the numbers. My wife was always adamantly pro life while I took more of a "hey I'd never do it but what other folks do is up to them" attitude. My wife had it right, I had it wrong. Life begins at conception, that is the science of the matter. It is indisputable. And finally the sheer numbers of human beings being killed for matters of convenience was simply appalling to me.
Later in life, an OB-GYN suggested to my daughter that she "selectively reduce" my granddaughter because she was smaller than her two brothers keeping her company in the womb which simply pushed me ever further into the pro life camp.
For many years now we've attended the March for Life which is like being reborn into the pro life movement once again. A wonderful experience to see hundreds of thousands of young teenagers already knowing what it took me considerably longer to come to know, killing babies is wrong.
No one introduced anything to do with getting any political party taken seriously.
One poster, and now you, have hijacked the thread.
The thread is about murder. Leave your agenda at the door.
I never stated that all Libertarians are pro-abortion, I merely (and correctly) stated that many are and unfortunately many Republicans are as well. However, Free Republic is a conservative forum, not a Libertarian or even a Republican forum. And I am aware of few if any genuine conservatives who are pro-abortion.
In my previous comments, I was simply trying to demonstrate that to say that you are "pro-choice" is really no different than saying you are pro-abortion. And I am of the belief that abortion is murder and as such is no different that shooting someone with a gun in cold blood.
Agenda? Free flowing discussions and now its an agenda? Wow, someones paranoid.
Off topic agenda. Hijacked thread.
Yea, free flowing discussions are thread hijacking.... Ok, whatever buddy.
Outstanding article by Fred Barnes. Bookmarked!
That has to be the most horrible thing I have ever seen. How can a doctor do that? How can a woman do that to herself and her child. I'm sick.
I fully flipped to pro life when I had to wrap a 5 month old dead fetus for photographing.
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