For those still undecided. Unborn baby at 5 months. From a book published in 1977.
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.
Interesting. The Summer of Mercy was when I learned first hand that the media had an agenda and would flat out lie to further that agenda. They are not neutral, and more times than not, they are the enemy of truth and goodness.
Yep. I've always liked Fred Barnes, but when I learned he was a serious Pro-Lifer, well ya know Victoria.
IIRC he was the keynote speaker at a major Pro-Life event not long ago.
Here is my story.
Febuary,1970.Just graduated from college and was working at a tax preparation service to earn money to travel around the country that summer.I had the usual California liberal position that its"the woman's right to choose" without really thinking of the implications of that statement.
Anyway,one day I walk into the breakroom and this kid about my age was crying and screaming,"she killed my baby,she killed my baby"over and over again.I consoled him and asked him what had happened.He said his girlfriend went and had an abortion without even consulting HIM.He just kept moaning and crying and his pain was so very intense that it shook me up badly.
That incident really made me question my previous cavalier attitude toward abortion.I had to do a lot of reappraisal.Though I never had any kids of my own,from then on I saw little babies and would grimace at the very though anyone might rip them from their mother's womb.
For those still undecided. Unborn baby at 5 months. From a book published in 1977.
It's a great topic for an article. Unfortunately, Barnes did a lousy job that would embarrass a moderately conscientious 16-year-old writing for a high-school paper.
It will hold no one's interest and will change few minds.
There is nothing new or interesting here, and the Weekly Standard, which is a serious journal, should not have run it even if Freddo is one of their big names.
I'd be interested in seeing a much more-depth, thought-provoking piece on this subject. All Barnes really did was say that some prominent people were converted to the pro-life cause, then tell his own not very intersting personal story.
Perfect down to fingernails and eye lashes...
How eerie you mention the Anais Nin diaries!
I just took out Volume Four on a whim today while browsing at the library.
First time I have ever read anything by her.
I like him, too. He's one of the good guys.
I agree and so I'll share here a story I shared on another thread:
I had an interesting interchange with a post-abortive coworker yesterday.She is always looking for opportunities to bring up her pro-abortion position and yesterday quoted to a third female coworker from an article in New Science magazine (I believe) that "ultrasound has now been proved to be harmful to babies" and should therefore be done away with.
Of course I see such comments as opportunities and I raised the point that perhaps New Science has a pro-abortion agenda and would like to see ultrasound technology abandoned so that expectant mothers who are considering abortion do not see their child in their womb.
And of course I was in turn accused of being paranoid and unscientific, of being out of the loop of the facts. When the post-abortive coworker again stated firmly that "this is being reported for the benefit of the babies, that they won't be harmed by ultrasound," I was blessed with words from On High to appeal to the sense of truth within her (within each one of us) - perhaps I wouldn't be remiss in calling it the "rules of logic" - which, unless a person's conscience has been truly seared and their heart forever hardened, does respond to absolute truth. She responded (by shutting up!) to these words:
"Think about this: they are saying that ultrasound hurts babies. At the very same time they are saying that abortion does not hurt babies. How can it be that abortion does not hurt babies but ultrasound does?"
"What you say is true; however, I believe that the established Libertarian Party platform has been pro-abortion for some time."
It's not quite that simple. I have quite a bit of experience with the libertarians. Here's the latest platform via a websearch:
"I.8 Reproductive Rights
The Issue: The tragedies caused by unplanned, unwanted pregnancies are aggravated and sometimes created by government policies of censorship, restriction, regulation and prohibition.
Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on both sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.
The Principle: Individual rights should not be denied nor abridged on the basis of sex, age, dependency, or location. Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for other people's abortions, nor should any government or individual force a woman to have an abortion. It is the right and obligation of the pregnant woman regardless of age, not the state, to decide the desirability or appropriateness of prenatal testing, Caesarean births, fetal surgery, voluntary surrogacy arrangements and/or home births.
Solutions: We oppose government actions that either compel or prohibit abortion, sterilization or any other form of birth control. Specifically we condemn the practice of forced sterilization of welfare recipients, or of mentally retarded or "genetically defective" individual. We support the voluntary exchange of goods, services or information regarding human sexuality, reproduction, birth control or related medical or biological technologies. We oppose government laws and policies that restrict the opportunity to choose alternatives to abortion.
Transitional Action: We support an end to all subsidies for childbearing or child prevention built into our present laws."
Source: National Platform of the Libertarian Party
But here's the rub and where it gets a lot more complicated. If you look at the more encompassing Statement of Principles it states (in part) the following:
"We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual: namely, (1) the right to life -- accordingly we support the prohibition of the initiation of physical force against others..."
For many libertarians, abortion represents initiation of force (and, frankly, homicide). That's no small issue from a libertarian perspective. As such, abortion has been hotly contested in libertarian circles for years. "Libertarians for Life" is an example of an organization that opposes abortion from a libertarian philosophical perspective. Their perspective is rather succinctly summarized as follows:
The Libertarian Case Against Abortion
To explain and defend our case, LFL argues that:
1. Human offspring are human beings, persons from fertilization.
2. Abortion is homicide -- the killing of one person by another.
3. There is never a right to kill an innocent person. Prenatally, we are all innocent persons.
4. A prenatal child has the right to be in the mother's body. Parents have no right to evict their children from the crib or from the womb and let them die. Instead both parents, the father as well as the mother, owe them support and protection from harm.
5. No government, nor any individual, has a just power to legally depersonify any one of us, born or preborn.
6. The proper purpose of the law is to side with the innocent, not against them.
"There are people with agendas who look for openings all day everyday on this site to insert it into topics no matter how far fetched or off topic. This person has made another huge reach to introduce the hatred of freedom loving people into a thread about how people came to their senses about precious children sent to this earth by God."
And you happen to be engaging in hyperbole. Not every conservative agrees with libertarian philosophy. In my view, there is a very strong philosophical case against abortion from a libertarian perspective (non-initiation of force). Happily, Libertarians for Life has very succinctly stated the case for us:
The Libertarian Case Against Abortion
1. Human offspring are human beings, persons from fertilization.
2. Abortion is homicide -- the killing of one person by another.
3. There is never a right to kill an innocent person. Prenatally, we are all innocent persons.
4. A prenatal child has the right to be in the mother's body. Parents have no right to evict their children from the crib or from the womb and let them die. Instead both parents, the father as well as the mother, owe them support and protection from harm.
5. No government, nor any individual, has a just power to legally depersonify any one of us, born or preborn.
6. The proper purpose of the law is to side with the innocent, not against them.
Abortion, or as I prefer to call it 'infanticide', is a very emotional subject that tends to bring out the vitriol in people.
As I see it, there are libertarians who view infanticide as some sort of political right. And then there are other libertarians who bitterly oppose infanticide and can stand foursquare on libertarian principle in doing so.
"Libertarians" are nothing more than spoiled children trying to codify their selfishness behing some greater ideology, sadly."
Depends on the Libertarian. You could substitute the word "Democrats" or "Republicans" in your post and have it be accurate as well.
Trying to pigeonhole an entire group of people on the basis of a political label is painting with an overly broad brush and is, in my view, counter-productive. There are anti-infanticide Libertarians out there as well as some anti-infanticide Democrats. I happen to be one of them.
Last I checked, the broader goal of the pro-life movement was to end infanticide. Hard stop. It wasn't to necessarily agree on the minutae of differing political philosophies.
"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."
Not everyone who considers themselves to be a "libertarian" is a member of the Libertarian Party. As a matter of fact, it's a fairly small minority. In my experience, most of those who consider themselves to be "libertarian" philosophically tend to be members of the Republican party.
I remember my turning point also.
The Fla. legislature was holding hearings on the subject.
The hearings were being broadcast on Public TV. I was watching the session.
A nurse testified some of the horrors , live 'births', dumping the fetus in waste pails to go out with the garbage, that kind of horror.
It turned my stomach and mind.
I do not disagree with what you say, for my own "choice" to abort my first child was made based on believing the lie that "it's only tissue." I found out a significant fact a little more than a year ago, however, and it explains a great deal:
A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips;
and a liar giveth ear to a naughty tongue.
Proverbs 17:4 (KJV)
You have it precisely correct.
It's not rocket science - killing innocent people is wrong.
I loved the picture that led to Drudge being "excommunicated" from TV -- the one with the unborn baby grabbing the physician's finger with his tiny little hand during surgery.
Then you'll really like this:
An Update on Samuel Armas "The Hand of Hope"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1012548/posts
Thank you so much for that! What a wonderful testimony by these parents.
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