Deal Hudson Finds Kerry's Views on Abortion and Life "A Little Hard To Believe"

On Sunday, John Kerry told Iowa's Telegraph Herald that he personally opposes abortion and believes that life begins at conception. The exact quote is as follows:

"I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception."

You may recall the e-letter I sent you in February that covered this very issue. In it, I had assembled several past Kerry comments that seemed to show that Senator Kerry does NOT really oppose abortion -- publicly or personally.

For example, compare his recent statement with the remarks he made at last year's NARAL Pro-Choice America Dinner:

"I think that tonight we have to make it clear that we are not going to turn back the clock. There is no overturning of Roe v. Wade... There is no outlawing of a procedure necessary to save a woman's life or health and there are no more cutbacks on population control efforts around the world. We need to take on this President and all of the forces of intolerance on this issue. We need to honestly and confidently and candidly take this issue out to the country and we need to speak up and be proud of what we stand for."

Did you catch that? Not only should abortion be available to all American women, all the time, but it should be used as a population control valve around the world. And this is something we should "be proud of." Not what you'd expect from someone who claims he doesn't like abortion.

From the Boston Herald on January 23, 2001: "I will not back away from my conviction that international family planning programs are in America's best interests. We should resist pressures in this country for heavy-handed Washington mandates that ignore basic choices that should belong to free people around the globe."

Kerry's support for "international family planning programs" -- a standard euphemism for "abortion" -- is an issue he's advocated for some time. If Kerry is telling the truth about being "personally opposed" to abortion, why is he trying to spread it worldwide?

But perhaps the most outrageous quote comes from the 1994 Congressional record: "The right thing to do is to treat abortions as exactly what they are -- a medical procedure that any doctor is free to provide and any pregnant woman free to obtain. Consequently, abortions should not have to be performed in tightly guarded clinics on the edge of town; they should be performed and obtained in the same locations as any other medical procedure... [A]bortions need to be moved out of the fringes of medicine and into the mainstream of medical practice. And by the same token, if our children are to be safe from the danger of fanaticism, tolerance needs to spread out of the mainstream churches, mosques, and synagogues, and into the religious fringes."

Abortion is simply "a medical procedure"? If that were true, then on what grounds could he possibly be personally opposed to it? He certainly doesn't seem to be struggling with the issue here. And how exactly does he propose to "spread tolerance" to the "religious fringes"? Presumably, he's referring to the people who, as an article of faith, believe abortion to be immoral. But didn't he just claim to be one of those very people?

John Kerry says he believes that abortion is wrong and that life begins at conception. And yet he vows to do everything he can to make sure that women have the freedom and right to end that life.

You can say a lot of things about a position like that. But you certainly can't say it's Catholic.
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I believe this is a dangerous effort to undermine a woman's right to choose, which is a constitutional amendment I will always fight to protect.

.... (so I can maintain those much needed votes from NARAL.)

Can you imagine his mother telling him: "John, I would have aborted you, but it was not legal back then. Please fight to ensure the right to choose is kept legal."

Here is an argument I like to use for those who like to fool themselves into thinking a fetus is not a human life. People like this generally will not respond to any type of religious or moral argument so I leave it at purely secular and logical level.
Indisputable premise. If all women alive as of this date, were to abort all pregnancies for the next 60 years, then the human race will be extinct by 2124.It does not matter if the abortion is conducted 1 sec after conception or 8 month 29 days.
Irrefutable logic. Since it is true for the entire population then it is true for each individual in that population, thus if all human life ends, each individual act ends human life.
While some might argue that this is an argument taken to an absurd conclusion, it does not change the truth of the premise and it belies the sophistry used by the SC to justify their inability to call a fetus human life or an individual deserving of protection by society.

Try this one the next time a woman argues with you in favor of a woman's right to choose. "Do you think it is acceptable to abort a fetus simply because it is female." It's kind of tough to argue that we should legitimize the view women have less value than men men. It is actually happening now in India and China where boy babies are considered more valuable than girl babies. The long term cultural consequences of such "choices" are the thing of nightmares. Imagine a society where there are vastly more men than women. A total breakdown would be inevitable.

Most women would laugh and say that will never happen. Remind them that when abortions were first legalized no one dreamed we would someday legalize partially delivering a baby from it's mother and then suck out it's brains before we pulled the head out.

eastsider:"Care to comment on the sentence in bold?" 14 posted on 07/07/2004 9:22:19 AM PDT by eastsider

Well...where to begin? Kerry, on a moral level, is a barbarian. He's a member of weird secret societies. He supports "population control" with enthusiasm. Arrogantly he maintains the public fraud that he may do so and receive Holy Communion as a "Catholic" at Roman Catholic Masses. He MUST be stopped. And the bishops must stand up for innocent life. If they fail to do so, they will have blood on their hands and will have to answer for it in the afterlife.

I would urge all loyal faithful Catholics to speak out against this barbarian mass murderer LOUDLY and CLEARLY to fellow Catholics and Christians whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so.

Or did you mean the bit about "article of faith"? Well, we don't believe abortion to be immoral as "an article of faith." We KNOW and UNDERSTAND it to be immoral and evil based on evidence, reason, and natural law ethics. It's not a mere issue of "faith" or "belief" or requiring any leap into mysteries.

I think the problem is with this fuzzy idea, of extremist totalitarian secular humanism, that expressions of a need to protect the lives of the unborn are part of some questionable esoteric theological mystery or sectarian absolutist Christian morality. An immediate question should follow for any logical, sane, literate adult: "Gee, does that mean any need to protect adult humans from murder is also a part of some mysterious theological morality which liberals are also exempt from?"

The legalization of abortion came about as a result largely of the secular revolution of the 1960s. Much of the rhetoric about "just a mass of cells" or "part of a woman's body" reflect a very unscientific and superstitious attitude toward what embryonic human life is. When people could NOT actually see what an unborn child looks like there was a lot of hocus pocus pushing for abortion. The original abortion attitudes of the 1970s and 1980s are now challenged by the fact that babies delivered pre-maturely SURVIVE MUCH EARLIER than before. In the UK this is causing legal review of abortion laws. As it should. The whole abortion industry is on very shaky ground just based on evidence - medical and scientific. The rot about "just a mass of cells" and "just part of a woman's body" should be over and thrown on the ash heap of history along with Auschwitz, the Gulag, and slavery.

Bump to your last two posts. Outstanding!

To boil it down a little more:

"If the concept of the sanctity of life is merely religious mysticism then murder is nothing more than a mystical concept. Therefore no life has any intrinsic value and punishments for taking or harming a life are absurd and neurotically irrational."

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