Posted on 06/06/2003 10:32:33 AM PDT by Cathryn Crawford
The Pro-Life Movement's Problem With Morality
Exclusive commentary by Cathryn Crawford
Jun 6, 2003
Making claim to being pro-life in America is like shouting, “I’m a conservative Christian Republican!” from your rooftop. This is partly due to the fact that a considerable number of conservative Christian Republicans are pro-life. It’s hardly true, however, to say that they are the only pro-life people in America. Surprisingly enough to some, there are many different divisions within the pro-life movement, including Democrats, gays, lesbians, feminists, and environmentalists. It is not a one-party or one-group or one-religion issue.
The pro-life movement doesn’t act like it, though. Consistently, over and over throughout the last 30 years, the pro-lifers have depended solely on moral arguments to win the debate of life over choice. You can believe that abortion is morally wrong, yes, and at the appropriate moment, appealing to the emotions can be effective, but too much time is spent on arguing about why abortion is wrong morally instead of why abortion is wrong logically. We have real people of all walks of life in America – Christians, yes, but also non-Christians, atheists, Muslims, agnostics, hedonists, narcissists - and it’s foolish and ineffective for the pro-life movement to only use the morality argument to people who don’t share their morals. It’s shortsighted and it’s also absolutely pointless.
It is relatively easy to convince a person who shares your morals of a point of view – you simply appeal to whatever brand of morality that binds the two of you together. However, when you are confronted with someone that you completely disagree with on every point, to what can you turn to find common ground? There is only one place to go, one thing that we all have in common – and that is our shared instinct to protect ourselves, our humanness.
It seems that the mainstream religious pro-life movement is not so clear when it comes to reasons not to have an abortion beyond the basic arguments that it’s a sin and you’ll go straight to hell. Too much time is spent on the consequences of abortion and not enough time is spent convincing people why they shouldn’t have one in the first place.
What about the increased risk of breast cancer in women who have abortions? Why don’t we hear more about that? What about the risk of complications later in life with other pregnancies? You have to research to even find something mentioned about any of this. The pro-life movement should be front and center, shouting the statistics to the world. Instead, they use Biblical quotes and morality to argue their point.
Don’t get me wrong; morality has its place. However, the average Joe who doesn’t really know much about the pro-life movement - and doesn’t really care too much for the obnoxious neighbor who’s always preaching at him to go to church and stop drinking - may not be too open to a religious sort of editorial written by a minister concerning abortion. He’d rather listen to those easy going pro-abortion people – they appeal more to the general moral apathy that he so often feels.
Tell him that his little girl has a high chance of suffering from a serious infection or a perforated uterus due to a botched abortion, however, and he’ll take a bit more notice. Tell him that he’s likely to suffer sexual side effects from the mental trauma of his own child being aborted and he’ll take even more notice. But these aren’t topics that are typically discussed by the local right-to-life chapters.
It isn’t that the religious right is wrong. However, it boils down to one question: Do they wish to be loudly moral or quietly winning?
It is so essential that the right-to-life movement in America galvanize behind the idea the logic, not morality, will be what wins the day in this fight, because sometimes, despite the rightness of the intentions, morality has to be left out of the game. Morality doesn’t bind everyone together. The only thing that does that is humanness and the logic of protecting ourselves; and that is what has to be appealed to if we are going to make a difference in the fight to lessen and eventually eliminate abortion.
Cathryn Crawford is a student from Texas. She can be reached at feedback@washingtondispatch.com.
I have always been against abortion all my life. That basic concept is horrible to me. However, I have faced facts of life.
In 1973, I offered to marry a girl who became pregnant. We had always been good friends since we were in 9th grade. I was not the father, but she had few choices left and I offered to give the baby a legal name.
She chose to have an abortion in Canada.
Today, I still think that she made the wise choice.
Frankly, pro-life discussions, speeches, exposition of logic, etc. all helps the pro-life cause. But it's not the main thing we need to do to be "winning"--quietly or not. Frankly, as I look at the front lines, we're losing. It's the babies for the most part who are "manning" the front lines. So they continue to be slaughtered.
What's needed are not more logicians at the front line. It's people acting like abortion is murder. When people see by your actions & lifestyle that you're convinced that pre-born babies are your brothers and sisters, guess what? You've exposed them to pro-life activism & they may reconsider their position then.
I assure you this is standard fare with these serial killer apologists, because I have made it my methodology to never appeal against abortion on demand from a religious perspective, yet I am constantly being accused of trying to force my religious beliefs upon those who don't agree with 'my religious beliefs'. To refute irrational or illogical premises requires more than a sound-byte response, yet the media is geared to such brevity and controls the overall outcome of the public debate by tacitly ridiculing reasoned syllogisms as 'too difficult for the average Joe to follow'.
I have a book called Who Broke the Baby? which is an excellent deconstruction of pro-abort arguments from the late '70s. The author took her title from a question her child asked her. He came downstairs long after bedtime while she was working with some pro-life materials, saw a picture of an aborted fetus and asked, "Who broke the baby?" Not that he did not ask, "Who broke the fetus" or "Who broke the products of conception?"
Loud? Exactly where on TV do you hear an ardent pro-life message?
Too many folks take all "exposition" and re-interpret as "pounding into their heads." There is a difference between exposing and imposing.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, admits his group lied about the number of women who died from illegal abortions when testifying before the Supreme Court in 1972. "We spoke of 5,000 - 10,000 deaths a year.... I confess that I knew the figures were totally false ... it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"
That claim of thousands of maternal deaths due to illegal abortion doesn't measure up when compared with other statistics. About 50,000 women of child-bearing age die each year -- from all causes combined. To suggest that 10,000 of these deaths were from illegal abortion would make that the cause of one out of every five deaths, or twenty percent. This would have made illegal abortion the leading cause of death among women in that age group.
If you had the money, you sent the girl to Canada.
You are a liar and a fool!
No, it's just that I'm a total a-hole.
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