By Dave Andrusko
Not often do I agree with pro-abortionists, especially the kind who sees their mission in life as eliminating even a flashing yellow light on a woman’s race to abort and persuading the culture that concern about both mother and child is the very definition of “discrimination.”
But they do have a point: if they can convince us to stay quiet while they “change the narrative,” they can carry the day. Unfortunately for them—and fortunately for the babies—that will never happen.
Over the next couple of days, I’ll offer some thoughts on essays that have appeared at rhreality.org, based on the authors’ consciousness-raising attendance at last week’s annual International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics conference in Italy.
It’s come to this. Leila Hessini offers this gem:
“How can this decision be wrong?” asks Dr. Nozer Sheriar, a gynecologist in India. “How can any decision, choice or action taken by 43 million women each year around the world be wrong?”
Really? Would we care to extend that logic to wife-beaters? To child abusers? Please.
The brunt of the argument is a familiar litany: abortion on demand will never be accepted unless they de-stigmatize abortion. One you get past that hurtle, then you move on to the next phase: if one abortion is morally neutral (if not positively beneficial to the mother), who is to say/judge/evaluate a woman if she has abortion after abortion after abortion?
The stigma that surrounds abortion, Hessini tells her readers, is a “social construct.” We don’t question abortion because unborn children are ripped apart and mothers often traumatized but as a way of controlling women with a made-up “construct.”
Like so many who “reason” like she does, Hessini argues along parallel paths. On the one hand, women need this “health care service” to save their lives or to avoid “back alley abortions.” These are combined in the same paragraph with commonsense laws that required waiting periods: six of one, half-dozen of the other.
But on the other hand, that’s just to lay the groundwork for the real agenda: abortion without apology and (I would argue) without conscience. Hessini asks in effect, where does anyone get off offering bromides like abortion as “safe, legal and rare”? That by definition “reinforces the notion that abortion is wrong and abnormal”-in other words that abortion is something to AVOID.
That must be rejected, at all costs, for the likes of Hessini. That’s the kind of stigmatization that leads to “creating hierarchies of women—some who deserve an abortion, some who do not.”
You get the point: repeat abortion without a second thought=good/accepting. Asking yourself whether such a cavalier disregard for life is not good for your soul=bad/stigmatization.
What’s the solution?
“Advocates must continue to change the narrative around abortion: Women are the center. They should have the power and the right to make their own decisions and to not be judged—by society, by their communities, by the health system, nor by us.”
If they can only “change the narrative,” all will be well. Guess what? Tens of millions of pro-life Americans will never stand idly by.
We will shout the truth from the rooftops: abortion is wrong!
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