harmonicminer

Most of us in the “pro-life” community do not mind the label “anti-abortion,” although in fact pro-life also means we are against euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the like.

On the other hand, lots of people who call themselves “pro-choice” are offended at being called “pro-abortion.”   This is illogical, of course: people who have no firearms, and no intention of ever buying one, are still called “pro-gun” if they simply believe that other people should have the right to keep and bear arms.  And political associations being what they are, a fair number of the very people who resent the term “pro-abortion” are likely to use the term “pro-gun” in exactly the same way.

There’s a reason for this, of course.  Even “pro-choice” people know there is something inherently wrong with abortion (for reasons other than saving the life of the mother), and so they don’t want to be thought “pro-abortion,” since that’s like being called “pro-evil-thing.”  I understand their reluctance.  If I was all for unfettered freedom on the part of some humans to take away the right of other humans to live, I’d want to hide it, too.

Nevertheless, pro-lifers, cheerfully anti-abortion, should deny the use of the term pro-choice as cover for people who want to deny the right to life.  It is simply a “term of art” created by clever public relations people, not a descriptive term of the actual position.  When someone tells me they are “pro-choice” I usually say, “You mean, pro-abortion?”  And the discussion that ensues allows me to make the obvious point above.

Tags: abortion

Here is a website whose major topic is the black genocide of the unborn. Fair warning: some will find it offensive because of its Ku Klux Klan imagery. But if you have the courage to actually read it, you’ll discover that it is DECRYING the abortion of black babies, not encouraging it, though the satire is a bit heavy, perhaps.

Planned Parenthood clinics kill more Blacks than the Ku Klux Klan

Planned Parenthood operates the nation’s largest chain of abortion clinics and
almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods.

And if you click on the link labelled “What the Ku Klux Klan Could Only Dream About
The Abortion Industry is Accomplishing “, you see this, among other things:

Lynching by the Ku Klux Klan isn’t as efficient at killing Blacks as Planned Parenthood abortions. Thanks to them, in America today, almost as many black babies are killed by abortion as are born.

This brochure presents abortion statistics that highlight the genocide that is being waged on the Black community by Planned Parenthood and the supporters of legalized abortion. It also exposes the racist ideas of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who openly admitted in her autobiography that she was once the featured speaker at a KKK meeting.

The truth revealed by the abortion facts and quotes in this brochure will open your eyes.

And then there’s this tidbit:

Lynching is for amateurs.

A bit heavy handed?  Perhaps.  But if you’re more offended by this page than you’re offended by abortion, including the deliberate attempt to minimize the black race that was intended by Margaret Sanger and the original founders of Planned Parenthood, then you’re simply morally tone-deaf.

Click the links, and look into your soul.  Can you tolerate this?

Tags: abortion

Were They at the Same Meeting? by George Weigel on National Review Online

He [the Pope] told Pelosi, politely but unmistakably, that her relentlessly pro-abortion politics put her in serious difficulties as a Catholic, which was his obligation as a pastor. He also underscored, for Pelosi, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barbara Mikulski, Rose DeLauro, Kathleen Sebelius, and everyone else, that the Church’s opposition to the taking of innocent human life, at any stage of the human journey, is not some weird Catholic hocus-pocus; it’s a first principle of justice than can be known by reason. It is a “requirement of the natural moral law”, that is, the moral truths we can know by thinking about what is right and what is wrong, to defend the inviolability of innocent human life. You don’t have to believe in papal primacy to know that; you don’t have do believe in seven sacraments, or the episcopal structure of the Church, or the divinity of Christ, to know that. You don’t even have to believe in God to know that. You only have to be a morally serious human being, willing to work through a moral argument, which, of course, means being the kind of person who understands that moral truth cannot be reduced to questions of feminist political correctness or partisan political advantage.

Tags: abortion

Why “Reducing the Number of Abortions” not Necessarily Prolife

…pro-life activists have worked tirelessly over the years to reduce the number of abortions, but a numerical reduction is not our only goal. The prolife position is that all members of the human community, including the unborn, have inestimable and equal worth and dignity and thus are entitled to the fundamental protection of the laws. “Reducing the number of abortions” could occur in a regime of law in which this principle of justice is denied, and that is the regime that President Obama wants to preserve and extend. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of others who happen to possess the power to decide to kill them or let them live. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts of killing simply by trying to pacify and/or accommodate the needs of those who want to procure or encourage abortions only reinforces the idea that the unborn are subhuman creatures whose value depends exclusively on someone else’s wanting them or deciding that they are worthy of being permitted to live. So, in theory at least, there could be fewer abortions while the culture drifts further away from the prolife perspective and the law becomes increasingly unjust.

Consider this illustration. Imagine if someone told you in 19th century America that he was not interested in giving slaves full citizenship, but merely reducing the number of people brought to this country to be slaves. But suppose another person told you that he too wanted to reduce the number of slaves, but proposed to do it by granting them the full citizenship to which they are entitled as a matter of natural justice. Which of the two is really “against slavery” in a full-orbed principled sense? The first wants to reduce the number of slaves, but only while retaining a regime of law that treats an entire class of human beings as subhuman property. The second believes that the juridical infrastructure should reflect the moral truth about enslaved people, namely, that they are in fact human beings made in the image of their Maker who by being held in bondage are denied their fundamental rights.

Just as calling for the reduction of the slave population is not the same as believing that slaves are full members of the moral community and are entitled to protection by the state, calling for a reduction in the number of abortions is not the same as calling for the state to reflect in its laws and policies the true inclusiveness of the human family, that it consists of all those who share the same nature regardless of size, level of development, environment or dependency.

Yep.  Francis Beckwith says it exactly right.

The argument that “Obama’s policies will reduce the number of abortions because people will feel they have other alternatives” is very, very ugly under the surface.  Yet, exactly that was the position of many Christians who voted for Obama.  They need to reconsider, repent, and re-engage with the real pro-life movement.

I wonder if they’d have thought a good solution to slavery was to leave it legal, but give away farming machinery to plantation owners, hoping they’d release their slaves?

Tags: abortion

There aren’t that many people less diplomatic than me, but one of them may be Doug Giles:

In less than a week after Obama’s swearing in, our nuevo POTUS unfurled his radically liberal abortion and family plans together with his juicy pro-homosexual agenda.

Good job, all evangelicals who voted for Obama, as these aforementioned ditties—from a biblical perspective—are about as sanctified as the Antichrist French kissing a crack whore in Bret Michaels’ hot tub.

Yep, I wanna give a special shout out to all the “major” ministers who fawned and swooned over Barack and swayed their congregations to vote for him in spite of his anti-scriptural stances on life, marriage and sexuality.

One wonders if any apologies will be forthcoming in 2-4 years, when it is evident to absolutely everyone that Obama is utterly hostile to the notions of traditional family legal protections and the right-to-life.  But to the Left, Christian or otherwise, having good intentions means never having to say you’re sorry.

Keep your eyes on MoralAccountability and here, too, as we follow developments.  And keep praying for Obama to have a Damascus Road experience, where he suddenly realizes that fetuses are people, too.

Tags: abortion

Abortion and the Obama Presidency

Pro-lifers in the United States were generally disappointed and discouraged by the results of the 2008 national elections. Barack Obama—as measured by his own record and campaign promises, the most pro-abortion presidential candidate the United States has ever seen—was elected with 52.6 percent of the popular vote. It appears inevitable that the modest but significant political gains made by the pro-life movement since 2000 will be eroded or undone when the president-elect takes office. In some areas the short-term damage may be even more extensive than veteran pro-lifers anticipate.

To step back for some perspective, when Roe v. Wade, the infamous Supreme Court decision striking down state anti-abortion laws nationwide, turned 25 years old in 1998, the pro-life movement was at a low point. Just five years under then-President Bill Clinton had wiped out what little political progress there had been during the Reagan and Bush (I) administrations.

In 1998, to mark that grim 25th anniversary, an anthology of essays entitled Back to the Drawing Board was published, in which around two dozen American pro-life leaders reviewed the political, legal, educational, and social gains and losses since 1973 and recommended courses of future pro-life action. The volume demonstrated that politics is only one area of a much broader social movement, and that practical efforts to help women in need and to educate the American public are as important as political measures.

Now, 10 years later, the prospects at the level of the federal government are again bleak, but this time pro-life leaders are not waiting until the second term of a pro-abortion president to take stock.

Much more at the link above.

Tags: abortion