The Silliest Argument Ever (Is One You Hear All The Time)
By Kristen Walker -- January 12th, 2012, 5:32 pm
The Ten Commandments: All up in your business since circa 1440 B.C.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you.
It’s lunchtime. You are eating at your desk at work and decide to look at Facebook. It’s as exciting as ever. Your aunt had a burrito for lunch. A girl you haven’t seen since college got a new tattoo. Someone is super happy it’s almost Friday.
Showing posts with label ProLife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ProLife. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Link To Webpage With Inspiring Stories Of Babies - Now Adults - That Survived Abortion
http://liveaction.org/blog/the-faces-of-aborted-children/
In Their Own Words, Planned Parenthood 2010 Annual Report
For those who insist as Planned Parenthood does that abortion is just a small part of the work they do ... from Lila Rose's Facebook post ... "Planned Parenthood's new 2010 annual report shows that they performed 329,445 abortions compared to 31,098 prenatal care services and 841 adoption referrals. It is pretty clear where their focus is. Wish it was on life." Please keep in mind the info comes from their own report ... http://www.lifenews.com/2011/12/30/planned-parenthood-helps-fewer-pregnant-woman-adoptions-drop/(retrieved from Facebook 12/31/11)
Mammograms At Planned Parenthood?
Watch the video ... Planned Parenthood provides mammograms? That's news to Planned Parenthood employees ...
http://liveaction.org/blog/planned-parenthood-ceos-false-mammogram-claim-exposed/
http://liveaction.org/blog/planned-parenthood-ceos-false-mammogram-claim-exposed/
The 3% Deception of Planned Parenthood
... Planned Parenthood keeps telling us that abortion is only 3% of its services, though we know it’s actually more like 95% and they get that 3% from coding (an abortion has different parts such as office visits, follow ups, pregnancy test, etc., so each part gets coded differently but it’s all part of one abortion). If this low percentage were true then they could stop doing abortions, keep their money and stay profitable. (Susan Tyrrell, retrieved 11/19/11 from http://www.lifenews.com/2011/11/18/13th-texas-planned-parenthood-may-close-after-de-funding/)
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
ProLife Mark Crutcher responds to "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament"
Few write with clarity and precision as well as Mark Crutcher, Founder and President of Life Dynamics. Here, from his book, "On Message" (2005, Life Dynamics Incorporated, p. 34) Mr. Crutcher addresses the oft-heard wisecrack directed at Pro-Life males – “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”. To grasp the insidious intention of this insinuation one must appreciate what a “sacrament” is. According to the Baltimore Catechism a “Sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace” (http://www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson13.htm, retrieved 1/19/10). A further definition is useful, that of “grace”; meaning “a supernatural gift of God bestowed on us, through the merits of Jesus Christ, for our salvation” (http://www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson10.htm retrieved 1/19/10). That preliminary basic definitions on terms for which entire volumes have been written are required reveals the underlying nature, whether intentional or inadvertent, of ineptitude and contempt toward theological concepts pervading this comment. Mr. Crutcher exposes the absurdity of the pro-abortion remark and does so with his characteristic sense of disarming reason. (Visit Life Dynamics at www.LifeDynamics.com and Mr. Crutcher's blog at www.markcrutcherblog.com.)
Since the beginning of this debate, radical pro-aborts have been regurgitating this nonsense and it is time to set the record straight. If you look at polls taken on the public’s attitude about abortion, one thing jumps out. Regardless of whether the poll is paid for by the pro-abortion side or the pro-life side, and regardless of how the questions were slanted to favor one position or the other, one finding almost never changes. With virtually no exceptions, the results show that men are consistently more pro-abortion than women. It seems that men, especially single men, are aware that they are the ones best served and protected by legal abortion.
So while these abortion advocates continue to espouse this “sacrament” garbage, they do so with the full knowledge that it’s a bald-faced lie. They are fully aware that the data shows that the ability to become pregnant actually makes a person less supportive of abortion. Of course, the abortion lobby finds that fact to be counter productive, so they just ignore it.
Let’s not forget, with almost no exceptions, pioneers of the women’s movement like Susan B. Anthony, Mattie Brinkerhoff, Sarah Norton, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were quite outspoken in their opposition to legal abortion. In fact, Alice Paul, who helped write the original Equal Rights Amendment and worked 50 years for its passage, called abortion, “the ultimate exploitation of women.” Even suffragist newspapers like Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, had editorial policies which openly attacked abortion and abortionists. (For more information on pro-life feminism see: Victoria-Woodhull.com)
These early women’s rights advocates correctly saw abortion as patronizing and paternalistic. What they recognized back then remains true today. Abortion doesn’t free women, it devalues them. Abortion says they are second-class people whose problems are so trivial they can be handled with a “quick-fix” solution. These women knew that abortion favors sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible males. It allows them to sexually exploit women in a relatively risk-free environment. These guys can have their fun, and if a pregnancy occurs the woman involved can just be “vacuumed out” and used again.
True feminists also know that abortion lets men buy their way out of responsibility. The fact is, no other single factor has freed more sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible men than women's willingness to submit to abortion. It is, has always been, and will always be, a safety net which makes it easier for women to provide responsibility-free sex to men.
The reality that abortion is a protector of men is now so well known that some abortion advocates no longer even bother to deny it. In fact, some even say it should be celebrated. On May 11, 1990, on the nationally syndicated radio commentary program Spectrum, one very vocal proponent of abortion-on-demand, Ann Taylor-Flemming, was expounding on the need for their side to bring more men into the cause. She said this should be done because of the service abortion renders them. This is what she had to say about men, women, and abortion:
“I came of age with the women’s movement. It has given license to my ambitions and dreams, and filled me with the fervor for equality that permeates all that I do. But this time, I want to turn the tables a bit. Take an issue that always seems like a women’s issue and pitch it directly towards the men out there. And that issue is abortion … it’s time now to invite the men of America back in, to ask them to raise their voices for choice … I dare say that many of them have impregnated women along the way, and then let off the hook in a big, big way – emotionally, economically and every other way – when the women went ahead and had abortions … the sense of relief for themselves was mixed with sympathy for and gratitude towards those women whose ultimate responsibility was to relieve them of responsibility by having abortions … it would sure be nice to hear from all those men out there whose lives have been changed, bettered, and substantially eased because they were not forced into unwanted fatherhood.”
Even the most bigoted male chauvinist would never suggest that women have a “responsibility” to let the men who impregnate them “off the hook” by submitting to abortion. And yet, here is that very philosophy being espoused by someone who claims to be an advocate for women.
Statements like these prove that even outspoken advocates of abortion know that by its nature abortion will always be something which allows men to sexually exploit women. The really deplorable part of this is that they have this patronizing attitude toward women while claiming the only motive they have for being in this battle is to protect women. Maybe that’s an example of that old warning to be suspicious of anyone who says they only have your best interests at heart. (A recording of the Taylor-Flemming quote is on file at Life Dynamics.)
Another point is, not only does abortion protect men, it does so without demanding that they face any personal risk. After all, while the baby that’s sentenced to death is just as much his as hers, it’s only her body which will be invaded to carry out the execution. You can bet that if these guys were the ones who might end up on the abortionist’s table, facing unknown emotional and physical risks, they’d suddenly have a different attitude about sex and abortion.
Then there is the argument that a woman sometimes “needs” an abortion because a baby might interfere with her career. However, true feminists do not ask women to change to meet society’s needs, but instead work toward a society in which pregnant women, and women with children, are allowed to fully participate just as they are. If the failures of society clash with the biology of women, a feminist would not say that women are the ones who have to change. Simply put, real feminism does not ask women to solve society’s problems by killing their children. In fact, powerful women do not kill their children for anyone or for any reason, nor do they believe that women need surgery to be equal to men.
It is interesting to note that anytime a state has tried to enact legislation prohibiting abortions for sex selection, these “protectors of women” are the first ones to fight against it. They do this despite the fact that it’s been proven time and again – by people on both sides of this issue – that when a sex selection abortion occurs the overwhelming majority of the time it’s a female baby which ends up dead. These people think so little of women that they won’t even stop killing those babies whose only sin is that they would one day be women. The pro-choice mob has apparently decided that if our society wants to view being female as a fetal deformity punishable by death, that’s okay by them.
The abortion industry wraps feminism around abortion hoping to hide what it really is. Better than anyone else in our society, these people know that abortionists are nothing more than cowardly, cold-blooded, hired serial killers and moral hyenas who prey on women in troubled circumstances. They also know that abortion has the same relationship to women’s rights that pornography has. It cheapens, degrades and victimizes them for the benefit of men. For the abortion industry to suggest that having a clean place to kill their babies is the cornerstone of women’s equality is a self-serving and vile perversion of the basic values of true feminism. As pro-life feminist Melissa Simmons-Tulin once said:
“… women will never climb to equality over the dead bodies of their children.”
Since the beginning of this debate, radical pro-aborts have been regurgitating this nonsense and it is time to set the record straight. If you look at polls taken on the public’s attitude about abortion, one thing jumps out. Regardless of whether the poll is paid for by the pro-abortion side or the pro-life side, and regardless of how the questions were slanted to favor one position or the other, one finding almost never changes. With virtually no exceptions, the results show that men are consistently more pro-abortion than women. It seems that men, especially single men, are aware that they are the ones best served and protected by legal abortion.
So while these abortion advocates continue to espouse this “sacrament” garbage, they do so with the full knowledge that it’s a bald-faced lie. They are fully aware that the data shows that the ability to become pregnant actually makes a person less supportive of abortion. Of course, the abortion lobby finds that fact to be counter productive, so they just ignore it.
***
The only people who ever tried to sell the idea that women will never be equal to men unless they can legally butcher their children, are those who have either a financial or political interest in abortion. The average woman, regardless of her views on abortion, is simply not gullible enough to be convinced that protecting the unborn would mean relegating women to the status of nothing more than the property of their husbands.Let’s not forget, with almost no exceptions, pioneers of the women’s movement like Susan B. Anthony, Mattie Brinkerhoff, Sarah Norton, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were quite outspoken in their opposition to legal abortion. In fact, Alice Paul, who helped write the original Equal Rights Amendment and worked 50 years for its passage, called abortion, “the ultimate exploitation of women.” Even suffragist newspapers like Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, had editorial policies which openly attacked abortion and abortionists. (For more information on pro-life feminism see: Victoria-Woodhull.com)
These early women’s rights advocates correctly saw abortion as patronizing and paternalistic. What they recognized back then remains true today. Abortion doesn’t free women, it devalues them. Abortion says they are second-class people whose problems are so trivial they can be handled with a “quick-fix” solution. These women knew that abortion favors sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible males. It allows them to sexually exploit women in a relatively risk-free environment. These guys can have their fun, and if a pregnancy occurs the woman involved can just be “vacuumed out” and used again.
True feminists also know that abortion lets men buy their way out of responsibility. The fact is, no other single factor has freed more sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible men than women's willingness to submit to abortion. It is, has always been, and will always be, a safety net which makes it easier for women to provide responsibility-free sex to men.
The reality that abortion is a protector of men is now so well known that some abortion advocates no longer even bother to deny it. In fact, some even say it should be celebrated. On May 11, 1990, on the nationally syndicated radio commentary program Spectrum, one very vocal proponent of abortion-on-demand, Ann Taylor-Flemming, was expounding on the need for their side to bring more men into the cause. She said this should be done because of the service abortion renders them. This is what she had to say about men, women, and abortion:
“I came of age with the women’s movement. It has given license to my ambitions and dreams, and filled me with the fervor for equality that permeates all that I do. But this time, I want to turn the tables a bit. Take an issue that always seems like a women’s issue and pitch it directly towards the men out there. And that issue is abortion … it’s time now to invite the men of America back in, to ask them to raise their voices for choice … I dare say that many of them have impregnated women along the way, and then let off the hook in a big, big way – emotionally, economically and every other way – when the women went ahead and had abortions … the sense of relief for themselves was mixed with sympathy for and gratitude towards those women whose ultimate responsibility was to relieve them of responsibility by having abortions … it would sure be nice to hear from all those men out there whose lives have been changed, bettered, and substantially eased because they were not forced into unwanted fatherhood.”
Even the most bigoted male chauvinist would never suggest that women have a “responsibility” to let the men who impregnate them “off the hook” by submitting to abortion. And yet, here is that very philosophy being espoused by someone who claims to be an advocate for women.
Statements like these prove that even outspoken advocates of abortion know that by its nature abortion will always be something which allows men to sexually exploit women. The really deplorable part of this is that they have this patronizing attitude toward women while claiming the only motive they have for being in this battle is to protect women. Maybe that’s an example of that old warning to be suspicious of anyone who says they only have your best interests at heart. (A recording of the Taylor-Flemming quote is on file at Life Dynamics.)
Another point is, not only does abortion protect men, it does so without demanding that they face any personal risk. After all, while the baby that’s sentenced to death is just as much his as hers, it’s only her body which will be invaded to carry out the execution. You can bet that if these guys were the ones who might end up on the abortionist’s table, facing unknown emotional and physical risks, they’d suddenly have a different attitude about sex and abortion.
Then there is the argument that a woman sometimes “needs” an abortion because a baby might interfere with her career. However, true feminists do not ask women to change to meet society’s needs, but instead work toward a society in which pregnant women, and women with children, are allowed to fully participate just as they are. If the failures of society clash with the biology of women, a feminist would not say that women are the ones who have to change. Simply put, real feminism does not ask women to solve society’s problems by killing their children. In fact, powerful women do not kill their children for anyone or for any reason, nor do they believe that women need surgery to be equal to men.
It is interesting to note that anytime a state has tried to enact legislation prohibiting abortions for sex selection, these “protectors of women” are the first ones to fight against it. They do this despite the fact that it’s been proven time and again – by people on both sides of this issue – that when a sex selection abortion occurs the overwhelming majority of the time it’s a female baby which ends up dead. These people think so little of women that they won’t even stop killing those babies whose only sin is that they would one day be women. The pro-choice mob has apparently decided that if our society wants to view being female as a fetal deformity punishable by death, that’s okay by them.
The abortion industry wraps feminism around abortion hoping to hide what it really is. Better than anyone else in our society, these people know that abortionists are nothing more than cowardly, cold-blooded, hired serial killers and moral hyenas who prey on women in troubled circumstances. They also know that abortion has the same relationship to women’s rights that pornography has. It cheapens, degrades and victimizes them for the benefit of men. For the abortion industry to suggest that having a clean place to kill their babies is the cornerstone of women’s equality is a self-serving and vile perversion of the basic values of true feminism. As pro-life feminist Melissa Simmons-Tulin once said:
“… women will never climb to equality over the dead bodies of their children.”
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Oprah Shows Her True Colors with Words of Discouragement for Teens
On January 22, 2010 Oprah Winfrey criticized 19 year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, for pledging abstinence until marriage during an interview with In Touch Weekly. Bristol, who has admitted to previous poor choices, is a mother of one.
Oprah commented at the start of the interview with Bristol, “I kind of bristled when I saw this—where you said, ‘I’m not going to have sex until I’m married. I can guarantee it’ ... I’m just wondering if that is a realistic goal. I think teaching responsibility, teaching, ya know, a sense of judgment about it, but is that a realistic position?”
Oprah commented at the start of the interview with Bristol, “I kind of bristled when I saw this—where you said, ‘I’m not going to have sex until I’m married. I can guarantee it’ ... I’m just wondering if that is a realistic goal. I think teaching responsibility, teaching, ya know, a sense of judgment about it, but is that a realistic position?”
Monday, January 25, 2010
A Story of Life - "A Mass of Fetal Tissue" - A Heisman Trophy
I heard about this story on 1/25/10. The story is being told in an advertisement placed during the NFL's Superbowl on the CBS Broadcasting Network. The ad was produced by and paid for by the Christian group Focus on the Family. The cost to place the ad is reportedly about $2 million dollars, all of which has been paid for by donors to Focus on the Family who donated specifically for this project. Almost immediately after hearing this story, a twist was filtered through and given center stage in mainstream media - certain groups that claim to advocate on behalf of women, and groups that call themselves "pro-choice" were raising a ruckus about the ad. Though, representatives from such groups admit they had not seen the ad ... they were opposed to it. In fact, the only ones that had seen the ad were those involved in its production and some Focus on the Family staff. CBS had reviewed a script and determined the ad met whatever guidelines CBS imposes. What is interesting is that the groups that oppose the ad oppose it - without having seen it or having reviewed scripts or poster boards, mind you - because it comes from a Christian group and is NOT supportive of abortion. These groups call themselves "pro-choice" but seem to really struggle with individuals who choose life instead of, well, another "choice". Rather than make a fuss over ads that undoubtedly will air during the game which reduce women to nothing but play things for men and exploit them as objects useful to sell product - these groups choose to fuss over (the personal and private decisions they say they defend) of the family told in this story. Rather than fuss over domestic abuse against women, these "pro-women, pro-choice" groups want to vilify one woman, one family, and one man for making a choice. Very telling indeed.
In the mid-1980s, Pam and her husband Bob, were Christian missionaries in the Philippines and raising four young children. While abroad, she contracted amoebic dysentery, which is typically transmitted through contaminated food or water. During this time she became pregnant with her fifth child. The treatment for the dysentery would require strong medications that doctors told Pam would cause irreversible damage to the little baby she and her husband had already named “Timmy”; they advised her to have an abortion.
Pam refused the abortion and cited her Christian faith as the reason for her hope that her son would be born without the devastating disabilities physicians predicted. She and her husband prayed to God and promised that they would raise the boy to be a Christian and a preacher.
Doctors continued to counsel the mother and family to abort the baby, describing the child as “a mass of fetal tissue and not a baby". She spent the last two months of her pregnancy in bed and, eventually, gave birth to a health baby boy in August 1987.
Little Timmy, now a man, did grow into a preacher with a ministry to prison inmates and orphans. Veteran sports commentators gush, not only about Timmy’s fearlessness on the football field, but also about his off-the-field endeavors. Little Timmy is Tim Tebow the University of Florida quarterback, who became the first sophomore to ever receive the prized college football honor, the Heisman trophy.
In Florida he has become a role model garnering so much affection that the local fans like to joke that "Superman wears Tim Tebow pajamas." In Alabama, there is even a Tim Tebow bill in the legislature which would afford home scholars (Tebow and his siblings were all home-schooled) equal access to public-school sports programs and extracurricular activities.
As prominent researcher Joel Brind writes in a LifeNews.com editorial, doctors are frequently telling women they should consider abortions when confronted with various medical situations affecting their health. Yet, as he notes, physicians can successfully treat both mother and child without suggesting that the baby be killed to spare a mother's life.
Read more about the work of Dr. Brind at http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/
REVISION - AFTER AIRING OF THE AD
Seriously, so what was the fuss about? Now, the same groups that opposed the ad prior to its airing are complaining it was too violent, because through a sight gag the appearance is given that Tim Tebow tackles his mother in a football blocking style. Are the same groups complaining about the ad that aired just before this one, in which, a facsimile of actress Betty White was tackled? The ad was well done with a tag to visit the Focus on the Family website for more of the Tebow family story. The ad can be viewed at numerous sites found through a quick search through many familiar search engines.
***
In the mid-1980s, Pam and her husband Bob, were Christian missionaries in the Philippines and raising four young children. While abroad, she contracted amoebic dysentery, which is typically transmitted through contaminated food or water. During this time she became pregnant with her fifth child. The treatment for the dysentery would require strong medications that doctors told Pam would cause irreversible damage to the little baby she and her husband had already named “Timmy”; they advised her to have an abortion.
Pam refused the abortion and cited her Christian faith as the reason for her hope that her son would be born without the devastating disabilities physicians predicted. She and her husband prayed to God and promised that they would raise the boy to be a Christian and a preacher.
Doctors continued to counsel the mother and family to abort the baby, describing the child as “a mass of fetal tissue and not a baby". She spent the last two months of her pregnancy in bed and, eventually, gave birth to a health baby boy in August 1987.
Little Timmy, now a man, did grow into a preacher with a ministry to prison inmates and orphans. Veteran sports commentators gush, not only about Timmy’s fearlessness on the football field, but also about his off-the-field endeavors. Little Timmy is Tim Tebow the University of Florida quarterback, who became the first sophomore to ever receive the prized college football honor, the Heisman trophy.
In Florida he has become a role model garnering so much affection that the local fans like to joke that "Superman wears Tim Tebow pajamas." In Alabama, there is even a Tim Tebow bill in the legislature which would afford home scholars (Tebow and his siblings were all home-schooled) equal access to public-school sports programs and extracurricular activities.
As prominent researcher Joel Brind writes in a LifeNews.com editorial, doctors are frequently telling women they should consider abortions when confronted with various medical situations affecting their health. Yet, as he notes, physicians can successfully treat both mother and child without suggesting that the baby be killed to spare a mother's life.
Read more about the work of Dr. Brind at http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/
REVISION - AFTER AIRING OF THE AD
Seriously, so what was the fuss about? Now, the same groups that opposed the ad prior to its airing are complaining it was too violent, because through a sight gag the appearance is given that Tim Tebow tackles his mother in a football blocking style. Are the same groups complaining about the ad that aired just before this one, in which, a facsimile of actress Betty White was tackled? The ad was well done with a tag to visit the Focus on the Family website for more of the Tebow family story. The ad can be viewed at numerous sites found through a quick search through many familiar search engines.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
On Abortion – "The Opinions of Men Do Not Count - Or Do They?" comments of Mark Crutcher
Few write with clarity and precision as well as Mark Crutcher, Founder and President of Life Dynamics. Here, from his book, "On Message", Mr. Crutcher addresses the oft-heard comment leveled against Pro-Life males - “This is a women’s issue. Men have no say in whether women have the right to get an abortion”. Mr. Crutcher exposes the false logic of the remark and does so with his characteristic reason and logic.
We are supposed to be beyond the point where people are excluded from decision making based on gender. Also, to say that because of their gender men have no right to be involved is not only sexist, but hypocritical. The pro-choice crowd never tells men who are pro-abortion to stay out. For example, they don’t tell the [Barack Obamas,] Bill Clintons or John Kerrys of the world to mind their own business. In fact, they invite them to be speakers at their conventions. They have never said that the 1973 Supreme Court had no right to be involved in the Roe v. Wade decision in spite of the fact that every single member of that court was male.
They don’t appear to have a problem with the fact that the overwhelming majority of abortionists in America are men. They never say anything about the male “escorts” outside the abortion mills. They never even say anything about sexually irresponsible men who coerce, threaten, or force women into abortions. Of course, it is somewhat understandable that they wouldn’t have a problem with this last group since that’s the backbone of the American abortion industry.
It is pretty clear that the pro-choice movement’s message is that there are three groups of acceptable men: those who put women in crisis pregnancy situations, those who build political careers off women in crisis pregnancy situations, and those who make money off women in crisis pregnancy situations. The “bad men” are the ones who think women deserve better than abortion.
It is obnoxious to say that men have no right to speak out against the killing of children. In the first place, men don’t need to be given the right to speak out against the killing of children, they already have a responsibility to do so. Real men don’t just stand around with their hands in their pockets while helpless babies are slaughtered for money. In fact, any man who is frightened into silence and inaction because of his gender wasn’t really much of a man to begin with.
Also, to say that men have no stake in abortion is to ignore the biological reality that every time a woman kills her own child she is also killing a father’s child.1
(Visit Life Dynamics at www.LifeDynamics.com and Mr. Crutcher's blog at www.markcrutcherblog.com.)
1Crutcher, Mark. On Message. Life Dynamics Incorporated, 2005, p. 32
We are supposed to be beyond the point where people are excluded from decision making based on gender. Also, to say that because of their gender men have no right to be involved is not only sexist, but hypocritical. The pro-choice crowd never tells men who are pro-abortion to stay out. For example, they don’t tell the [Barack Obamas,] Bill Clintons or John Kerrys of the world to mind their own business. In fact, they invite them to be speakers at their conventions. They have never said that the 1973 Supreme Court had no right to be involved in the Roe v. Wade decision in spite of the fact that every single member of that court was male.
They don’t appear to have a problem with the fact that the overwhelming majority of abortionists in America are men. They never say anything about the male “escorts” outside the abortion mills. They never even say anything about sexually irresponsible men who coerce, threaten, or force women into abortions. Of course, it is somewhat understandable that they wouldn’t have a problem with this last group since that’s the backbone of the American abortion industry.
It is pretty clear that the pro-choice movement’s message is that there are three groups of acceptable men: those who put women in crisis pregnancy situations, those who build political careers off women in crisis pregnancy situations, and those who make money off women in crisis pregnancy situations. The “bad men” are the ones who think women deserve better than abortion.
***
People who think men have no right to be involved in the abortion issue should be careful what they ask for. After all, polls consistently find that women oppose abortion at a higher rate than men. Women are also more opposed to government funding of abortion, more active in the pro-life movement, and more likely to favor banning abortion outright. Obviously, if the pro-aborts were to exclude men from the issue, their support would plummet.***
If the argument is that men shouldn’t be allowed to participate simply because they can’t get pregnant, what about women who can’t get pregnant? Should only fertile women of childbearing age … be allowed to have an opinion about abortion? What about all these older post-menopausal women we see on television shrieking about the right to abortion? Since they can’t get pregnant should they be excluded? Or how about lesbians who have no intention of ever getting pregnant, are they told to sit down and keep their mouths shut? Or let’s say some pro-abortion activist develops ovarian cancer and requires a hysterectomy. Once she can no longer get pregnant, does she get thrown out of the movement?***
If we establish a principle that men have no right to be involved in the abortion issue, what issues are we going to say women have no right to be involved in? The reality is, this whole argument is a fraud. We don’t shut people out of issues just because they are not directly affected by them. We don’t say white people can’t participate in efforts to rid our country of racism, simply because they aren’t its victims. We don’t say only Jews can speak out about the Nazi holocaust. We don’t say that since only men play professional football, women sports reporters are not allowed to cover the NFL. We don’t tell young people they have no business trying to stop the abuse of the elderly in nursing homes. We don’t say that only children can speak out against child abuse.It is obnoxious to say that men have no right to speak out against the killing of children. In the first place, men don’t need to be given the right to speak out against the killing of children, they already have a responsibility to do so. Real men don’t just stand around with their hands in their pockets while helpless babies are slaughtered for money. In fact, any man who is frightened into silence and inaction because of his gender wasn’t really much of a man to begin with.
Also, to say that men have no stake in abortion is to ignore the biological reality that every time a woman kills her own child she is also killing a father’s child.1
(Visit Life Dynamics at www.LifeDynamics.com and Mr. Crutcher's blog at www.markcrutcherblog.com.)
1Crutcher, Mark. On Message. Life Dynamics Incorporated, 2005, p. 32
Friday, January 15, 2010
On abortion - Back-alley-abortions and "Rape clinics", comments by Mark Crutcher
Few write with clarity and precision as well as Mark Crutcher, Founder and President of Life Dynamics. Here, from his blog (http://www.markcrutcherblog.com), Mr. Crutcher exposes a false logic used to justify abortion in cases rape, and he does so with his customary reason and logic.
If Saving Women is Really the Goal . . .
October 23, 2007
Now that the political season is back at our throats, we are again hearing the abortion lobby trot out its usual collection of distortions, half-truths and outright lies. Of course, one of their favorites is the old line that since women are going to have abortions regardless of what the law says, we have to protect them against dangerous back-alley abortions.
This assumes that the legal abortions women are getting right now are safe, but we'll let that fairy tail slide for the moment. We'll also ignore the fact that, if abortion were outlawed today and illegal abortionists started springing up next week, every one of them would be someone who is pro-choice. In fact, every woman who was ever killed or maimed during an abortion was killed or maimed by someone who was pro-choice. That means the obvious solution to the back-alley abortion problem is for the pro-choice mob not to do them. But like I said, we'll ignore that for now.
What I'm wondering about is this. If the motivation for legalized abortion really is to save the lives of women, why aren't the people who make that argument also calling for the repeal of laws against rape? After all, it is not uncommon for a woman to be killed by a rapist so she can't identify him to the authorities. Legalizing rape would save those women by taking away the rapists' motivation for killing them.
Legalization could also result in the establishment of rape clinics where rapists could take their victims instead of dragging them into dangerous back-allies. These facilities could offer clean rooms, condom machines, emergency contraception and perhaps even doctors on staff in case the rapist injures his victim. We could also issue licenses to rapists requiring them to undergo monthly testing for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Remember, the pro-choice argument is that women are going to have abortions regardless of what the law says, and that keeping abortion legal will make sure they occur in a clean and safe environment. Well, those dynamics also apply to rape. We know that keeping rape illegal has not stopped women from being raped, so why not try to create a more “enlightened” nation where rape is safe, legal and rare?
And by the way, as ridiculous as this suggestion is, if our goal is saving women's lives, it makes as much sense as legalized abortion.
http://www.markcrutcherblog.com/index.cfm/rape
If Saving Women is Really the Goal . . .
October 23, 2007
Now that the political season is back at our throats, we are again hearing the abortion lobby trot out its usual collection of distortions, half-truths and outright lies. Of course, one of their favorites is the old line that since women are going to have abortions regardless of what the law says, we have to protect them against dangerous back-alley abortions.
This assumes that the legal abortions women are getting right now are safe, but we'll let that fairy tail slide for the moment. We'll also ignore the fact that, if abortion were outlawed today and illegal abortionists started springing up next week, every one of them would be someone who is pro-choice. In fact, every woman who was ever killed or maimed during an abortion was killed or maimed by someone who was pro-choice. That means the obvious solution to the back-alley abortion problem is for the pro-choice mob not to do them. But like I said, we'll ignore that for now.
What I'm wondering about is this. If the motivation for legalized abortion really is to save the lives of women, why aren't the people who make that argument also calling for the repeal of laws against rape? After all, it is not uncommon for a woman to be killed by a rapist so she can't identify him to the authorities. Legalizing rape would save those women by taking away the rapists' motivation for killing them.
Legalization could also result in the establishment of rape clinics where rapists could take their victims instead of dragging them into dangerous back-allies. These facilities could offer clean rooms, condom machines, emergency contraception and perhaps even doctors on staff in case the rapist injures his victim. We could also issue licenses to rapists requiring them to undergo monthly testing for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Remember, the pro-choice argument is that women are going to have abortions regardless of what the law says, and that keeping abortion legal will make sure they occur in a clean and safe environment. Well, those dynamics also apply to rape. We know that keeping rape illegal has not stopped women from being raped, so why not try to create a more “enlightened” nation where rape is safe, legal and rare?
And by the way, as ridiculous as this suggestion is, if our goal is saving women's lives, it makes as much sense as legalized abortion.
http://www.markcrutcherblog.com/index.cfm/rape
“Personally Opposed, But…” Five Pro-Abortion Dodges by Todd M. Aglialoro
“Personally Opposed, But…” Five Pro-Abortion Dodges
By Todd M. Aglialoro
In that passage from Orthodoxy so familiar that it is almost now cliché, G. K. Chesterton wrote that there are a thousand angles at which a man may fall but only one at which he stands. By this he argued for the unique, enduring character of orthodox Church doctrine, of the one, true, upstanding strand of Right Teaching. Though the same tired heresies may reappear to contest it—mutated, renamed, warmed-over—the old, wild truth remains standing, “reeling but erect.”
This well-worn lesson takes on a new freshness, I think, when applied to the culture war. The wild truths that inform Christian ethics—our insistence on a moral universe, on a real human nature with its own teleology, on the transcendent significance of human acts and human relationships—also reel but remain erect in the face of perennial challenges. We are not gods. Moral truth is something we discover, not invent. From the Garden of Eden to the Supreme Court of the United States, we have fought the same battle under different banners.
In what is probably the modern culture battle par excellence, the fight against abortion, we see displayed with perfect clarity the principle of a single upright truth (that directly killing an unborn child is an evil and a crime) being contested by a rotation of errors; taking turns or working in tandem, passing in and out of fashion, each seizing upon the vocabulary, events, and moods of the cultural moment until the next comes along to supplant it.
In some cases cultural developments render one of them obsolete. In the years shortly after Roe v. Wade, abortion debates inevitably featured three words the pro-abortion side considered a trump card: “blob of tissue.” This factually empty but sound-bite–perfect catchphrase made a great impact with its implication that the fetus was roughly equivalent to a ball of snot. Which put abortion about on par with picking your nose: bad form, a messy affair that ought to be kept private, but nothing to get overly excited about.
Of course, advances in the study of human embryology, most notably the window to the womb afforded by the sonogram, all but pulled the teeth from the “blob of tissue” canard. The 1980 film The Silent Scream, an ultrasound depiction of an abortion at eleven weeks, provided a chilling, graphic look at abortion’s inner workings. And today, expectant mothers keep pictures of their “blobs of tissue” on the refrigerator. They make copies and stuff them into Christmas cards.
So that particular line was no longer viable. But it wouldn’t be the last. More would follow, and we who are engaged in the culture have surely heard most of them. However, even for those who have heard them all, I think it can be valuable to gather them up and define them; to identify their originators, exemplars, and champions; to understand their appeal; and to consider how to counter them. Let us now look, then, at five (a nice number, though by no means exhaustive) of history’s most insidious pro-abortion arguments.
1. ‘Don’t Say the “A” word’: NARAL
Names are important to propagandists. One could hardly imagine, for example, Planned Parenthood enjoying the status it does had it not in 1942 dropped “American Birth Control League” in favor of its current benevolent-sounding moniker. What if Greenpeace had instead called itself “Vegan Freaks Against Ambergris”? Would society still look on that organization in the indulgently tolerant way it does today? Would Bono still play its benefit concerts? There are some things we are just never meant to know.
Early last year, in a calculated PR move, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) changed its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America. Amazingly, the new name is even more cumbersome than the old. “NARAL” juts out at the front like “Nokia” before “Sugar Bowl.” But this name change was not about streamlining signage and business cards. It was an attempt to deflect notice from the singular object of NARAL’s 30-plus years of existence—unlimited access to abortion-on-demand—and toward broader, more high-minded, and less gruesome concepts of gender equality and personal self-determination. The change was timed to coincide with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign depicting the new-and-improved NARAL not so much as an advocate of “abortion rights” as a defender of women’s suffrage, satellite TV, and 31 Flavors.
Semantic games have always been part of the battle, of course. No one—no one, mind you—is “pro-abortion.” Folks are “pro-choice,” “pro–reproductive rights,” or, slightly more courageously, “pro–abortion rights.” In each case, even the last, the emphasis is steered away from the repugnant reality of abortion itself—a sure loser in focus groups time and time again. Whenever we debate abortion or write a letter to the editor, we engage in a struggle for the linguistic high ground.
But NARAL’s gambit takes things to a new level. By all accounts, abortion’s popularity is waning steadily. Recent polls show high school and college students reporting pro-life leanings in growing numbers. The pro-life side’s rare propaganda advantage in the partial-birth abortion debate has riveted public attention with clinically graphic descriptions of the violence abortion inflicts on the unborn.
Clearly, the long-term survival strategy, from NARAL’s perspective, is to make the abortion debate about anything but abortion.
It can be wearying sometimes, but the counter-strategy is continually to return the debate to where it belongs: the humanity of the unborn child and his right to life. It may also be effective to ask just why abortion is so repugnant to so many.
2. ‘Personally Opposed, But...’: Mario Cuomo
It is these days thoroughly engrained in abortion discourse; its premises taken for granted and its logic never questioned. It is all too common for a politician, clergyman, or fellow parishioner to claim that he is “personally opposed” to abortion but wouldn’t dream of “imposing” that opinion on a public with diverse religious and ethical beliefs—and then sit back, secure in the feeling that his is an ironclad position.
Yet this line about being “personally opposed, but…” has only the appearance of reasonableness, acquired through sheer repetition. It also fits perfectly in a society valuing tolerance above all other virtues, conflict-avoidance over tackling unpleasant truths.
Some might trace this attitude back to John F. Kennedy, who as the price of the presidency swore that he would not let his Romish religious convictions dictate his politics. And if you want to point to JFK as a kind of spiritual grandfather to the “personally opposed, but…” position, you’ll get no argument from me. But in its full form it must be credited not to Kennedy but to the former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo.
In a 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame (at the invitation of the notorious Rev. Richard McBrien) titled “Religious Belief and Public Morality,” Cuomo laid out the basic premises of the “personally opposed, but…” line, by way of reconciling his soi-disant devout Catholicism with his political support for abortion-on-demand. Skillfully equivocating Catholic teaching on abortion with Catholic teaching on contraception and divorce, as well as a presumed Catholic perspective toward nuclear weapons, he asks, would it be right for a Catholic to make (or sign) laws forbidding divorce? Withholding state funds for contraception? Instituting a unilateral nuclear freeze?
“Should I argue,” he asks, “to make my religious value your morality? My rule of conduct your limitation?” Clearly not, is his conclusion. Not, absent a democratic consensus, in a society of varied and sometimes flatly contradictory moral values, a society in which even the collective voice of Christianity is not monolithic on issues but fractured and sectarian. Not, he notes, when “there is no Church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism.”
The forceful case made by Cuomo in his speech (he quotes for support, in places, Michael Novak and even Pope John Paul II; the whole thing makes for fascinating reading) touches only on the context of politics, and mostly from the politician’s perspective. But its spirit has crept out of the corridors of power into general society. It is the spirit that makes the saying “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one” sound to some ears like a devastating rejoinder. The spirit that gives rise to slogans like “You can’t legislate morality,” when in fact the morality that protects human rights and thus the common good is the first and best thing worth legislating.
It is also the spirit that animates our next argument.
3. ‘Safe, Legal, and Rare’: Bill Clinton
Among politicians only Bill Clinton could devise a line like this, during his 1996 campaign, brilliantly triangulating liberal abortion-on-demand orthodoxy with Middle America’s broad-based distaste for the practice. Ultimately nonsensical yet somehow familiar and reassuring, like a couplet from Dr. Seuss, this buzz phrase became an instant and enduring success, for two reasons.
First, it validated the internal conflict that the majority of Americans were (and still are) experiencing over the abortion question. They were conscious of a natural sense of revulsion toward abortion itself, yet unwilling for whatever reason to sign on whole-hog with the pro-lifers. Clinton let them know that he felt their pain and that his administration’s policy would include a subtle nod toward the general feeling that abortion is a Bad Thing (which ought to be “rare”) but would not place restrictions on its availability (“legal”) that might send women to back alleys (“safe”). Thus he accomplished an unprecedented political feat: co-opting the vaguely antiabortion sentiments of the masses and mollifying the blood lust of the radical pro-abort left with one simple statement.
“Safe, legal, and rare” also subtly but definitely realigned the terms of the abortion debate. No longer would the question center on whether the aborted fetus was a blob or a baby; no longer would it be necessary to make tortured distinctions between public and private morality. In the first place, safety and legality are conservative concepts, not radical ones. Now the pro-choicer could consider himself a guardian of the status quo—an American tradition, even. In the second place, with the word “rare,” the focus shifted away from abortion itself (which we now presumed to be beyond debate) and toward abortion’s presumptive root causes. The abortion issue was now really a health-care or poverty or education issue—right in the liberal Democrats’ wheelhouse.
To be truly pro-life, they could argue, meant to “get over this love affair with the fetus” (as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders put it, with typical elegance) and instead pay attention to alleviating the conditions that led women to get abortions in the first place. Implied here, of course, is a kind of false dichotomy: The qualities of justice and mercy are not strained, nor must the interests of the mother and unborn child be necessarily set at odds. But the argument worked by playing into multiple stereotypes: pro-lifers as single-issue fanatics, misogynists, icy-hearted grinches. And it allowed politicians to spin abortion questions into Great Society sermonettes.
Pro-abortionists’ next major tack would ratchet to a new level the lip-biting empathy invoked by “safe, legal, and rare” and that slogan’s tacit admission of abortion’s unpleasantness. But at the same time, it would rebuke the Clintonian strategy of ignoring or spinning away from the question of abortion itself.
4. ‘Embrace the Guilt’: Naomi Wolf
Feminist-at-large Naomi Wolf is perhaps best known for her work as a consultant to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 1999-2000. Charged with creating, ex nihilo, a personality for the vice president that would play better with women voters, Wolf devised the “alpha male” strategy, which began with Gore donning earth tones and lumberjack duds and ended (mercifully) with his PG-13 smooch of Mrs. Gore on convention night. In years previous, Wolf had been credited with identifying the “soccer mom” constituency while advising Clinton’s reelection bid and caused numerous stirs with her books and publications on gender conflict and female sexual “liberation.”
But in an earlier writing—an article for The New Republic in 1995—she caused quite a different kind of stir. In it she claimed that her recent firsthand experience of pregnancy and childbirth had given her a new perspective on the abortion debate, a perspective she believed her fellow feminist pro-choicers needed to hear and act on.
In “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” Wolf called for “a radical shift in the pro-choice movement’s rhetoric and consciousness about abortion.” Self-deluded by their long practice of dehumanizing the unborn (what she termed “the fetus-is-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement”), pro-choicers, she argued, were falling dangerously out of touch with the reality of abortion and women’s experiences with it. In order to avert the loss of credibility and thus political influence the abortion movement would suffer thereby (although to her credit, Wolf also cited the need simply “to be faithful to the truth”), she asserted the “need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.”
This remarkable essay is liable to engender, in the pro-life observer, the same kind of cognitive dissonance that “safe, legal, and rare” does. In it Wolf admits bluntly that the fetus is a live human being with a certain value and that abortion undoubtedly kills that human being. She laments the prevalence of casual, “‘I don’t know what came over me; it was such good Chardonnay’ abortions.” She insists that abortion calls for a period of “mourning” and recommends spiritual “mending” ceremonies for women who abort, for vigils outside abortion clinics “commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.”
Yet her practical aim all along is to help other pro-abortionists develop a better strategy for keeping abortion legal.
Wolf avoids adopting conventional pro-life convictions by assigning the significance of the guilt and blood and killing to interior categories only. “If I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life,” she writes, “then that would be between myself and God.” For the unhappily pregnant woman, oppressed by patriarchal society and burdened by this fellow-victim inside her womb, abortion is not a social injustice but a personal “failure”; an evil to be borne and acknowledged and slowly atoned for.
For its frank admission (and thus diffusion) of the evidence that abortion kills a living human being, and its conclusion that this evidence doesn’t logically require prohibition of abortion—and in fact may even lend its perpetrators a certain tragic nobility—Wolf’s argument is a powerful one. Its effects live on in every pro-choice apologist who tries to imbue his position with moral gravity—or, as with our next case, in those who invoke the name of God.
5. ‘Pro-Faith, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice’: The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Some abortion advocates pick up Wolf’s ball and run even farther with it. For some, God might be not merely patiently tolerant, even sympathetic, toward this business of feticide; He may in fact positively endorse it, as the exercise of a mature and devout conscience. For sure, the landscape is dotted with liberal churches and associations of them, each self-defined as “pro-choice.” But the biggest and best organizational representation of the religious pro-abortion folk can be found within the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), Planned Parenthood’s collar-and-chasuble lackey.
Beginning with the assertion that “most people of faith are pro-choice because of their religious beliefs, not in spite of them,” the RCRC attempts to build a case for abortion on both sectarian and interreligious principles. First, compassion: “People who follow Jesus…should bring healing and wholeness to those in distress,” claims one of the canned sermons the group offers as a resource. This means not forcing them into back alleys for their “healing” abortions and not forbidding them to opt out of the life-threatening ordeal of childbirth. Of course, there’s good ol’ freedom of conscience, too. Didn’t Jesus “emphasize the moral agency of each person”? By this He compels us to believe that a woman’s “life, health, and freedom…are more important than the potential life in her womb.”
Not convinced? Then there’s the cleanup issue: religious freedom. Church and state are separated in this country; without this separation we would be in danger of losing the freedom to believe and worship freely. “And at the center of religious freedom is keeping the government out of personal moral decisions such as terminating a pregnancy.”
This rather bald assertion is a kissing cousin to the “libertarian” pro-abortion argument one is beginning to hear more frequently (which I do not treat fully here due to space limitations): According to this argument, the whole question hinges on whether “the government” has the right to interfere with personal medical decisions. Here the RCRC simply substitutes “moral” or “religious” for “medical.” The antiabortionist’s affront is not to the presumed sacrosanctity of medicine but to the cherished American ideal of religious liberty, of which the right to an abortion has apparently become iconic.
One could spend a great deal of time deconstructing the RCRC—its sophistic mastery of religious vocabulary and concepts; its historical place in the disintegration of American mainline Protestantism; its clever self-positioning as an “equal but opposite” voice in the abortion debate and thus its successful bid to neutralize the natural advantage the pro-life side enjoys in religious contexts.
But I will make just one other observation: It’s the pro-abortion side that always wants to turn this into a religious issue. Sure, there’s no shortage of biblical positivist pro-lifers, but by and large, the pro-life side would like to frame the debate in social-justice terms. One needn’t be a Christian to oppose murder or to look at a sonogram. Conversely the pro-abortionists need desperately to paint the issue as a struggle against religious zealotry.
To these folks it is always an effective—and unexpected—rejoinder to ask that they stop talking about God so much.
Wesley Clark and the Eclipse of Reason
There may be a thousand angles at which a man can fall and an equal number of ways to justify killing the unborn, yet all pro-abortion arguments really boil down to one root fallacy. General Wesley Clark, once a pretender to the Democratic presidential nomination, expressed it quite well to a New Hampshire newspaper earlier this year. Keen to display his abortion credentials (having entered the race too late to attend the NARAL fund-raiser at which the other major candidates had already pledged their obeisance), Clark claimed to oppose all restrictions to abortion, up to the point of complete delivery. After fumbling for a moment with a follow-up question about where life begins, he replied, “Life begins with a mother’s decision.”
Here we have a philosophical phenomenon aptly summarized by the title of Bernard Nathanson’s second film, The Eclipse of Reason. Here we have nothing less than a fundamental crisis of being at the heart of our culture: a legal and societal status quo wherein a person is defined (and thus has rights apportioned to him) not by what he is but by how another person feels about him. This has been underscored in the debate over the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. If “life begins with a mother’s decision,” kill a pregnant woman on the way to an abortion clinic and you’ve committed one murder; kill a pregnant woman on the way to buy baby clothes and you’ve committed two.
The human mind can barely contain such a violent conflict of premises, forced together against the laws of nature and reason like identical poles of powerful magnets. How much more can the national soul contain it?
Todd M. Aglialoro is editor for Sophia Institute Press.
By Todd M. Aglialoro
In that passage from Orthodoxy so familiar that it is almost now cliché, G. K. Chesterton wrote that there are a thousand angles at which a man may fall but only one at which he stands. By this he argued for the unique, enduring character of orthodox Church doctrine, of the one, true, upstanding strand of Right Teaching. Though the same tired heresies may reappear to contest it—mutated, renamed, warmed-over—the old, wild truth remains standing, “reeling but erect.”
This well-worn lesson takes on a new freshness, I think, when applied to the culture war. The wild truths that inform Christian ethics—our insistence on a moral universe, on a real human nature with its own teleology, on the transcendent significance of human acts and human relationships—also reel but remain erect in the face of perennial challenges. We are not gods. Moral truth is something we discover, not invent. From the Garden of Eden to the Supreme Court of the United States, we have fought the same battle under different banners.
In what is probably the modern culture battle par excellence, the fight against abortion, we see displayed with perfect clarity the principle of a single upright truth (that directly killing an unborn child is an evil and a crime) being contested by a rotation of errors; taking turns or working in tandem, passing in and out of fashion, each seizing upon the vocabulary, events, and moods of the cultural moment until the next comes along to supplant it.
In some cases cultural developments render one of them obsolete. In the years shortly after Roe v. Wade, abortion debates inevitably featured three words the pro-abortion side considered a trump card: “blob of tissue.” This factually empty but sound-bite–perfect catchphrase made a great impact with its implication that the fetus was roughly equivalent to a ball of snot. Which put abortion about on par with picking your nose: bad form, a messy affair that ought to be kept private, but nothing to get overly excited about.
Of course, advances in the study of human embryology, most notably the window to the womb afforded by the sonogram, all but pulled the teeth from the “blob of tissue” canard. The 1980 film The Silent Scream, an ultrasound depiction of an abortion at eleven weeks, provided a chilling, graphic look at abortion’s inner workings. And today, expectant mothers keep pictures of their “blobs of tissue” on the refrigerator. They make copies and stuff them into Christmas cards.
So that particular line was no longer viable. But it wouldn’t be the last. More would follow, and we who are engaged in the culture have surely heard most of them. However, even for those who have heard them all, I think it can be valuable to gather them up and define them; to identify their originators, exemplars, and champions; to understand their appeal; and to consider how to counter them. Let us now look, then, at five (a nice number, though by no means exhaustive) of history’s most insidious pro-abortion arguments.
1. ‘Don’t Say the “A” word’: NARAL
Names are important to propagandists. One could hardly imagine, for example, Planned Parenthood enjoying the status it does had it not in 1942 dropped “American Birth Control League” in favor of its current benevolent-sounding moniker. What if Greenpeace had instead called itself “Vegan Freaks Against Ambergris”? Would society still look on that organization in the indulgently tolerant way it does today? Would Bono still play its benefit concerts? There are some things we are just never meant to know.
Early last year, in a calculated PR move, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) changed its name to NARAL Pro-Choice America. Amazingly, the new name is even more cumbersome than the old. “NARAL” juts out at the front like “Nokia” before “Sugar Bowl.” But this name change was not about streamlining signage and business cards. It was an attempt to deflect notice from the singular object of NARAL’s 30-plus years of existence—unlimited access to abortion-on-demand—and toward broader, more high-minded, and less gruesome concepts of gender equality and personal self-determination. The change was timed to coincide with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign depicting the new-and-improved NARAL not so much as an advocate of “abortion rights” as a defender of women’s suffrage, satellite TV, and 31 Flavors.
Semantic games have always been part of the battle, of course. No one—no one, mind you—is “pro-abortion.” Folks are “pro-choice,” “pro–reproductive rights,” or, slightly more courageously, “pro–abortion rights.” In each case, even the last, the emphasis is steered away from the repugnant reality of abortion itself—a sure loser in focus groups time and time again. Whenever we debate abortion or write a letter to the editor, we engage in a struggle for the linguistic high ground.
But NARAL’s gambit takes things to a new level. By all accounts, abortion’s popularity is waning steadily. Recent polls show high school and college students reporting pro-life leanings in growing numbers. The pro-life side’s rare propaganda advantage in the partial-birth abortion debate has riveted public attention with clinically graphic descriptions of the violence abortion inflicts on the unborn.
Clearly, the long-term survival strategy, from NARAL’s perspective, is to make the abortion debate about anything but abortion.
It can be wearying sometimes, but the counter-strategy is continually to return the debate to where it belongs: the humanity of the unborn child and his right to life. It may also be effective to ask just why abortion is so repugnant to so many.
2. ‘Personally Opposed, But...’: Mario Cuomo
It is these days thoroughly engrained in abortion discourse; its premises taken for granted and its logic never questioned. It is all too common for a politician, clergyman, or fellow parishioner to claim that he is “personally opposed” to abortion but wouldn’t dream of “imposing” that opinion on a public with diverse religious and ethical beliefs—and then sit back, secure in the feeling that his is an ironclad position.
Yet this line about being “personally opposed, but…” has only the appearance of reasonableness, acquired through sheer repetition. It also fits perfectly in a society valuing tolerance above all other virtues, conflict-avoidance over tackling unpleasant truths.
Some might trace this attitude back to John F. Kennedy, who as the price of the presidency swore that he would not let his Romish religious convictions dictate his politics. And if you want to point to JFK as a kind of spiritual grandfather to the “personally opposed, but…” position, you’ll get no argument from me. But in its full form it must be credited not to Kennedy but to the former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo.
In a 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame (at the invitation of the notorious Rev. Richard McBrien) titled “Religious Belief and Public Morality,” Cuomo laid out the basic premises of the “personally opposed, but…” line, by way of reconciling his soi-disant devout Catholicism with his political support for abortion-on-demand. Skillfully equivocating Catholic teaching on abortion with Catholic teaching on contraception and divorce, as well as a presumed Catholic perspective toward nuclear weapons, he asks, would it be right for a Catholic to make (or sign) laws forbidding divorce? Withholding state funds for contraception? Instituting a unilateral nuclear freeze?
“Should I argue,” he asks, “to make my religious value your morality? My rule of conduct your limitation?” Clearly not, is his conclusion. Not, absent a democratic consensus, in a society of varied and sometimes flatly contradictory moral values, a society in which even the collective voice of Christianity is not monolithic on issues but fractured and sectarian. Not, he notes, when “there is no Church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism.”
The forceful case made by Cuomo in his speech (he quotes for support, in places, Michael Novak and even Pope John Paul II; the whole thing makes for fascinating reading) touches only on the context of politics, and mostly from the politician’s perspective. But its spirit has crept out of the corridors of power into general society. It is the spirit that makes the saying “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one” sound to some ears like a devastating rejoinder. The spirit that gives rise to slogans like “You can’t legislate morality,” when in fact the morality that protects human rights and thus the common good is the first and best thing worth legislating.
It is also the spirit that animates our next argument.
3. ‘Safe, Legal, and Rare’: Bill Clinton
Among politicians only Bill Clinton could devise a line like this, during his 1996 campaign, brilliantly triangulating liberal abortion-on-demand orthodoxy with Middle America’s broad-based distaste for the practice. Ultimately nonsensical yet somehow familiar and reassuring, like a couplet from Dr. Seuss, this buzz phrase became an instant and enduring success, for two reasons.
First, it validated the internal conflict that the majority of Americans were (and still are) experiencing over the abortion question. They were conscious of a natural sense of revulsion toward abortion itself, yet unwilling for whatever reason to sign on whole-hog with the pro-lifers. Clinton let them know that he felt their pain and that his administration’s policy would include a subtle nod toward the general feeling that abortion is a Bad Thing (which ought to be “rare”) but would not place restrictions on its availability (“legal”) that might send women to back alleys (“safe”). Thus he accomplished an unprecedented political feat: co-opting the vaguely antiabortion sentiments of the masses and mollifying the blood lust of the radical pro-abort left with one simple statement.
“Safe, legal, and rare” also subtly but definitely realigned the terms of the abortion debate. No longer would the question center on whether the aborted fetus was a blob or a baby; no longer would it be necessary to make tortured distinctions between public and private morality. In the first place, safety and legality are conservative concepts, not radical ones. Now the pro-choicer could consider himself a guardian of the status quo—an American tradition, even. In the second place, with the word “rare,” the focus shifted away from abortion itself (which we now presumed to be beyond debate) and toward abortion’s presumptive root causes. The abortion issue was now really a health-care or poverty or education issue—right in the liberal Democrats’ wheelhouse.
To be truly pro-life, they could argue, meant to “get over this love affair with the fetus” (as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders put it, with typical elegance) and instead pay attention to alleviating the conditions that led women to get abortions in the first place. Implied here, of course, is a kind of false dichotomy: The qualities of justice and mercy are not strained, nor must the interests of the mother and unborn child be necessarily set at odds. But the argument worked by playing into multiple stereotypes: pro-lifers as single-issue fanatics, misogynists, icy-hearted grinches. And it allowed politicians to spin abortion questions into Great Society sermonettes.
Pro-abortionists’ next major tack would ratchet to a new level the lip-biting empathy invoked by “safe, legal, and rare” and that slogan’s tacit admission of abortion’s unpleasantness. But at the same time, it would rebuke the Clintonian strategy of ignoring or spinning away from the question of abortion itself.
4. ‘Embrace the Guilt’: Naomi Wolf
Feminist-at-large Naomi Wolf is perhaps best known for her work as a consultant to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 1999-2000. Charged with creating, ex nihilo, a personality for the vice president that would play better with women voters, Wolf devised the “alpha male” strategy, which began with Gore donning earth tones and lumberjack duds and ended (mercifully) with his PG-13 smooch of Mrs. Gore on convention night. In years previous, Wolf had been credited with identifying the “soccer mom” constituency while advising Clinton’s reelection bid and caused numerous stirs with her books and publications on gender conflict and female sexual “liberation.”
But in an earlier writing—an article for The New Republic in 1995—she caused quite a different kind of stir. In it she claimed that her recent firsthand experience of pregnancy and childbirth had given her a new perspective on the abortion debate, a perspective she believed her fellow feminist pro-choicers needed to hear and act on.
In “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” Wolf called for “a radical shift in the pro-choice movement’s rhetoric and consciousness about abortion.” Self-deluded by their long practice of dehumanizing the unborn (what she termed “the fetus-is-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement”), pro-choicers, she argued, were falling dangerously out of touch with the reality of abortion and women’s experiences with it. In order to avert the loss of credibility and thus political influence the abortion movement would suffer thereby (although to her credit, Wolf also cited the need simply “to be faithful to the truth”), she asserted the “need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.”
This remarkable essay is liable to engender, in the pro-life observer, the same kind of cognitive dissonance that “safe, legal, and rare” does. In it Wolf admits bluntly that the fetus is a live human being with a certain value and that abortion undoubtedly kills that human being. She laments the prevalence of casual, “‘I don’t know what came over me; it was such good Chardonnay’ abortions.” She insists that abortion calls for a period of “mourning” and recommends spiritual “mending” ceremonies for women who abort, for vigils outside abortion clinics “commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.”
Yet her practical aim all along is to help other pro-abortionists develop a better strategy for keeping abortion legal.
Wolf avoids adopting conventional pro-life convictions by assigning the significance of the guilt and blood and killing to interior categories only. “If I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life,” she writes, “then that would be between myself and God.” For the unhappily pregnant woman, oppressed by patriarchal society and burdened by this fellow-victim inside her womb, abortion is not a social injustice but a personal “failure”; an evil to be borne and acknowledged and slowly atoned for.
For its frank admission (and thus diffusion) of the evidence that abortion kills a living human being, and its conclusion that this evidence doesn’t logically require prohibition of abortion—and in fact may even lend its perpetrators a certain tragic nobility—Wolf’s argument is a powerful one. Its effects live on in every pro-choice apologist who tries to imbue his position with moral gravity—or, as with our next case, in those who invoke the name of God.
5. ‘Pro-Faith, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice’: The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Some abortion advocates pick up Wolf’s ball and run even farther with it. For some, God might be not merely patiently tolerant, even sympathetic, toward this business of feticide; He may in fact positively endorse it, as the exercise of a mature and devout conscience. For sure, the landscape is dotted with liberal churches and associations of them, each self-defined as “pro-choice.” But the biggest and best organizational representation of the religious pro-abortion folk can be found within the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), Planned Parenthood’s collar-and-chasuble lackey.
Beginning with the assertion that “most people of faith are pro-choice because of their religious beliefs, not in spite of them,” the RCRC attempts to build a case for abortion on both sectarian and interreligious principles. First, compassion: “People who follow Jesus…should bring healing and wholeness to those in distress,” claims one of the canned sermons the group offers as a resource. This means not forcing them into back alleys for their “healing” abortions and not forbidding them to opt out of the life-threatening ordeal of childbirth. Of course, there’s good ol’ freedom of conscience, too. Didn’t Jesus “emphasize the moral agency of each person”? By this He compels us to believe that a woman’s “life, health, and freedom…are more important than the potential life in her womb.”
Not convinced? Then there’s the cleanup issue: religious freedom. Church and state are separated in this country; without this separation we would be in danger of losing the freedom to believe and worship freely. “And at the center of religious freedom is keeping the government out of personal moral decisions such as terminating a pregnancy.”
This rather bald assertion is a kissing cousin to the “libertarian” pro-abortion argument one is beginning to hear more frequently (which I do not treat fully here due to space limitations): According to this argument, the whole question hinges on whether “the government” has the right to interfere with personal medical decisions. Here the RCRC simply substitutes “moral” or “religious” for “medical.” The antiabortionist’s affront is not to the presumed sacrosanctity of medicine but to the cherished American ideal of religious liberty, of which the right to an abortion has apparently become iconic.
One could spend a great deal of time deconstructing the RCRC—its sophistic mastery of religious vocabulary and concepts; its historical place in the disintegration of American mainline Protestantism; its clever self-positioning as an “equal but opposite” voice in the abortion debate and thus its successful bid to neutralize the natural advantage the pro-life side enjoys in religious contexts.
But I will make just one other observation: It’s the pro-abortion side that always wants to turn this into a religious issue. Sure, there’s no shortage of biblical positivist pro-lifers, but by and large, the pro-life side would like to frame the debate in social-justice terms. One needn’t be a Christian to oppose murder or to look at a sonogram. Conversely the pro-abortionists need desperately to paint the issue as a struggle against religious zealotry.
To these folks it is always an effective—and unexpected—rejoinder to ask that they stop talking about God so much.
Wesley Clark and the Eclipse of Reason
There may be a thousand angles at which a man can fall and an equal number of ways to justify killing the unborn, yet all pro-abortion arguments really boil down to one root fallacy. General Wesley Clark, once a pretender to the Democratic presidential nomination, expressed it quite well to a New Hampshire newspaper earlier this year. Keen to display his abortion credentials (having entered the race too late to attend the NARAL fund-raiser at which the other major candidates had already pledged their obeisance), Clark claimed to oppose all restrictions to abortion, up to the point of complete delivery. After fumbling for a moment with a follow-up question about where life begins, he replied, “Life begins with a mother’s decision.”
Here we have a philosophical phenomenon aptly summarized by the title of Bernard Nathanson’s second film, The Eclipse of Reason. Here we have nothing less than a fundamental crisis of being at the heart of our culture: a legal and societal status quo wherein a person is defined (and thus has rights apportioned to him) not by what he is but by how another person feels about him. This has been underscored in the debate over the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. If “life begins with a mother’s decision,” kill a pregnant woman on the way to an abortion clinic and you’ve committed one murder; kill a pregnant woman on the way to buy baby clothes and you’ve committed two.
The human mind can barely contain such a violent conflict of premises, forced together against the laws of nature and reason like identical poles of powerful magnets. How much more can the national soul contain it?
Todd M. Aglialoro is editor for Sophia Institute Press.
On abortion - Cases of Rape or Incest comments by Mark Crutcher
Few write with clarity and precision as well as Mark Crutcher, Founder and President of Life Dynamics. Here, from his book, "On Message", Mr. Crutcher confronts the matter of abortion in cases of rape or incest directly.
Why should a woman who was the victim of rape or incest have to bear a child?
Abortion for rape and incest victims is a very cynical way to address this issue, and it trivializes the harm that the victim suffered. It is as if someone pats her on the head and says, "Now everything's better. You've had an abortion."
When pregnancy occurs as a result of rape or incest, the baby is indeed the child of the perpetrator. What is often overlooked is that this baby is also the child of the woman. To suggest that inflicting violence on her baby will somehow benefit the mother is cruel to each of them. As a society, we have an obligation to see that every rape or incest victim is offered whatever assistance is needed to put her life back together again.
In recent years, there have been many books, reports, studies, etc., written about this very subject. Some were written by sociologists, some by professional researchers, and others by rape and incest victims. Naturally, this wide range of backgrounds and experiences leads at an equally wide range of suggestions for how to help rape victims cope with the problems they face. However, they almost universally agree what the problems are. They will tell you that these victims feel dirty. They feel helpless, no longer secure in their own homes. Some even experience shame or guilt, as if they were responsible. Often their sense of having been violated fills them with anger and rage toward all men. Many suffer low self-esteem. These are the most common hurdles which experts say rape victims have to overcome. Interestingly, pregnancy is seldom listed.
The reality is, having an abortion at a time when she's not yet over the shock of what's happened to her may actually make it harder to put this episode behind her. There are many examples of women saying that while they will never forget the rape or incest, they have learned to accept and live with it. But among those who had abortions, many say they will never be able to accept the fact that they killed their own baby. Through abortion, these women became not only victims of someone else's violence, but of their own as well. For many, it will be this second act of violence that "re-victimizes" them for the rest of their lives.
On the other hand, you never hear a woman who decided not to have an abortion later say she wised she had. Once she is able to deal with the feelings of shame and guilt, of feeling dirty, the anger, the rage, the feeling of helplessness or low self-esteem, she seldom views the child as another bad thing that happened from the situation, but maybe the only good thing that came out of it. If she keeps the child, that will certainly be the case for her, and if she decides to place the baby for adoption, it will be the case for another family.
Although it is understandable that some rape and incest victims will not see these children as a blessing but a curse, placing the babies for adoption will mean this "curse" will last for a few months. Killing these children could haunt them forever. Regardless of the circumstances, abortion never results in fewer victims but more. So, while the contention that abortion should be allowed for rape and incest victims may be driven by compassion, the reasoning behind it is severely flawed.
Unfortunately, when a sexual predator deprives someone of her right to decide for herself whether to have sex, he takes from her something neither the law, nor society, nor any individual has the power to give back. There is simply no logical basis for believing that allowing a woman to inflict violence upon her own child will lessen the effects of the violence that was done to her or benefit her in any other way.
The bottom line is, children do not find their right to life in the circumstances of their conception, and it is disgusting that someone would painfully execute a completely innocent baby for a crime that was committed by his or her father.
1Crutcher, Mark. On Message. Life Dynamics Incorporated, 2005, p 54.
Visit Life Dynamics at www.LifeDynamics.com
Why should a woman who was the victim of rape or incest have to bear a child?
Abortion for rape and incest victims is a very cynical way to address this issue, and it trivializes the harm that the victim suffered. It is as if someone pats her on the head and says, "Now everything's better. You've had an abortion."
When pregnancy occurs as a result of rape or incest, the baby is indeed the child of the perpetrator. What is often overlooked is that this baby is also the child of the woman. To suggest that inflicting violence on her baby will somehow benefit the mother is cruel to each of them. As a society, we have an obligation to see that every rape or incest victim is offered whatever assistance is needed to put her life back together again.
In recent years, there have been many books, reports, studies, etc., written about this very subject. Some were written by sociologists, some by professional researchers, and others by rape and incest victims. Naturally, this wide range of backgrounds and experiences leads at an equally wide range of suggestions for how to help rape victims cope with the problems they face. However, they almost universally agree what the problems are. They will tell you that these victims feel dirty. They feel helpless, no longer secure in their own homes. Some even experience shame or guilt, as if they were responsible. Often their sense of having been violated fills them with anger and rage toward all men. Many suffer low self-esteem. These are the most common hurdles which experts say rape victims have to overcome. Interestingly, pregnancy is seldom listed.
The reality is, having an abortion at a time when she's not yet over the shock of what's happened to her may actually make it harder to put this episode behind her. There are many examples of women saying that while they will never forget the rape or incest, they have learned to accept and live with it. But among those who had abortions, many say they will never be able to accept the fact that they killed their own baby. Through abortion, these women became not only victims of someone else's violence, but of their own as well. For many, it will be this second act of violence that "re-victimizes" them for the rest of their lives.
On the other hand, you never hear a woman who decided not to have an abortion later say she wised she had. Once she is able to deal with the feelings of shame and guilt, of feeling dirty, the anger, the rage, the feeling of helplessness or low self-esteem, she seldom views the child as another bad thing that happened from the situation, but maybe the only good thing that came out of it. If she keeps the child, that will certainly be the case for her, and if she decides to place the baby for adoption, it will be the case for another family.
Although it is understandable that some rape and incest victims will not see these children as a blessing but a curse, placing the babies for adoption will mean this "curse" will last for a few months. Killing these children could haunt them forever. Regardless of the circumstances, abortion never results in fewer victims but more. So, while the contention that abortion should be allowed for rape and incest victims may be driven by compassion, the reasoning behind it is severely flawed.
Unfortunately, when a sexual predator deprives someone of her right to decide for herself whether to have sex, he takes from her something neither the law, nor society, nor any individual has the power to give back. There is simply no logical basis for believing that allowing a woman to inflict violence upon her own child will lessen the effects of the violence that was done to her or benefit her in any other way.
***
Every unborn child is a living human being, and that remains true even when a baby is conceived through the most deplorable of circumstances. Further, if the legal protection afforded unborn children can differ based on the circumstances of their conception, there is absolutely nothing which says this discrimination has to end at birth. If an unborn human being conceived through rape or incest is less valuable than one conceived through a loving act of its parents, that same thing is true about a five-year-old. If a drunk driver runs over and kills a child, are we going to give him a lesser sentence if we find out the child was conceived through rape? If a parent kills their two-year-old and their defense is that the child was conceived through rape or incest, are we going to let them off?The bottom line is, children do not find their right to life in the circumstances of their conception, and it is disgusting that someone would painfully execute a completely innocent baby for a crime that was committed by his or her father.
***
If the guiding principle for abortion in rape an incest cases is that the woman shouldn't have to have a child that was fathered by a rapist, consider the following scenarios. A married woman discovers that she is pregnant after being raped by a man of anther race. She wants the baby if it is her husband's but not if it was fathered by the rapist. Should she be allowed to wait until the baby is born so she can see what race it is, and then have it killed if it is not here husband's child? Or what if a woman had an ultrasound, was told her baby was a boy, but learned at birth that it was a girl. Should she be allowed to kill the child because she would have aborted it had she known it was a girl?***
If the argument for abortion in rape or incest cases is that the cause of the pregnancy was beyond the woman's control, imagine that woman who was impregnated through rape has an abortion scheduled but she gives birth in the care on the way to the abortion clinic. The pregnancy is far enough along that the baby might survive. Should she be allowed to legally kill the baby there in the car? After all, the circumstances of its birth were no more within her control than were the circumstances of its conception. If we were willing to let her kill her child on the basis that the pregnancy was beyond her control, why would we take that right away because of a second event which was also beyond her control?11Crutcher, Mark. On Message. Life Dynamics Incorporated, 2005, p 54.
Visit Life Dynamics at www.LifeDynamics.com
Friday, January 8, 2010
"Mouths of Babes" condensed from "Small Comforts" by Tom Bodett, as it appeared in Reader's Digest
Among the thousand truisms and clichés that were hurled at us as expectant parents was one I actually looked forward to. “You are going to learn the most important things from your children.”
I soon decided it was all just a wish. My wife and I spent the first 20 months with our child teaching him everything from rolling over to the dynamics of liquids in cups not carefully handled. I’d yet to see where the teaching left off and the learning began. And then the time arrived.
There are only a few words our boy has in his vocabulary. More is probably the foremost and means anything from fun to food. No is also a front-runner – he hears it so much he naturally repeats it at every opportunity. Hello, Bye-Bye, Momma and Daddy make up his standard casual conversation, and that’s about the size of it.
Except for one word. By far his most distinguished and seldom used expression is wow. He only says “wow” when something really impresses him: If dad lets a frying pan catch on fire. If we hit a ditch on the way to town. If the house were to burn down around him, I’m confident he would sum it all up with “wow.”
We recently spent the night at our friends’ house. They have an extra room in the basement, and we were set up with the bed and crib in the same room. I slept well but woke up too early and couldn’t get back to sleep.
In our natural habitat my wife and I don’t sleep with the baby. We normally first come to know he’s awake by a series of screams that would put any self-righteous banshee to same. But lying there wide-awake in an unfamiliar house offered me the opportunity to hear my child wake up for the first time.
I was thinking about my day, a Sunday, and all the chores that were at hand. We’d have to get organized and go home. My wife would clean the house. I would pay bills and do some home repairs. The prospect of all this was less than the stuff of dreams.
I heard my child stir. He rolled over, opened his eyes and said, “Wow.” Suddenly, I learned something.
With all my training on “good thoughts,” “looking on the bright side” and “taking it a day at a time,” I woke up to a near miserable world. This little boy with no experience at his disposal was at the place I’ve been looking for. To wake up in the morning, take a look at the world, and say “wow” is probably as close to contentment as a person could ever get.
I’m sure our child will eventually wake up, as most of us do, only to say “ugh.” I wish I knew what I could do to never let this happen. I wish he could teach me the way he sees things now.
If we could just make ourselves relearn what it takes to open our eyes in the morning, see that we are alive in paradise and say “wow.”
I soon decided it was all just a wish. My wife and I spent the first 20 months with our child teaching him everything from rolling over to the dynamics of liquids in cups not carefully handled. I’d yet to see where the teaching left off and the learning began. And then the time arrived.
There are only a few words our boy has in his vocabulary. More is probably the foremost and means anything from fun to food. No is also a front-runner – he hears it so much he naturally repeats it at every opportunity. Hello, Bye-Bye, Momma and Daddy make up his standard casual conversation, and that’s about the size of it.
Except for one word. By far his most distinguished and seldom used expression is wow. He only says “wow” when something really impresses him: If dad lets a frying pan catch on fire. If we hit a ditch on the way to town. If the house were to burn down around him, I’m confident he would sum it all up with “wow.”
We recently spent the night at our friends’ house. They have an extra room in the basement, and we were set up with the bed and crib in the same room. I slept well but woke up too early and couldn’t get back to sleep.
In our natural habitat my wife and I don’t sleep with the baby. We normally first come to know he’s awake by a series of screams that would put any self-righteous banshee to same. But lying there wide-awake in an unfamiliar house offered me the opportunity to hear my child wake up for the first time.
I was thinking about my day, a Sunday, and all the chores that were at hand. We’d have to get organized and go home. My wife would clean the house. I would pay bills and do some home repairs. The prospect of all this was less than the stuff of dreams.
I heard my child stir. He rolled over, opened his eyes and said, “Wow.” Suddenly, I learned something.
With all my training on “good thoughts,” “looking on the bright side” and “taking it a day at a time,” I woke up to a near miserable world. This little boy with no experience at his disposal was at the place I’ve been looking for. To wake up in the morning, take a look at the world, and say “wow” is probably as close to contentment as a person could ever get.
I’m sure our child will eventually wake up, as most of us do, only to say “ugh.” I wish I knew what I could do to never let this happen. I wish he could teach me the way he sees things now.
If we could just make ourselves relearn what it takes to open our eyes in the morning, see that we are alive in paradise and say “wow.”
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