A Comment

I wrote too much to post this as a comment. Figures! So I am posting it here. MBS said:

"really trying to figure out how you reconcile a feminist pov while trashing on a 'culture of contraception' and abortion rights. feminists got us where we are now with those things! that stuff is all about women taking control of their bodies and their futures..."

I replied:

Thanks for commenting, MBS. You bring up some interesting points.

First of all, I claim a New Feminism. I do not share the classic feminist view of "reproductive rights."

Secondly, yes, our feminist sisters got us the right to vote and the right to enter the workplace as equals, and we thank them for that, but they also got us to deny the differentness that makes us unique and special, and in so doing opened up a Pandora's box that us Catholics call the Culture of Death.

Before I step up on my soapbox, please understand: you don't have to be a Catholic, a Christian, or anything at all to understand what I'm about to say. I was pro-life before I was Catholic, Christian, or anything at all. I would probably have described myself as an Agnostic Pagan, and had been for years, on the night when I had The Conversation. (Yes, I was stubbornly pro-choice for as long as I could remember, but it only took one Conversation to change my mind. Such is the power of Truth.)

You've given a great example of the standard party line of feminism when you say "that stuff is all about women taking control of their bodies and their futures."

I agree, first of all, that women should take control of their bodies and their futures. I absolutely agree with those things! Wholeheartedly!

What I do not agree with is what feminists consider "taking control of their bodies and their futures." It is a lie.

First, when it comes to abortion, it is quite simply not "their bodies" we are talking about. It is someone else's body. Now, back in the 70s, during and just after Roe v. Wade, there was still some more or less intelligent argument about when life began. That argument is over, thanks to advancing science. Open any obstetrics textbook, ask any biologist, and they will tell you that human life begins at conception. Period. Only people trying really hard to defend abortion will argue that point, such as a Planned Parenthood abortionist who recently claimed that in "his opinion" life began when "the child was viable," as in, able to live outside the womb. Of course that has nothing to do with a definition of life; he's just trying to justify what he does for a living. We know that children are alive long before they're viable. Things that aren't alive do not yawn and suck their thumbs.

So, life begins at conception. That point is no longer even questioned in intelligent debate about the subject. So what you're doing when you abort a child is, you're killing a human being. Period. Any honest abortionist will admit that to you. The abortionist at Southwestern, right here in Dallas, has admitted in writing, "I know that what I'm doing is killing."

From there, pro-choicers like to get into semantics and toss around words like "personhood" and "viability" and then start screaming about "women's bodies." But what they are really doing is trying to justify murder in one of two ways: either by claiming that, despite the fact that it most definitely is a life, it isn't really and TRULY a life because we can't see it walking around and going to Starbuck's and stuff. They'll say it's a human life but not a PERSON, forgetting that it most definitely would end up a PERSON (in their definition) if they didn't KILL it.

The other argument they like to make is that, yeah, it may be a human being, but it is inside another human being. In other words, it's okay to kill it because of where it's LOCATED. So, killing a baby in a bassinet by the hospital bed is murder, but killing a baby three feet to the left in its mother's womb, that's okay. Never mind the fact that in more than 99% of cases, the woman voluntarily let it in to her womb by having concensual sex. (If you want to debate cases of rape and incest, let's do that later 'cause this is getting long; and they also count for less than half of one percent of abortions.)

Oh, I forgot about another argument, which is surprisingly prevalent and incredibly disgusting: the argument that all those murdered babies, if they had been born, would have been a drain on society, and grown up to have more unwanted babies and so on and so forth. This makes a lot of sense if you hold a utilitarian view of human life, the kind of view that the Nazis held and that told them it was a really good idea to gas prisoners who couldn't work and to use natural selection to create a super race. At some point they forgot that society exists for people, not the other way around. If your pants are too short, you don't cut your feet off, you buy longer pants. Darwinist natural selection leads to eugenics leads to murder. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was an American pioneer of eugenics. (Don't take my word for it; look it up.) Her platform was that it was a terrible idea to let poor brown people breed. That's why to this day most Planned Parenthood offices are in poor brown neighborhoods.

That's not helping women take control of their bodies and their futures. That's genocide. If we cared about those women, we would help them value themselves and their bodies so they become pregnant in loving, committed relationships, and promote a culture that takes care of women and children so women are able to afford health and child care. THAT is helping women.

You know who gives a shitload of money to Planned Parenthood? Playboy Magazine. That's right. Hugh Hefner. Know why? Because birth control and abortion are not about empowering women. They're about making it easier to view women as objects, something to use for pleasure and throw away. Do you think Playboy cares about women's liberation? Think again. Let's train that gal to take her little pink pill every day like a good girl, never mind what it does to her hormones and her body, and if she does get knocked up, give her a few hundred bucks to get the little bugger sucked out of her. It's cheaper than child support! Then, we'll convince her that all of this an EMPOWERING EXPERIENCE!!!

My advice to you is, don't be like I was. I embraced the tenets of feminism because I thought it was part and parcel of being a strong, independent, intelligent person. It came with the "liberal starter pack," so I accepted it without really questioning it. Before November of 2006, I would have called you a lot of nasty names if you had tried to sell me your pro-life rhetoric. Then someone cared enough about me to show me pictures of aborted children, and I became aware, while having a visceral, soul-shaking experience, that what I was looking at was not okay, could never be justified as okay. It was the broken, shredded, discarded body of an innocent human child.

A culture that does that to its most innocent, helpless members is doomed. It's sick to its very soul.

That's why to me abortion is the most important issue there is. It is the ultimate human rights issue because abortion "rights" are the ultimate in "might makes right" thinking. It's the most important issue because while this is going wrong, even if everything else goes right, it's still a sign of a deep sickness in our culture.

I implore to you to find out exactly -- EXACTLY -- what it is that you're defending. I never did until I had the Conversation. Most people don't. They consider it "distasteful" to look at pictures of aborted fetuses. (It kills me when pro-choicers say this "disrespects the dead." They don't mind the actual killing, but they mind photographs of it. Unreal.) Viewing these images is a horrible experience. But you owe it to them and to yourself. Know what you're defending. If you're gonna say it's okay, go look at it. Look at the pictures, and while you're looking, see if you can say to yourself, honestly, "This is okay." Never mind "good" or "righteous." Try to say, "This is okay."

If you have a heart, or a conscience, you won't be able to do it.