From: an5200@anon.penet.fi
Subject: Why we are pro-life:
Organization: Anonymous contact service
X-Anonymously-To: talk.abortion,alt.birthright
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 21:24:21 GMT

X-Anon-To: talk.abortion,alt.birthright
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.birthright
Subject: Why we are pro-life:

    

I would like to explain why many of us (the majority) whom you call
"anti-choice," take a pro-life stance on the abortion issue.

As much as pro-choice activists claim that life is not inherently
valuable, citing the death penalty and war as examples, it is not only
the value of a human life that drives us. Either consciously or
subconsciously, it is also, to us, an issue of discrimination. As much
as I dislike racism and bigotry, I find it kind of hypocritical to
look at prenatal human development and call an unborn baby nothing
more than an inanimate mass of tissue analogous to a cancer cell. That
is not only dehumanizing, but it is also factually wrong in that we
are, as I found out during the last of my pro-choice days, looking at
a member of the human species that is determining his/her own growth
by their genes, and unlike any part of the human body, is
differentiating. That means, a one-cell zygote, is running a genetic
program which causes him/her to develop cells quite different than the
original - one cell divides and after so many divisions, they create
different cells. And unlike any cell in our bodies, the zygote already
has a predetermined gender - they are either male or female at
conception, and it takes a full decade and more, before that trait
becomes fully relevant to them at puberty. So, really, hence no one is
a complete person, so to speak, until, say, their teens - if you're
not a person because your brain or lungs are incomplete, then the same
can be said about your reproductive system. Looking at them and
saying, "Okay, s/he is growing, replacing their own cells, looking for
and receiving nutrients to survive, is genetically different from
his/her parent, is producing a myriad of different kinds of cells, all
this without any genetic instructions from the mother - yet they are
not alive any more than sperm or cancer cells," is either ignorance or
discrimination. An educated society claims to fight flaws in human
rights based on either ignorance or discrimination - why not here? Why
do the rules suddenly change with regards to abortion? Sure, if we
were not talking about our own offspring here, and if this unborn baby
was in fact a stranger, we could call him/her a parasite - but they
are, scientifically, the mother's (and father's) offspring. Offspring
and parasites are two wildly different things: we cannot endanger or
neglect our offspring when they depend on us - we remove parasites.
Confusing and redefining the terms, to defend abortion on a whole new
front, should remind me of George Orwell's 1984, in which Big Brother
changes the meaning of words to suit the agenda of INGSOC. That's why
I look skeptically at things like "collateral damage" - just call it
"civilian casualties" and prosecute the offending troops, is what I
say about that issue.

The nature of the facts I saw in this issue were so grave that I
changed despite the fact that I risked losing a girlfriend over the
issue (and I did). I voted Republican this year whereas I've been a
Democratic voter all my life, because I have always liked Democrats
where it came to keeping the demand for abortion down by not sticking
it to the single parents and women in society.

And in addition, we are referred to by many as religious zealots.
Assuming that this is substantiated beyond the media stereotypes, that
has no bearing to individuals. We have pro-life feminists, peace
activists, environmentalists, atheists, and even gays in our movement.
As David Shaw of The Times wrote, ours is one of the broadest
coalitions in US history, and includes leaders like the late Susan B.
Anthony, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and the late Mahatma Ghandi - all
renowned human rights advocates whose credibility is largely beyond
question. No one talks about the extremists in the pro-choice
movement, who are now resorting to attacking pro-life meetings like
the one at Cornell University a few months back, or the pro-life mass
at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Chicago, which was attacked by ACT-UP.
In addition, all this attention is placed on Jerry Falwell and his
merry band religious people, when pro-life arguments exist which are
completely independent of any Biblical argument. For one thing, I
believe I presented an argument that never once mentioned God in it.
It did mention discrimination, however, which is something most
Americans oppose and which is illegal by law and principle, in
America. The pro-life movement is so broad that, sadly, many voted for
Clinton because they thought the advantages of his economic stands
outweighed their opposition to his free abortion-on-demand for
9-months stand. But then again, many pro-choicers voted for Bush, for
similar, inverted reasons. Sure, we do have several thousand
pro-lifers who chase clinic owners and their families around, and who
get themselves put in jail by blocking clinics. As Pat Buchanan
himself has said, these people ask for the jail time they get. Not
even he supports them, and neither do the millions of us registered
with the National Right to Life Committee. But there are also militant
liberals who have bombed churches, spray-painted people's houses, and
threatened to infect people with AIDS - yet, no one talks about that.

We don't hate women. In fact, the leader of the NRLC, the largest
pro-life organization in the world, is a woman, Dr. Wanda Franz.
Really, ask yourself: how can pro-life women hate themselves? Governor
Joan Finney of Kansas sure must hate ambitious women and the right of
women to live equally with men, since she took a pro-life stance, and
beat a Republican pro-choice candidate who outspent her three to one.
How much sense does that make? 

However, there are some things I'd like to take issue with the
extremists in the pro-life movement:
1. Why do you concern yourselves with homophobia? Can't you see they
are finding out now that homosexuality can show up before birth? How
will you react if you find your unborn child is going to be
homosexual? Which principle takes priority - the one that says
homosexuality is a sin, or the right to life? If your dislike of
homosexuals is so terrible that you'd abort him/her, I certainly
believe you have your priorities screwed. Adoption and/or acceptance
are certainly more in-line with our life-affirming principles;
bigotry, as I mentioned above, only leads us back to killing, and
further convinces me that it is at the root of abortion.
2. What good is Operation Rescue and Lambs of Christ doing for the
rest of us? How do you expect to make new laws when you're breaking
present ones? Doesn't that sound hypocritical? And aside from the
logical tone, don't you realize you're messing the rest of us up,
giving us all a bad image? The media only shows Americans what you do
- not the logical, thoughtful and considerate side of the movement,
and you're just helping them.
3. Please, take religion out of your arguments. Aside from the fact
that this nation constitutionally forbids a Theocracy or any
religion-based legislation, pro-life arguments can be presented
independently of religion. This kind of action threatens to open the
door to further actions making it easier to discriminate with regards
to religion. And seeing as we even have pro-life Jewish members, that
makes religion in government, doubly hard to swallow. It's bad enough
that it simply is unconstitutional and inherently capable of
oppressing other religions, but the idea that we might harm someone
who has parted from their leadership to help us, is even worse.
4. We need to get away from the references to pro-choicers as Nazi's.
It heats this already volatile issue to a point where no one is
willing to talk. For those of you who are lining up with the history
books to now compare it with Naziism's competitor, aka Communism..
pleez, lay off..
5. Lay off of Murphy Brown. The only way to return America back to the
days of the dominant two-parent family, is to drastically increase the
abortion rate in order to lower the single-parent ratio. Once again,
it is an issue of judging one's priorities. We do not have to harbor
dislike for single-parent families - in fact, it can in fact lead to
effects that contradict the results we've been working hard to
achieve.


I don't know if this is going to be relevant in the next 4 years. We
were able to talk before, when we had Republicans in the White House,
slowing down a pro-choice takeover of the country. But with Bill
Clinton in the White House, it's all over. We're looking at abortion
being legal until the moment of birth, in addition to it being free
(at the taxpayers' expense), and also, we will be funding China's
forced abortion program, fetal experimentation in which women will be
encouraged to get pregnant just to kill the babies and provide fetal
tissue transplants, and that's long before we get to RU-486.. Now, the
pro-choicers won't want to talk, and it's going to mean a whole lot of
suffering until Jack Kemp leads us out of the darkness in 1996. Heck,
I don't even want to be IDENTIFIED as a pro-lifer in the next four
years, because of all the things they are going to say about us in the
media and in the streets.

All I can say is we're in a whole lot more trouble than we ever
deserved to be, and all because of a few nuts that are portrayed to be
the whole movement.

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