By Judie Brown
Look around you and see the wonder of all that God has wrought! It is a beautiful exercise in developing hope to recognize the hand of our Father, even in the midst of dread, denial, and destruction.
Reading the news that never gets reported by the mainstream media but is crucial to our daily work as pro-life advocates is where that hope is nurtured, encouraged, and stated for all to see and hear. It is in this work that we develop the insight to examine what is reported and expose the evil where it exists.
Think about HBO show host John Oliver, for example. He recently told his audience that fetal personhood “effectively treats women as incubators” and that those of us who work toward personhood are “effectively stripping women of their rights and autonomy.” He continued, “Even low-risk pregnancies are obviously life- and body-altering experiences. And it does not seem radical to me to be able to control your own life and body through that experience.”
Oliver is so committed to abortion that he uses his platform to misinform, twist, and otherwise attempt to disallow the truth, which is that a woman who is expecting a child is a mother. If she chooses to end the life of her baby, she is then the mother of a dead baby. What could possibly be more radical and devastating than that?
Yet people like Oliver spin a web of lies because they believe that our focus on the humanity of the child and the fact that he is uniquely separate from his mother contradict the deadly narrative of reproductive “rights.” We cultivate the good in a situation like this by asking a simple question: Does the baby have rights as well?
It is not human personhood that scares Oliver and his ilk. It is the reality that pregnancy is a good, a miracle, a wonder beyond anything else a woman could ever experience. And Oliver detests that good.
By the same token, consider the argument that it is legal to advise a woman how she can obtain the abortion pill but allegedly illegal to tell her where she can go to reverse the deadly effects of that pill. The case in point involves Mayday Health, an Internet resource for helping women find where they can obtain an abortion and related services. Mayday is a literal moral briar patch, but it apparently has the respect of judicial systems that do not offer the same level of recognition to pro-life organizations like Heartbeat International. In an article about this obvious judicial contradiction, we read, “If Mayday has a First Amendment right to tell women where they can obtain illegal abortion pills, then surely Heartbeat has a First Amendment right to tell women where they can seek perfectly legal medical help after taking one.”
Such commonsense arguments escape those who are hell-bent on securing a right to abort a baby at all costs while arguing against those who strive to protect innocent lives. We suggest in situations like this that pro-lifers gently remind those who fight against them that terms like “junk science” and “dangerous” information are go-to terms for those who cannot tolerate the truth that if a baby were not involved in pregnancy, their work as promoters of the killing of those babies would not exist.
Desperate language from deceptive people does not erase the good that comes from affirming life, hope, families, and the common good.
We know that the abortion cartel cannot abide a single truth about the preborn child, including the fact that abortion is killing a person, but try as they may, their tactics will not cause a single one of us to cower and back down.
And so it is that we persist in cultivating the good.