There’s got to be a reason why there is so much whining in the pro-abortion movement right now. The recent behavior of the folks at RH Reality Check, National Abortion Rights Action League (I mean NARAL Pro-Choice America) and elsewhere is very interesting. These people are seriously distraught over our insistence that every human being, from his beginning, has a right to equal protection under the law.
NARAL’s latest video production, Women Can’t Lose, focuses on our efforts, and Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, referred to American Life League during the first 60 seconds of a recent speech. Not only that, but as LifeNews.com’s Steven Ertelt reports, Keenan is getting downright hostile toward those of us who understand the cruelty of taking the life of even one innocent preborn baby:
“I’ll be honest — we all expected a fight from the usual anti-choice agitators on health-care reform,” she said. “We expected it from Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the Family Research Council, and the American Life League.”
She accused [Michigan Congressman] Stupak of “carrying the right wing’s water on this issue.”
“Stupak is ready to jeopardize the entire health-care reform bill to stand between women and their doctors,” Keenan claims.
“He’s willing to undermine health-care reform — blocking the landmark bill from even coming to a vote — in order to impose an abortion ban on women in the reformed health system. His proposal would take away coverage from women who already have it,” she says, even though the latter claim is not the case.
My, oh my! Could it be that we at American Life League, and our pro-life friends, are touching nerves that make our opponents nervous? I wonder why? Is the pro-life fly on the pro-death movement’s oversized chassis starting to create a big pain that can no longer be ignored by the vigilantes for “choice”?
What could be so nerve-racking for Keenan about a simple standard that prohibits payment for child killing in any health care “reform” bill? The answer, quite simply, is that the proponents of death for the preborn see big bucks coming their way. They don’t mind deceiving expectant mothers into believing abortion is a choice, not an act of killing. They just want our tax dollars to pay for the dirty deed. Keenan says it’s all about reproductive rights, after all, not about those expectant mothers and their future pain, should they actually decide to abort.
The lesson to be learned from this is a simple one. When the pro-life movement stays on message, doesn’t play games with politicians, presses forward and repeats the facts, the other side gets as nervous as a kindergarten student preparing for his first Christmas pageant. All we pro-lifers have to do is remain steadfast; the rest is easy.
This is why Montana commentator Laura Lundquist writes,
Meddling busybodies are back, sneaking around behind the scenes and trying to abort Montana’s constitutional right to privacy.
Last weekend, a national anti-choice group slithered into three Montana cities, including Missoula, to launch a petition drive with the covert intention of stopping abortions. In order to do that, the Virginia-based American Life League wants Montanans to rewrite our constitution. The proposed Constitutional Initiative 102 would define “person” as starting “from the beginning of the biological development of that human being” — basically anything with one or more human cells. If this group has its way, the due process clause that says “no person should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law” would apply to an egg the minute it is pierced by the head of a sperm, even if it sits in a test tube.
I will give Lundquist credit for understanding the fundamental meaning of human personhood, even if her spin is off base. After all, working to protect the human rights of all persons from the moment their lives begin is in keeping with America’s traditional defense of the innocent; it’s certainly nothing that requires slithering or sneaking. I guess that when our team visited the Big Sky state, the message made sense, so poor Laura had to say something negative.
Jodi Jacobson, a blogger on the anti-life RH Reality Check web site, opines about the human personhood effort in Michigan, telling her readers that with the economy being in such poor shape and women struggling to pay for “family planning services” such as contraception and abortion, state legislators should not be attempting to garner support for a resolution that might open the way to placing a personhood measure on the ballot in that state. She writes,
The implications of these so-called “personhood” amendments, which are spreading like the swine-flu in state legislatures, such laws would also outlaw any activity or medical treatment required by a woman–radiation or chemotherapy for breast cancer, say–that might interfere with the “personhood” of fertilized eggs, or the possibility that a fertilized egg might be present in the carrier of said egg-people.
In case Jacobson’s silliness troubles you, let me set the record straight. A human personhood proposal affirms that all human beings, including those not yet born, have equal rights and that their human rights should be protected. The effect would be to restore the integrity of this statement in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is why the human personhood message is spreading like the good news that it is—quite the opposite of swine flu. Americans are sick of the pro-abortion tirades and are increasingly uncomfortable with the whole idea of killing babies prior to birth. It’s as simple as that, really. And as far as radiation treatments, chemotherapy and other treatments for disease are concerned, the ethical physician who is treating an expectant mother always provides proper guidance to her because he knows that he is dealing with two patients, even though pro-abortion stalwarts like Jacobson prefer to ignore one of the doctor’s two patients.
Oh, and speaking of the swine flu, Amanda Hess just reported that that the ordeal of swine flu victim Aubrey Opdyke, whose horrific suffering resulted in losing her preborn child, her ability to walk and more, has not been properly reported by others. Hess tells her readers,
In [New York Times reporter] McNeil’s profile of Opdyke, losing the baby was “most important”—more traumatic than even falling into the coma, suffering a seizure, temporarily losing the ability to walk, talk, and see her family, and facing death. The trauma of losing a child in the womb is clearly central to Opdyke’s experience. But it is still Opdyke’s experience—the ordeal is hers, not her baby’s.
No, Amanda, the ordeal was that one person died and the other will grieve for that loss. The whole experience of losing that baby was so tragic that Opdyke's husband of 16 months had photos taken of their baby girl, Parker Christine, who died shortly after birth, so that, when sufficiently recovered, Opdyke could at least see the daughter she lost due to swine flu complications.
To callously toss off this baby’s death as nothing more than another side effect of Opdyke’s devastating illness is chilling. However, it underscores the fact that for women such as Hess and her confreres in the shrinking culture-of-death cartel, these babies count for nothing. And that is the greatest tragedy of all.
If pro-life Americans were not having a positive effect on our culture, people such as Hess, Jacobson and Keenan would not be exhibiting such a bizarre degree of hysteria. I feel badly for these women. I worry about their dysfunctional attitudes toward the wonder and beauty of life, motherhood and family, and I pray for them. But I am eternally grateful to my friends in all the many spheres of our united pro-life effort. We are truly blessed to be of one mind in this work. We join with David Bereit, national director of 40 Days for Life, in a prayer that should be on our lips and in our hearts as we persist in our quest for human personhood and pray for our enemies:
O God, our heavenly Father, give us courage and wisdom as we seek to eradicate the evil in our society. Help us to realize that Your divine Spirit alone can change hearts and minds so that all Your human creatures may enjoy the fullness of life You intended for them. I pray this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. Amen.