Commentary by Judie Brown
When I saw the Ms. Magazine invitation to join the new "We Had Abortions" petition campaign, the evil practically jumped right off the page. This type of lexicon designed to disguise the murder of innocent preborn children has captured far too many hearts and minds in the war against the innocent.
For starters, the Ms. Magazine appeal notes that women undergo abortions, much as one might undergo major surgery. The reader is led to think in precisely those terms, which are designed to hide the fact that in an abortion, the mother forces her preborn child to undergo death by way of chemicals, a suction machine or a knife.
Ms. Magazine writers tell us that in the old days, "it seemed absurd that the government could deny a woman sovereignty over her own body." This concept suggests the preposterous idea that a human being is fully autonomous and all-powerful when dealing with his own person. This cannot be so; bodily sovereignty simply does not exist, as there is no person who can tell a cancer to go away or order an injury-free result following a life-threatening accident. Not a one of us possesses such power.
But when it comes to avoiding pregnancy, there is a simple solution: A woman can avoid sexual contact with members of the opposite sex. That means she can practice self control rather than deceiving herself about omnipotence.
Decrying the state of laws in our nation today, the Ms. Magazine diatribe goes on to say that it's time for "women of conscience to stand up and speak truth to power." This sounds like a call to arms; and that is precisely what it is. However, a woman with a properly formed conscience would never subject her preborn baby to death by abortion because she would recognize, due to her ability to exercise common sense, that she is a mother, she is with child and she has a responsibility to care for another person in addition to herself. That is, if she had a properly formed conscience.
The women Ms. Magazine is appealing to have denied their identities as mothers and refused to accept the fact that by choosing to abort a child, they have chosen to be the mothers of dead children. Such women have rejected the truth and have chosen, instead, to accept a lie that may eventually cause them enormous grief, suffering and in some cases death.
While all of us in the pro-life movement feel great sadness for such mothers, we are not going to deny truth in our quest to reach out to them and help them heal from their tragic abortion choices.
Ms. Magazine portrays poor women and those who live in impoverished lands around the world as a class which has been discriminated against because their ready access to aborting their children has been impeded in some way. They accuse the federal government of contributing to the toll of maternal deaths in the Third World. They insist that denying government funds for the provision of abortion information while funding abstinence education are deadly policies the United States imposes on the poor.
Maternal deaths in the Third World come about for a wide variety of reasons, including lack of proper prenatal care, the absence of sterile hospital settings and a host of difficulties associated with getting doctors into areas where transportation is a challenge. Also, many Third World women live in countries with oppressive governments and regimes whose selfish political agendas divert resources into their own pockets while their citizens are abandoned into starvation and sickness.
In other words, the world's poor are suffering because of situations and conditions that have little to do with the availability of prenatal child killing or the teaching of moral values. One has to wonder why the staff of Ms. Magazine is not volunteering its own funds and services in such countries so that mothers can survive, be healthy and have large families.
Near the conclusion of the Ms. Magazine call to arms, the article explains that when women signed the original abortion petition in 1972, they signed "to save lives and to spare other women the pain of socially imposed guilt."
Now that is really the kicker, isn't it! We are supposed to believe that because a mother feels guilty after paying a third party to kill her baby, she is simply a victim of a culture that does not accept such brutal acts. In reality, if Ms. Magazine writers were honest, the writers would see the reason there are pains of guilt — there is guilt because after all is said and done, the mother who has had an abortion realizes that what she did was terribly and irreversibly wrong.
Nobody can impose guilt on another human being; but we must not back down from our clear understanding that each abortion kills one person and maims another for life.
Contrary to what the petition's authors are saying, there is nothing necessary or important about killing a preborn baby; there is something very sad and socially disgusting about such a practice. Ms. Magazine's commentary suggests that abortion is "very common," and sadly that is true. But it is my hope that it becomes so very uncommon that it is simply rejected because the nation has recognized the truth and has embraced it.
The many phrases I have taken from the Ms. Magazine petition appeal, when added together and studied, betray the extent to which some will go in their continuing war on preborn babies and women. They will lie, they will attack and they will do whatever it takes to demean motherhood and advance the cause of prenatal child killing.
But what is perhaps most disturbing in all of this is that America appears to be sleeping through it. As it is with every war, those who refuse to take matters seriously and defend what they know to be right and just will lose more than a soft seat in front of the television. Our nation is dying, one preborn soul at a time.
Release issued: 3 Aug 06