PRO-LIFE, PRO-TRUTH

[Heddi]

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/03/pro-life-pro-truth

It is an exciting time to be pro-life. The political situation, all the way up to the Supreme Court itself, seems ripe for us to make major strides. Religious members of the movement are embarking on our 40 Days for Life campaign, in which we pray, fast, hold vigil, and perform community outreach, all in service of saving men, women, and children from abortion. We enter this season with words ringing in our ears from Vice President Pence’s speech at the March for Life. “I’ve long believed a society can be judged by how care for our most vulnerable,” he said, echoing the humanitarian sentiments our movement has always centered on. “Life is winning again in America!”

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When I speak to my pro-choice friends, I’m often able to find some common ground. They do not necessarily admit that human life has a God-given dignity, but they certainly assign it value—and even assign some value to life in the womb, though they leave this contingent on a mother’s choice. Some of my friends are sympathetic to the pro-life movement’s ideal of a world where mother and child are both offered love and support, a world less subject to the cultural and economic forces that can make motherhood unthinkable for women in unplanned pregnancies. The problem is, they don’t trust the broader pro-life movement’s motives. One friend told me he liked the picture I drew of a holistic ethic of life, but would deride it if he heard a pro-life spokesman share it.
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Crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life women’s health care organizations do a lot of good work helping uninsured women get care. But they sometimes succumb to the temptation to overstate the statistical connection between abortion and clinical depression—rather than simply share stories of real women experiencing post-abortion grief, they exaggerate the pervasiveness of the condition beyond what mental health studies show. There are even anecdotes about centers telling women abortion is linked to breast cancer, a patently wrong claim.
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We must, of course, speak the truth about the evils of abortion. But we must do so without self-righteousness, and with compassion for how hard it is for our pro-choice friends and neighbors to change their minds about such a weighty moral question. The abortion industry works hard to gaslight the American people. For the sake of liberals who are (understandably) queasy about defending abortion on its merits, Democratic politicians like to pretend that Planned Parenthood offers mammograms (it doesn’t), that it is a common source of pre-natal care (it’s not), and that abortion represents only 3 percent of its services (the real number is unclear, but far higher—though again, it doesn’t help our cause to inflate it to 94 percent).
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So it’s not quite right to say the truth is our greatest weapon. The truth is not a weapon we use. Instead, it is we who should be the weapons Truth wields—in defense of life.


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Edited to add -- I'm posting as a warning of the types of people that now own our government, our country, and sadly, our uteruses. This is what we're up against. I'm not posting b/c I agree with it (I am vehemently pro-abortion, not just pro choices). We cannot fight our enemy unless we know who our enemy is and what tactics they are using against us.

The softer, kinder, gentler anti-abortionists are just as evil and misogynistic as the Jerry Falwells and Phyllis Schafly's of the past. They are softening their language but not their attempt to use my body and reproductive rights as a battleground for their war of souls. Fuck them. Fuck their message.