Responses:
The issue is who decides, the woman or the state. It’s about freedom of choice.
The abortion lobby has always realized that abortion itself is indefensible. This has forced them to argue that whether abortion is the deliberate killing of a living human being or not, is unrelated to the question of whether it should be legal. In short, they have to divert attention toward the philosophical concepts of “choice” and “who decides” because they can’t afford for the public to look at what’s being chosen and decided.
To imply that the issue is not abortion, but choice, is to say that what’s being chosen is irrelevant. That is clearly illogical given that all choices are not equal. Choosing whether to buy a new car is vastly different than choosing whether to produce child pornography, and the morality of those choices is not affected by the eventual decision. However, the pro-choice position is that abortion becomes acceptable simply by the act of choosing to do it.
Defenders of slavery also used this same strategy.
During the 1858 Abraham Lincoln- Stephen Douglas debates, Douglas said he did not support outlawing slavery, saying, “I am now speaking of rights under the Constitution, and not of moral or religious rights. I do not discuss the morals of the people favoring slavery, but let them settle that matter for themselves. I hold that the people who favor slavery are civilized, that they bear consciences, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity and not to us. It is for them to decide therefore the moral and religious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits.”
Just substitute the word abortion every place the word slavery appears, and this statement perfectly defines the pro-choice position in America today. Lincoln’s response to Douglas’ pro-choice position on slavery was, “He cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down. When Judge Douglas says whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do a wrong.”
Lincoln recognized that there is nothing intrinsically noble about the concept of choice, and that there are choices which a society cannot allow the individual to make.
The fact is, before one can rightly claim that the issue is “choice” or “who decides,” he or she must first examine what’s being chosen. If it’s what color shoes to wear, that’s one thing; if it’s whether to kill another human being, that’s another. Except in self-defense, the decision about whether one human being can kill another one cannot be left up to the individual who wants to do the killing.
Besides, this “who decides, the woman or the state” rhetoric is idiotic on its face. Laws against abortion would not let the state decide who gets abortions any more than laws against rape let the state decide who gets raped. Instead, they establish that certain behaviors are so unacceptable they must be illegal.
Finally, as used by abortion advocates, the term “pro-choice” is both inaccurate and dishonest.
In an abortion, at least three people are directly impacted: the mother, the father, and the child. The pro-choice argument is that only one is entitled to a choice. Additionally, it has never been a part of their agenda to protect any choice other than abortion. They don’t lobby for women to have the legal right to be prostitutes or use crack cocaine. Yet these laws, and thousands of others, deny women “the right to choose” just as much as laws preventing abortion would.
The government has no right to interfere in people’s personal choices.
To say that government should let people make all of their own choices is neither practical nor desirable. We cannot let people make their own choices to rape, rob or drive drunk. We cannot let them make the choices to embezzle, defraud, write hot checks, drive their cars over the speed limit, slander other people, etc. By definition, the goal of every law is to deny someone the legal ability to choose a particular activity, and many prohibited choices could even be considered “personal.” For example, it is illegal to have sexual relations with a sibling, or a child, or an animal, or a dead body.
As for abortion, it is not the government’s role to protect one individual’s choice to kill his fellow human beings. Given the biological fact that the unborn are living human beings, the question is not whether the government has the right to prohibit abortion, but whether it has the right not to.
The government has no right to come into our bedrooms.
Abortions are not done in bedrooms. But even if they were, the bedroom is no more a sanctuary from the law than is a cornfield.
The reality is, many illegal acts happen in bedrooms. In fact, some – spousal abuse, incest, statutory rape, and pedophilia, just to name a few – usually happen in bedrooms. Let’s also not forget that back when abortion was illegal, the public was at no greater risk of having their bedrooms invaded by the state than they are today.
No one has the right to tell a woman she has to have a child.
The pro-life movement has never suggested that women should be required to have children. However, it is a biological fact that when a woman is pregnant she already has a child. Our argument is that this child should not be butchered.
The government should not be involved in the practice of medicine.
Telling physicians that they can’t kill people is not practicing medicine. Besides, the government is already involved in the practice of medicine. With the exception of abortion, medicine is one of the most heavily regulated industries in America.
The government has an obligation to fund abortions for poor women.
On one hand, the abortion lobby says that abortion is a private decision in which the government has no right to be involved. Then, they demand that the government pay for abortions and force even pro-life taxpayers to buy abortions for other people. They defend this obvious hypocrisy by pointing out that government often requires taxpayers to pay for things with which they disagree. For example, people opposed to war have to pay taxes which fund the military.
However, the abortion lobby’s position is that government has no right to even be involved in the abortion issue. So why should government pay for something which the recipients of those funds say is none of the government’s business? After all, if we concluded that national defense was none of the government’s business, we would not use tax money to buy jet fighters.
Also, just because someone has a right to do something doesn’t mean the government has to pay for it. Americans have the right to own guns, but the government doesn’t provide free pistols to poor people. We have a right to free speech, but the government doesn’t buy public address systems for poor people. We are also guaranteed freedom of religion, but the government has no obligation to purchase Bibles for poor churches.
Government should stay out of abortion. Don’t subsidize it and don’t prohibit it.
That’s as irrational as saying that if we neither subsidize nor prohibit lynching black people, we’re staying out of racism.
I’d rather pay $300 for a welfare mom’s abortion than thousands to raise her kid.
Few issues speak more clearly about the immorality of the pro-choice mentality than the argument that abortion should be used to save us tax money. Imagine that the two-year-old daughter of a family on welfare fell into an abandoned well. Authorities calculate that since a funeral is cheaper than a rescue, and since this little girl might be on welfare for the rest of her life, the financially sound thing to do is just flood the well with water. Once the child floats to the top, the coroner can scoop up her body, have it buried, and the taxpayers will have saved a bundle. That is obviously a monstrous idea, but it is no more so than telling poor women that if they will kill their children to save us money, we’ll pay the killer.
Now if America is serious about having a social policy based on the philosophy that it’s cheaper to execute a child than support one, then we should start encouraging families on welfare to not only kill their unborn children, but their born children as well. Remember, the guiding principle here is not morality but saving money. If we are willing to ignore the biological fact that their unborn children are living human beings, why should we care that their born children are living human beings?
I am against abortion but I look at all the issues. Besides, most political offices have nothing to do with abortion.
For people who believe that abortion is murder, a candidate’s position on other issues is irrelevant. The slaughter of children cannot be equated to any other social, cultural or political issue. It is also irrelevant that most political offices have no impact on abortion. If a candidate is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, voters will not ignore that just because the office he is seeking has no impact on racial issues. That dynamic also applies in this case. People who support legalized abortion are not morally qualified to serve in any public office.
It is interesting to note that the number of people killed during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is virtually the same as the number of unborn children killed daily in America’s death camps. In other words, for the unborn every day is 9/11. If the rest of us were being hit like that, no one would be saying that there are other issues to consider.
We should not have litmus tests for politicians and judges.
That is pure rubbish. A politician could be attractive, intelligent, experienced and have all the right answers to the important issues of the day, but if he was found to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan most people would view that as a litmus test. If a judge was nominated to the Supreme Court and it was discovered that he had written a law review article saying women should not be allowed to vote, that would be a litmus test. If a politician said that the terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center had legitimate reasons for doing so, that too would be a litmus test.
In fact, there are many legitimate and positive reasons for litmus tests, and people who claim they don’t have any are either lying or they lack a well-developed belief system. In either case, such people should never be entrusted with positions of power or influence.
Abortion is about empowering women.
If you want to see the weakest and most subservient women in America, just look at the faces of those entering an abortion clinic. What you will see is sadness, desperation, fear, and resignation. What you will not see is women who feel empowered or in control.
These faces make it clear that, like suicide, abortion is a choice made by tragic people who have been convinced they have no choice. Better than anyone else, women who submit to abortion understand why no woman was ever admired for having an abortion, and why no woman ever bragged about her abortion, and why no woman ever climbed off an abortionist’s table with a higher opinion of herself than she had when she climbed onto it.
Early Feminists
This nonsense that women must have the right to kill their children in order to be equal to men is an invention of the abortion industry. With almost no exceptions, pioneers of the women’s movement like Susan B. Anthony, Mattie Brinkerhoff, Sarah Norton, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were outspoken opponents of legal abortion. Alice Paul, who wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment, called abortion the ultimate exploitation of women. Even suffragist newspapers such as Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, had editorial policies which openly attacked both abortion and abortionists.
These early feminists saw that abortion is patronizing and paternalistic and that a woman’s willingness to submit to it doesn’t free her, it devalues her. They understood that legalized abortion is nothing more than a safety net for sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible men. Today, after over 30 years of legalized abortion, that view has been so thoroughly proven true that some abortion advocates no longer even bother to deny it. In fact, some say it should be celebrated.
“Off The Hook?”
On May 11, 1990, the PBS radio program Spectrum featured the staunchly pro-choice Ann Taylor-Flemming saying, “I came of age with the women’s movement. It has given license to my ambitions and dreams, and filled me with the fervor for equality that permeates all that I do. But this time, I want to turn the tables a bit. Take an issue that always seems like a women’s issue and pitch it directly towards the men out there. And that issue is abortion… it’s time now to invite the men of America back in, to ask them to raise their voices for choice… I dare say that many of them have impregnated women along the way, and then let off the hook in a big, big way – emotionally, economically and every other way – when the women went ahead and had abortions… the sense of relief for themselves was mixed with sympathy for and gratitude towards those women whose ultimate responsibility it was to relieve them of responsibility by having abortions… it would sure be nice to hear from all those men out there whose lives have been changed, bettered, and substantially eased because they were not forced into unwanted fatherhood.”
It is hard to imagine that even the most bigoted male chauvinist would suggest that women have a responsibility to let men who impregnate them “off the hook” by submitting to abortion. Yet here is that very argument being espoused by someone who claims to be an advocate for women.
Today, abortion apologists continue to push the idea that having a clean place to kill their babies is the cornerstone of women’s equality. That lie is a self-serving perversion of the basic values of legitimate feminism. As pro-life feminist Melissa Simmons-Tulin once said, “Women will never climb to equality over the dead bodies of their children.”
It’s the woman’s body. It’s her decision.
First, it is nonsense to suggest that the law never tells people what they can or cannot do with their bodies. In fact, there are many things which people are not legally allowed to do with their bodies. To name just a few, they cannot sell them for sex, or sell their organs to people who need transplants, or put certain drugs into their bodies.
Second, statements like this ignore the fact that, by any rational standard, the unborn child is a separate individual from its mother.
In fact, if an unborn child had the ability to commit a crime, it has everything necessary for a forensic expert to identify it in court. Long before the point at which most abortions are done, the unborn child has its own DNA code, its own fingerprints, and its own blood type – none of which match the mother.
The individuality of the unborn was evident in 1999 when a Tennessee surgeon had just completed an operation on an unborn baby and was about to close the incision in the mom’s abdomen. Before he could do so, the child punched his arm through the incision and grasped the doctor’s finger. A photo of this event ended up on magazine covers and television sets around the world. The question is, who grabbed the doctor’s finger?
Abortion is a women’s issue. Men have no right to even be involved.
First, people who think men have no right to be involved in the abortion issue should be careful what they ask for. Polls consistently find that women oppose abortion at a higher rate than men, they are more opposed to government funding of abortion, more active in the pro-life movement, and are more likely to favor banning abortion outright. It is abundantly clear that if men were excluded, support for abortion would plummet.
Second, men don’t need to be given the right to speak out against abortion, they already have a responsibility to do so. Real men don’t just stand around with their hands in their pockets while helpless children are slaughtered for money.
The Hypocrisy
Third, the pro-choice crowd never tells men who support legal abortion to keep quiet, and they have never said that the 1973 Supreme Court had no right to be involved in the Roe v. Wade decision, despite the fact every member was male. They also don’t seem to mind that the overwhelming majority of abortionists are men, and they never say anything about the male “escorts” outside the abortion mills or even the men who force women into having abortions. Evidently, the only men these people want to be censored are those who think women deserve better than abortion.
Finally, if the argument is that men shouldn’t be allowed to participate simply because they can’t get pregnant, what about women who can’t get pregnant? Should only young, sexually active, fertile women who are not practicing birth control be allowed to have an opinion about abortion?
What others believe about abortion is irrelevant. All that matters is what the woman believes.
In other words, it doesn’t matter whether abortion is murder or not as long as the person who hires the killer thinks it isn’t. Using that looney logic, the Ku Klux Klan should be allowed to legally kill black people as long as they claim to honestly believe that black people are not really human beings.
Obviously, we cannot allow individuals to create their own realities in order to justify killing other people. In the case of abortion, if woman “A” believes it’s murder and woman “B” believes it’s just a choice, it is not possible for both of them to be right.
The issue is whether we trust women to be their own moral agents.
Among the millions of people in the pro-life movement, the vast majority are women, including most of its leaders. To suggest that this female-dominated entity seeks to squash other women, or doesn’t trust women, would be silly if it were not so condescending. This is just another shabby tactic the abortion lobby uses to keep from having to defend abortion.
To understand how truly asinine this “trust women” rhetoric is, imagine someone opposing laws against rape or incest because they “trust men to be their own moral agents.”
Or imagine that a woman is scheduled to have an abortion tomorrow, but gives birth in her home today. If the baby survives, should she be allowed to kill it? After all, the child was going to be killed the next day anyway. Why should she lose her “right to choose” because of a premature delivery that was completely beyond her control? Is she only allowed to pay someone else to kill her baby, but not allowed to kill it herself? Are we saying that we only trust women to make good moral decisions while they’re pregnant?
If we are supposed to just blindly trust women, why not trust them across the board?
Let each woman make her own moral choice about whether to stop at red lights, embezzle money from her employer, write bad checks, use cocaine, or become a prostitute. Let’s also exempt all female business owners from discrimination laws which make it illegal for companies to refuse employment or service to minorities. In fact, since every law on the books prevents women from choosing to engage in a particular activity and says that women can’t be trusted to make that decision, shouldn’t the pro-choice mob be screaming that women should be exempted from all laws? Do they trust women or don’t they?
The reality is that the only reason for the law to even exist is because people – men and women – can’t be trusted to always do what’s right. Laws are necessary to keep them from inflicting their immoral decisions on others.
Clearly, this “trust women” rhetoric is a sham. By using the term “moral agents” to describe women who submit to abortion, the pro-choice gang hopes to create the illusion that women who pay to have their children slaughtered do so out of some kind of moral conviction. It’s just a rhetorical shell-game to make abortion seem morally defensible.
If abortion is illegal, how will women who miscarry convince the authorities that they didn’t actually have illegal abortions?
The police do not investigate instances where no one could be charged with a crime. Since no one is calling for women to be prosecuted for having illegal abortions, there is no motive for the authorities to investigate miscarriages. For proof, check out how often miscarriages were investigated by the police and how many women were prosecuted prior to abortion being legalized in 1973.
What gives you the right to tell a woman she can’t terminate her pregnancy?
This is more pro-choice double talk. These people know that we are not trying to stop pregnancy terminations. All pregnancies terminate! The only issue is whether they terminate with a live baby or a dead one. Abortion is not about the termination of pregnancy, but the termination of human life.
Now, if the question is, what gives us the right to tell a woman she can’t have an abortion, the answer is absolutely nothing. In a society of laws, no one is allowed to decide what activities others may or may not engage in. As individuals, we have no more right to tell a woman she can’t hire someone to kill her unborn child than we have to tell her she can’t rob convenience stores. However, it is right for there to be laws which say she can’t do so. Just as government has the responsibility and the right to prevent armed robbery, it has the responsibility and the right to prevent the killing of innocent human beings, including those waiting to be born.
Women must be free to control their reproductive lives.
First, abortion is not about reproduction. When a woman is pregnant, reproduction has already taken place. Abortion is about killing the child that has been produced. Second, what kind of perverted mind sees the right to kill one’s own offspring as a symbol of freedom? As pro-life feminist Frederica Mathewes-Green once observed, a woman killing her child through abortion is like an animal gnawing off its own leg to get out of a trap. Abortion, she said, is not a sign that women are free, but that they are desperate.
The Supreme Court settled this once and for all. They said that women have a constitutional right to abortion.
Although, the word “abortion” does not appear in the Constitution, in Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional right to privacy encompasses the right to abortion. However, the word “privacy” is not found in the Constitution either. Despite that, the Court said that a right to privacy is found in a “penumbra” (shadow) of the Constitution. That little example of verbal gymnastics is known as “judicial activism” which simply means that the Court started with the conclusion they wanted and twisted the Constitution to make it fit.
After he died, the notes of Harry Blackmun – the Supreme Court Justice who wrote Roe v. Wade – were released and they made it undeniable that Blackmun, and the majority of the Supreme Court, found a right to abortion because that is what they set out to find. When they saw that the Constitution contained no foundation to support their political agenda, they simply manufactured one. This is best exemplified in their assertion that abortion is constitutional because the unborn are not “persons.” That is the modern version of a tactic the Court has used in the past to make certain groups constitutionally invisible. In their 1857 Dred Scott decision, they ruled that slavery was constitutional because black people were not “citizens.”
As for the claim that the abortion issue was settled by Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has a long history of discovering that some of its prior decisions were wrong. We do not have to accept that abortion is a settled issue because of Roe v. Wade anymore than our ancestors had to accept that slavery was a settled issue because of Dred Scott.
Why should a fetus have more rights than the woman?
It shouldn’t. The pro-life position has never been that the baby’s rights are superior to the mom’s, but that they are equal. If our country was intentionally slaughtering women by the millions just so children could lead the lives they would prefer to live, the pro-life movement would be fighting that with the same intensity that we now fight abortion.
Our point is that while everyone has the right to live their life as they wish, they cannot kill other people in order to do so.
When we say to a man that he cannot kill someone in order to get the money to buy a new car, we are not saying that he has no right to buy a new car or that he has fewer rights than the person he might kill. We’re simply telling him that one person’s right to life is more valuable than someone else’s right to buy a new car.
That same dynamic applies in the case of abortion. Remember, the abortion industry’s own data proves that virtually every abortion performed in America is done for non-medical reasons on a healthy baby and a healthy woman who just doesn’t want to be pregnant. This clearly proves that the abortion issue is a conflict between the baby’s right to life and the mother’s desire not to be pregnant. And while that desire may be reasonable, we can’t allow her to kill someone in order to fulfill it.
For over 30 years, the abortion lobby has told the public that protecting the unborn would trample on the rights of women. That is a lie.
The Constitution was specifically designed to deal with situations like this.
Assuming that there is a constitutional right to privacy, before the law can say that someone’s right to participate in a certain activity is protected by that right to privacy, it must first ask, “The privacy to do what?”
One of the principles of the Constitution is that rights are never absolute. They all have limits. For example, libel and slander laws impose a limit on free speech, as do some consumer protection and price-fixing laws. We also have a right to the free exercise of religion, but we cannot legally kill someone even if our religion requires human sacrifice.
Rights also have value relative to each other.
For example, a store owner does not have the right to shoot a shoplifter – even if that is the only way he can recover his property. Our society says a thief’s right to life is superior to a store owner’s right to own property. This infringement on property rights is based on the relativity of rights which the law and any rational person supports.
This principle of rights having limits and relativity is how the Constitution weighs one individual’s rights against another’s. In the case of abortion, the question is not whether a woman has a right to privacy, but whether her right to privacy supersedes her child’s right to life. To say that it does, is to contend that there are limits to rights specifically expressed in the Constitution, but no limits on a right which had to be invented in a “penumbra.”
In the final analysis, it is as preposterous to suggest that the intentional killing of an innocent human being is a matter of privacy as it is to say it is a constitutional right. And this is precisely the reason why abortion defenders viciously attack any nominee to the Supreme Court who says he or she will interpret the Constitution and not legislate from the bench.
I am not for abortion on demand. I support the compromise in Roe v. Wade.
This rhetoric is designed to conceal the fact that Roe v. Wade legalized abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy. For over 30 years, the abortion lobby, with the help of their media lapdogs, has been able to carry out this deception because of a scam perpetrated by the Supreme Court in 1973.
Harry Blackmun – the Supreme Court Justice who wrote Roe v. Wade – clearly understood that the country would not support unlimited abortion on demand. However, his writings prove that this was the political goal that he and others on the Court sought. So they issued Roe v. Wade which included the following language: “State regulation protective of fetal life after viability has both logical and biological justifications: and if a state is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may proscribe abortion during that period except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.”
Obviously, this appears to allow states to prohibit abortion after viability.
The problem is, while it is normal for legal decisions such as this to include definitions of the important words and terms used in the ruling, in Roe the Court chose to omit any definition of the word “health.” However, on the same day they issued Roe, they also issued what’s known as a “companion decision.” That’s where two or more decisions on a common subject are released which must be read together to get the full effect of the ruling. The companion to Roe is called Doe v. Bolton and it contains this definition for health: “…in the light of all factors-physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age-relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.”
So, the court creates the illusion of a compromise by ruling in Roe that states can prohibit abortion under certain circumstances unless the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health. At that same moment, they bury within Doe a definition of health so broad that it literally covers any circumstance in which a woman might be pregnant, thus removing all elements of the phony compromise.
The Supreme Court was counting on the probability that the decision which legalized abortion would get all the attention, while its companion would be ignored – except by lawyers, judges and legislators. The evidence of how well this scam worked is that, today, most people know about Roe v. Wade but few have ever even heard of Doe v. Bolton.
The point is, when a pro-choice politician or activist says they support the compromise reached in Roe, they are lying. They are fully aware that no such compromise exists. They also know that legislation restricting abortion which includes an exception for the “health” of the woman is meaningless. In fact, that is precisely why they always demand a health exception in any abortion-related legislation.
How can a fetus have constitutional rights before it is viable?
Viability is a phony issue. The Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy and, today, abortion clinics across America routinely advertise elective abortions past the point where it is known that babies can survive on their own.
We also know that viability is a function of medical technology and unrelated to the question of whether the unborn are living human beings or not. This is proven by the fact that premature babies are now routinely surviving at gestational ages that would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago, despite the reality that unborn children are not biologically different than they’ve ever been.
Finally, if the argument is that the unborn are not viable because they are dependent on others to survive, then a one-year-old baby is no more viable than an unborn baby. Neither can survive alone. That could also be said about people who are severely handicapped or suffering from some debilitating illness, as well as people who are senile, comatose, unconscious, or under general anesthesia. If the ability to survive without others is what creates the right to life, these people have no more right to life than the unborn.
How can tissue only a quarter of an inch in diameter have constitutional rights?
In the first place, most abortions happen well after the unborn child is that small, and only a moron could see a sonogram image of an unborn child and dismiss it as mere tissue.
Beyond that, if size is the yardstick for constitutional rights, how big does a human being have to get before it starts having these rights? Is weight or height the determining factor? Do these rights come on gradually as size increases and, if so, what is the ratio of size to rights? Should men have more rights than women since they are generally larger? If someone loses weight do they lose rights?