Society, The Media, and Pro-Choice Advocates Know

Everyone knows that it’s a baby. It’s obvious from the smallest child to the most ardent supporter of abortion. The only question is, will they admit it, or continue to stick to a ludicrous definition of the child in the womb in order to try to sneak by something that wouldn’t be palatable to the general public if we call a spade a spade.

Yesterday I was talking to a coworker that was expressing frustration at trying to read a bill that had been signed into law– what did it do, what didn’t it do, and how did politician X vote? The frustration was that the law was written in such a way that it wasn’t transparent exactly what was going on and what the bill did.

The same thing happens in the abortion debate. In order to obscure what is really going on, the pro-abortion side changes the terms, sidesteps the questions, and lies its way through hoping that you won’t catch on. It’s a tough job– I mean, it’s taken a lot of work to try to convince people that it’s a blob of cells or fetus rather than a baby. That we’re removing an unwanted group of cells rather than killing a new human being. And yet for all this work, everyone still knows it’s a baby when they get brutally honest.

Think about the warning messages that are placed in bars, on packs of cigarettes, etc. “Pregnancy and Alcohol do not mix”, “Cigarette smoking can lead to harm to your child,”… How about prescription drugs? It seems that during every pregnancy in our household my wife needs some kind of medicine for infection, and when we get to the counter at the pharmacist it’s specified whether and how it will impact the baby. If alcohol, smoking, drugs, etc are bad for the baby, what do you think abortion does to it?

A front-page headline of the Oregonian read, “Judge Sends Mother to Jail to Protect Unborn Child.”¹ South Carolina has used its child-endangerment law as the basis for arresting and prosecuting women who use illegal drugs while pregnant:

South Carolina’s policy of protecting the unborn children from their mother’s cocaine abuse will continue even at public hospitals. Search warrants can be used as well as consents to search… There is no constitutional right for a pregnant mother to use drugs. The unborn child has a constitutional right to protection from its mother’s drug abuse.²

However, should this woman decide not to drug her child, but to kill it, that’s supposed to be a Constitutionally protected right of the mother! How about this:

[A] Newsweek article warns against do-it-yourself attempts at abortion. It says caution should be used with taking drugs to induce abortion because of the danger of “depriving the fetus of oxygen and causing fetal brain damage instead of abortion.” The writer states, “Sadly, many home remedies could damage a fetus instead of kill it.”³ A damaged unborn child is a tragedy; a dead unborn child is a remedy. Does Newsweek understand what it is saying?⁴

Why is it that when a pregnant woman is killed, that’s a big deal? Why do the media report it separately? Because they know that there are two people, and one’s an innocent child. Time magazine had this statement:

Courts will never be able to ensure real protection to an unborn child. That will have to come from mothers who take responsibility for the lives they carry within them.⁵

Huh? Mother’s should take responsibility for the lives they carry in them– unless they want to terminate them, right?

How about ads in the media:

Susan Reed was on her way to work when a drunk driver crashed into Susan’s 1990 Dodge Spirit. Both cars were totally destroyed. But Mrs. Reed was wearing her lap/shoulder belt, and the Dodge Spirit was equipped with a driver’s air bag. It worked. It saved her life. And it saved another life. Her baby’s.⁶

The only thing that I can see that differentiates whether the baby in the womb is acknowledged as a baby or not is whether or not the baby is wanted. If it’s wanted, it’s a baby. If it’s not, it’s a fetus, a blob of cells, a product of conception. But calling it by a different name did not change what it is. Either it’s a baby or it’s not.

How about this from the New Republic:

There clearly is no logical or moral distinction between a fetus and a young baby; free availability of abortion cannot be reasonably distinguished from euthanasia. Nevertheless we are for it. It is too facile to say that human life always is sacred; obviously it is not.⁷

Or this from psychologist and pro-choice advocate Magda Denes:

I do think abortion is murder– of a very special and necessary sort. And no physician ever involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that.⁸

I have to close this post quoting directly from Randy Alcorn:

For many people, prochoice thinking is not primarily the result of ignorance, but of denial or ignorance-by-choice. What we all know to be true we refuse to admit or act upon as truth because of the difficulty it may create for us. By heaping up argument upon argument– as illogical or inconsistent as they may be– we try to bury the truth so deep that it will not resurface. And when it does, we quickly push it back down, hoping that our wishing it to go away will make it go away. But no matter how we ignore or deny it, the truth will still be the truth: Human life begins long before birth and abortion kills children.⁹

Everyone knows it’s a child– and if you’re honest with yourself, you know it to. The question is, can you truly justify killing a child? Look at the picture on the top of this post… Can you truly look square into his face and think that there’s a good reason out there that he should never see the light of day– that he should be dead right now?

1. Fred Leeson, “Judge Sends Mother to Jail to Protect Unborn Child,” Oregonian, 9 December 1989, A1. [↩]
2. Associated Press, 28 February 2000 [↩]
3. Ann McDaniel, “Home Remedy Abortions,” Newsweek, 17 July 1989, 25. [↩]
4. Randy Alcorn, Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Questions, p. 97 [↩]
5. Barbara Cornell, “Do the Unborn Have Rights?” Time, special fall edition 1990, 23. [↩]
6. Chrysler advertisement, Time, 15 October 1990, 28-9 [↩]
7. “The Unborn and the Born Again,” editorial, New Republic, 2 July 1977, 6. [↩]
8. Magda Denes, “The Question of Abortion,” Commentary 62 (December 1976): 6. [↩]
9. Randy Alcorn, Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Questions, p. 99-100 [↩]