March 28, 2024

“I’m Personally Pro-Life”

baby header

Says the person with a conflicted conscience.

The society that we live in today has a problem.  It is at the same time very opinionated as well as believing that the moral high ground rests in not telling others their opinion, all the while telling you their opinion.

Karen sent me this article that discussed a woman working at a Crisis Pregnancy Center that was not pro-life.  Well, she said that she was personally pro-life, but that she believed that women should have a choice, and should be educated about the choice.

Personally, when I hear something from this point of view, my first thought is that this woman is a plant and didn’t work for a crisis pregnancy center at all.  If you read her post on the topic, you begin to wonder why she was there in the first place.

My Experience with CPC

Back in the late 1900s I was counseling some people online in terms of abortion, pro-life, etc. and felt the desire to get involved.  I sought out my local Crisis Pregnancy Center and contacted them for training.  We had to go through multi-week training (I believe 10 weeks) which we paid for, and it included everything from what you could and could not say to how to counsel people in need.  Reminded me a lot of counseling classes in college.

At the end of that time we gave testimonies and then were told what we could do to help out.  Of course, being a guy, I couldn’t counsel women in crisis pregnancies, but I could help with classroom settings and the like.

However, I didn’t get to be a regular presenter.

I went with a couple of young ladies to a presentation done in a school.  I thought I was part of the group, and tried to help, though I guess I was only supposed to be observing.

During a lunch that followed, I expressed my opinion to the two ladies, and I must have sent off red flags as being too religious or something, because I was told that I was not going to be allowed to go into the classroom.

So, then I was taken to a church setting, and I watched the church presentation that differed only slightly from the classroom.  On my way out I expressed even more reservations.

It was ok, I thought, to stress the disease and pregnancy issue in the public school classroom, but the emphasis in a church should be (I thought) on what God expects of me.  I cringed when the young ladies doing the presentation said their number one reason for not wanting to have sex was to keep themselves pure for their husband, when in private they said it was because God told them not to.  I cringed when I had to hear talks about the “disease that keeps on giving” with like 5 minutes about the Bible in the church.

I’m not trying to treat them badly.

I had a talk with the head of the local center at the end of the two presentations.  She told me that they would not permit me to go to either of these places to present.  I had no problems with them.  They and I had two different worldviews.  I wrote them a letter to express my position.

I say all this not to try to treat them badly or exact revenge but to illustrate a point.

A lot of what I read from this post is exactly the opposite of my experience with the Crisis Pregnancy Center.  Now, every place is different, and every person that counsels is different, but when I start reading about a center talking about “facts that aren’t facts” or taking advantage of people in need, I start to think that this is more just a bunch of talking points than it is a real experience.

The center that I was affiliated with didn’t want a passionate speaker on the topic to be in a classroom because he might “say the wrong thing” or “make the teacher uncomfortable” or “have them asked to not return.”  She didn’t want me in a church setting because I believed too much about God’s commands and thought I’d get too preachy—imagine that.

When a person that claims that their pro-life starts using the term “fetuses” instead of babies, when they say that the reason that they quit was there was too much of an emphasis on life in the womb it tells me that either they didn’t know what they were getting into in the first place, or they knew all too well and wanted to be credible.

And that brings us back to the title.  You can’t be “personally pro-life” as well as “pro-choice” or pro-abortion.  Their political and moral positions about what you believe that life is in the womb.  It’s morally inconsistent, it’s a way to compartmentalize your beliefs, and it’s irrational.

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6 thoughts on ““I’m Personally Pro-Life”

  1. Most of this post makes sense, but I don’t understand why you object to the word fetus. To say fetus instead of baby isn’t to make a value judgment about personhood is it? To me this reads the same as if you objected to people who insisted on calling eight-year-olds children instead of adults. It isn’t saying one is better than the other, it’s just the accurate term. Humans progress from zygote to adult through the stages of embryo, fetus, neonate, infant, child, and adolescent. This is true regardless of whether you think a fetus is a person.

  2. @Jake: I don’t have a problem with the accuracy of the term, just the symbolism behind the term. Those of us in the Pro-life movement tend to emphasize “baby” because “baby” has warm thoughts and makes us think of a child. “Fetus” is impersonal to most, and refers to a stage when you can’t see the child. Since most of the battle is over how words are used (“Pro-Choice” vs. “Pro-Abortion”), people choose their words carefully.
    So, while technically accurate, the fact that the girl in the post does not use baby says that it really isn’t a “baby” to her. It’s just the blob of tissue she can’t see.

  3. “You can’t be “personally pro-life” as well as “pro-choice” or pro-abortion.”

    What if you believe that life begins in the womb, but are not sure if life starts at conception, or some-time later before birth? That could lead you to this kind of position–you might personally never feel right having an abortion yourself, at any stage, because you’re not certain when the baby becomes a human life. But, at the same time you might not feel comfortable making it illegal to do something that “might” not be wrong.

    I’ve had three children, and one mis-carriage. I have felt my little ones kick in the womb, responding to my touch. I know without a doubt that life does not all of a sudden happen when the baby crowns and takes it’s first breth–it begins before. I also know that DNA, the blueprint for life, begins at conception. But I’m not certain that having the blueprint is the same thing as having life (in the sense of a soul). The Bible verse about being “knit in my mother’s womb” doesn’t clear this up for me. Knitting starts with a mass of string and ends up as a finished creation. When does a blueprint first turn into a soul? I’m not sure.

    For myself the issue has been hormonal birth control pills. After doing a little research (from the birth control’s own manual) I discovered has an uncertainty about how it works. It EITHER blocks the sperm from reaching the egg, OR may keep the egg from implanting once fertilized (a VERY early abortion, depending on your definition). This one one area I waver on. I care about this enough to not use birth control that works like this myself. I am not sure enough about it to call for others to stop using it.

    As for abortion, I feel certain that by the second trimester, when thought and pain become possible, that it should be illegal. I don’t know about before that…though I would certainly not fight a law against it as I think this is an area where it is better to side on possible life if we are uncertain.

  4. Why can’t people be a little more realistic about this? Is it not possible to be a libertarian and be personally pro-life at the same time? Is it necessary to do things like stop the distribution of condoms to poor countries already reeling from AIDS?

  5. Wow, MIn…you have had some very interesting experiences.

    How very sad! I would think that the most passionate among us should be the ones speaking for pro-life causes.

  6. @Gale

    Yes, but what if life DOES begin at conception? There is more to lose when you just HOPE it doesn’t and allow abortions to continue than when you assume it does and fight against abortions from day 1.

    Better to err on the side of life than have the blood of 35 million innocents on your hands.

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