Planned Parenthood (you know, the group that gets $542 million from taxpayers) wants to stop using the word “choice” when referring to abortion:
After polling Americans on how they feel about abortion and about the terms “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and other language surrounding the abortion debate, the nation’s largest abortion chain is moving away from talking about abortion in the decades-old language of “choice” in favor of language that emphasizes the “difficulty” of the abortion decision.
Planned Parenthood has realized that the demographic they have to pursue and persuade is the majority of Americans who are somewhere in the middle on abortion…
“It’s an opportunity to talk to an enormous number of people we haven’t been talking to as much as we should,” said Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, who was also in attendance to help introduce the organization’s upcoming advertising campaign, which will highlight how complex and personal the decision to have an abortion can be with taglines such as “Only you know what it’s like to walk in your shoes” and “Decisions about reproductive health are personal. You can help keep them that way.”
I suppose they’ve done the polling and maybe I’m not talking to the right pro-choicers (oops, I’m already outdated), but most of them seem to root their position in the fact that abortion is legal, not that carrying a baby to term is difficult, or that the decision to abort should be less so.
Clik here to view.
Whether or not to own a slave: a complex and personal decision. BLAKE10.jpg at wikimedia commons
So the strategy is to suggest that, because a situation is difficult, no one else (even the law) should be allowed to intervene in the decision. But there are lots of complex and personal decisions where the law steps in. Most directly, consider a situation of a mother who has just given birth to a baby, but who then finds that living with the infant is difficult. Would we allow her to kill her newborn, since we should not interfere with her “complex and personal decision?” The situation is no different from the one that Planned Parenthood wants to offer us as justification for keeping abortion legal.
Of course, underlying its argument is the presumption that pro-choicers increasingly hold: that the unborn are not “persons” deserving of protection. It’s impossible to argue that the fetus is not a new life, since it obviously develops on its own. It’s impossible to argue that the fetus is just a part of the mother’s body with which she can do whatever she wants, since DNA doesn’t lie. So, it’s a new life, distinct from the mother, but not quite yet a person. Since “person” requires some degree of sentience or self-awareness, pro-choicers can deem that fetuses who do not yet possess these traits are therefore expendable, but logically this opens the door to the expendability of lots of other beings in their fourth, fifth, or two hundredth trimesters who have developmental disabilities, dementia, or are asleep.
Call me optimistic, but this strategy of “keep it legal because it’s a difficult decision” seems doomed to backfire. The follow-up questions would be “Why is it a difficult decision? What is it about pregnancy or abortion that is difficult? Is it not because there is another person involved besides the mother?”
As always, we need to not only arm ourselves with logic and sound arguments but with charity and benevolence as well. We need to be aware of local resources that can help women or couples in crisis pregnancies. We need to know about charities or shelters that can help women or couples struggling to make ends meet while caring for a child. And we need to pray for a respect for all life, that the God of infinite mercy and forgiveness may use us as instruments for the conversion and repentance of our culture.