Answering the Only Question About Abortion That Matters

at Catholic Online

 

The Supreme Court dodged a significant question when legalizing abortion because they didn’t want to answer it. It was the only question that mattered; it was the only one that was relevant. It’s the question, and the answer, upon which the whole thing hinges.
So let’s answer it.

But first, let’s have some very plain talk about pregnancy and women. I’m an expert on both subjects, since I’m a woman who has been pregnant 5 times and has given birth to four children. (My husband and I lost our first child in a miscarriage at 9 weeks.)

Pregnancy is unlike anything else even an extremely imaginative person could imagine. Pick a feeling, and it probably applies to pregnancy at some point. Joyful, scared, elated, nervous, sick, numb, sad, angry, happy, lonely, hungry, tired, energized, eager, dreading, grateful, you name it. It all fits.

Pregnancy is amazing. It’s terrifying. It’s life-altering. Seriously life-altering. And you can’t even predict how it will alter your life or how it will make you feel or how you’ll react. Nope, you’re along for the ride, and it’s wild and crazy sometimes.

Pregnancy is other-worldly. It is awesome in its power. What’s going on inside your body is mind-blowing. But pregnancy is also downright exhausting, so you can’t stay on the mountaintop of awe continually. You come down when your head is over the toilet.

Or when you’re tossing and turning, unable to sleep with an aching back. Or when you can’t tie your shoes because, hey, you can’t even see your feet.

Pregnancy can be frightening, too. The weight of the burden (literally and figuratively speaking) can sneak up on you in weak or tired moments, and then all you can do is cry. It’s overwhelming.

It’s wonderful and it sucks. It’s a dream-come-true and it’s nightmarish. It’s a lot of fun and it’s a lot of work. It’s exciting and it’s monotonous. It’s a miracle. But it doesn’t always feel that way.

It’s no easy thing, period. There is no reason not to admit that pregnancy can be very, very hard on a woman. It can be every good and beautiful thing, and it can be some very difficult things, too. That’s the truth. Plain and simple.

But here’s the bottom line: it’s irrelevant.

Yep, you heard me.

Now calm down. Women’s feelings, women’s bodies, women’s personal sufferings, women’s private sacrifices, women’s needs and wants are all very important and wholly relevant to the subject of women, and of marriage, and of health care.

However, all those things I said about pregnancy and what a woman goes through are utterly and completely irrelevant– when it comes to abortion. It doesn’t matter a hill o’ beans! (as my Dad would say.)

All that matters is the humanity of the child in the womb.

The morality, the ethicalness, and yes, the legality of abortion depends on only one question: Does abortion kill a human child or not? Yes or no? It’s not a complicated question, and it demands a simple yes or no answer.

If you answer No, then you must explain what exactly abortion does. Based on real science, mind you. “Terminating a pregnancy” is not a sufficient answer. Pregnant with what? (By the way, childbirth terminates a pregnancy.) Why is the pregnancy considered terminated? What has changed? The uterus is emptied? Emptied of what? What was there that required being “terminated”?

If not a human child, then what? A seahorse? A cucumber? No, silly, of course not. Okay, then what? A clump of cells? What kind of cells?Hamster? Whale? (Oh, if only whale! Then those precious cells would be safe!)  No, not animal. Okay, so they’re human cells.

A human being, then? A “potential” human being?

Ah, yes… the “potential” human being. A darling phrase of the abortion advocates, or at least the keep-abortion-legal crowd. Many well-meaning folks cling to this idea that the child is merely a “potential” child, on its way to being human but not quite there yet. Development, size, age, etc., are not all aligned well enough to meet the fully-human criteria, so they feel more comfortable “terminating” this merely “potential” human being.

Alongside this reasoning is the deification of woman by many abortionists who claim that women can magically bestow humanity on their child if they decide they want to keep their child, and withhold humanity if they do not want their child. Women have god-like powers over the “products” of their wombs, and the child only becomes a “real person” if the mother chooses.  It’s the stuff of fairytales!

The truth is actually quite simple. When sperm and ovum join, an entirely new human person comes into existence who never existed before. This new human person may be microscopic for a while, but is nevertheless, human. With a complete DNA blueprint that is unique, this human begins his or her life in the exact same manner that each of us did — growing each day, changing each day, safely tucked away in the only space in the universe that can sustain him or her, by design.

Humanity is not a function of utility, or size, or development, or appearance, or wantedness. Humanity is not something any of us can bestow or withhold from another because it is not ours to give or take away. We do not grant it. We cannot conjure it up out of nothing. To pretend we can is delusional.

The only other answer to the question, then, is Yes, and if you are honest enough to answer Yes, then you must also be honest enough to say out loud that we are a nation that sanctions killing children.

That makes us barbarians. We have given legal protection to the most egregious, most horrifying, most evil action imaginable: killing our children. That is the reality of abortion. Sweep away all the political mumbo-jumbo and all the euphemistic crap. The truth is, we give legal protection to the crime of killing children. We have justified the unjustifiable. We’ve been falling all over ourselves ever since that terrible day 41 years ago in our attempts to hide it, disguise it, excuse it, redefine it, and when that wasn’t enough, to begin celebrating it as a “good” and a “necessary” thing for women.

It’s all crap. Every decent person knows it in the quiet of their own heart. Every honest person has to admit that we’re not terminating a pregnancy, as if pregnancies happened apart from a baby. We’re terminating our children.

Surely those nine Justices in 1973 knew this quite well. They had to have known it, but I guess they were not willing to seem unsympathetic to women and the growing cry for “equality.”

So they reached for their “penumbra” and invented a mythical “right” to abortion, giving it the illusion of sound legal reasoning, when it was nothing more than a snooty euphemism covering up something unspeakable.

They opined about the beginning of life, and the unknowableness of this beginning, then excused themselves from responsibility by saying it didn’t even matter that the Court could not say for certain when life begins. All that really mattered was that they had a “penumbra” and it allowed them to permit what no civilized society should ever permit.

Ever since, our babies have been sacrificed to their cowardice and our selfishness. There’s no pretty wrapping for any of this. There’s no plausible explanation or reasonable excuse. We have killed millions and millions of our own babies because we have consented to being barbarians in disguise. It happens in a nice clinical setting, far away from our eyes, and the victims are very, very small. So small they most often cannot be buried. They are hidden, and we gratefully take advantage of their obscurity. They are silent, and so we allow ourselves to keep silent as well.

And if they are small, but not so hidden anymore, then we defend our barbarism by blaming their “defects” and say it’s “better this way.” We shed dishonest tears of sorrow for deaths we commissioned, and assuage our consciences with the illusion of our nobility.

It’s all just crap. We are a nation that sanctions killing children. If killing our children isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong. Nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which image bothers you more?

 

Waging War on Womanhood: Reject the Counterfeit Woman

at Catholic Online

As a consumer, I don’t appreciate being sold a cheap knock-off of some item I wanted. As a book lover, I don’t want the abridged or Cliffsnotes version. As a chocolate connoisseur, don’t you dare try to feed me carob or that other nasty stuff called “white chocolate” because it is, in fact, not chocolate at all.

I want the genuine article. I want authenticity. I want the real deal, not the counterfeit. Doesn’t everyone?

There’s a particular counterfeit being aggressively marketed and sold as the genuine article, and it’s far more serious than even chocolate. It’s a counterfeit woman. She stands at the heart of all this brouhaha called “the war on women.”

The criteria these days for being an acceptable modern woman, a woman of influence and power and progress, can be summed up in a pretty short list that revolves around the unholy trinity of sex, contraception, and abortion. All on-demand, without restriction, and the last two free of charge.

If you dare to object to that criteria or criticize those demands in any way and you are female, then you have broken ranks with the “sisterhood” and are no better than the men the sisterhood hates.

Since my place outside the sisterhood is quite secure, thank you, I’ll continue.

The Girl Scouts USA gave a shout-out to some “incredible women” for 2013, including Texas Senator Wendy Davis, and Gloria Steinem. Both are fierce abortion advocates. (Davis is now running for Governor of Texas, and guess who really, I mean really, wants to see her elected? Planned Parenthood, Emily’s List, and NARAL, all of whom have donated generously to her campaign.)

Comedian Sarah Silverman and her friends hosted a fundraiser for the Texas Abortion Fund and they called it “A Night of A Thousand Vaginas.”  Classy.

Nina Burleigh of the New York Observer remembered 2013 with her own month-by-month list of sexist offenses committed against women, wherein she declared that “childbirth itself is a gruesome and violent event” no worse than late-term abortion. Among Burleigh’s other quotables is this gem: “I’d be happy to give Bill Clinton oral sex just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”

In her recent “opinion” piece over at US News and World Report entitled “The Catholic Supreme Court’s War on Women”, Jamie Stiehm vomited up the most loathing, whiny, and dim-witted tantrum ever pawned off as journalism. (Her bigoted screed was expertly dismantled by The Anchoress, as well as Deacon Greg Kandra and others.)

Those are just a few recent examples of the dissonant pitch being echoed out there.

There is indeed a war on women currently being waged in America, bloody as all hell. More accurately, it’s a war on womanhood. But the warmongers are not conservative men, or priests or religious sisters, or the Catholic Church, or the Republicans. The aggressors are women like Davis, Steinem, Burleigh, Stiehm, Silverman, Cecile Richards, and all those who have reduced the complexly beautiful, uniquely gifted, and dignified female human person to nothing but a vagina.

They are the sisterhood that talks non-stop about their “lady parts” and their sexual habits while simultaneously telling the government to stay out of their bedrooms and pay for their birth control at the same time.

These foot soldiers in the war on womanhood try to paint fertility and pregnancy as a disease, and childbirth as a gruesome, violent event. They insist that a woman’s power comes from being able to execute her own baby. Victory in this war means the child has been successfully “terminated.”

They get fuel and cover for their war from politicians who take their orders from Planned Parenthood, and, shamefully, from a medical profession that calls it “health care” to poison female bodies with nasty chemicals and devices that have dangerous side-effects nobody in their right mind should consider healthy for women.

Alas, no longer “victims of biology destined to be shackled to a fruitful womb” (so saith the sisterhood), women have now “progressed” to being nothing more than a cruel bully willing to kill someone who can’t fight back at all; someone who happens to share her DNA; someone who rightfully deserves protection, especially from women.

It strikes a particularly evil chord for women to turn on their own God-given nature. Scream all you want in protest, but it is God’s thoughtful design for the human person and the human race that women are the bearers of new life; women are the ones He partners with in a profoundly creative way. (Did I say that every woman on the planet must become pregnant and give birth in order to be a real woman? No. I didn’t.)

We may wish sometimes that men could share the reproductive load more “equally”, but they can’t and they never will. Women are the ones who have both the joy and the burden of childbearing. It’s a woman’s profound gift and sometimes her heavy cross. In fact, it’s usually both at the same time.

The fact that many women will never know this joy and cross for a variety of reasons changes nothing. It remains an integral and beautiful part of a woman’s nature. It is a remarkable thing, an astounding thing, to be entrusted with an entirely new creation and a new immortal soul. Only a woman can contain two souls at once. What could be more empowering?

Speaking of power, it needs to be said: crude does not equal powerful, and delicacy does not equal weakness. Vulgarity isn’t impressive. Being profane and immodest doesn’t make you tough and formidable. It just makes you sleazy and pathetic. Women should never be sleazy and pathetic.

That’s why this war on womanhood, and the war on the womb, is so freakish and unnatural and scary. It’s like forcing a symphony to play out of tune and without rhythm. It’s like lobbying for the sun to go cold and dark. It’s like preferring a stagnant and smelly pool to a clear, rushing river. The objective of this war seems to be that women cease to be authentic and lovely women who appreciate their own unique design; it means turning life-bearers into barbaric armed guards at barren doors.

What we’ll be left with is a crass, self-loathing, hostile version, much like what’s currently on parade as the modern woman. She is “equal” to the men she hates and emasculates and blames for her lot in life. She objectifies and degrades herself in her manner of dress, speech, conduct, and thinking, but don’t you dare suggest that her behavior is anything less than admirable.

She hates her own body and she will gladly risk her health by swallowing or injecting hormones she would never tolerate being given to the cows in the field. The vegetables, eggs, and milk had better be organic, but her own body must be a toxic dump in order for her to be “free” and have “preventive health care.”

Most of all, she has made the child in the womb — her child, her womb — her enemy, who will be shown no mercy or even consideration. This unwelcome pest and threat to her plans is targeted and dealt with by whatever means necessary. Whether chemical or surgical, it doesn’t matter. As long as the enemy is destroyed.

The natural and intense instinct to protect a child from danger (mother bear, anyone?) is perversely turned on its head, and now the child is considered the predator.

That is not how a woman was meant to live. That is not how a woman was meant to be. That is a sad, sad counterfeit.

Young girls beginning to navigate adulthood deserve much better than to be programmed to believe they can only fulfill their dreams and enjoy freedom and equality if they can manage to poison their healthy bodies and beat their functioning reproductive organs into submission with carcinogenic hormones.

They ought to be told the truth: that they are fearfully and wonderfully made for a purpose higher than themselves, as is every human person. Part of that mystery, for women, is the ability to protect and nurture a new human being within their womb. That is something to be treasured and respected, not despised and mocked.

Our daughters deserve role models who are not in perpetual war with their own nature, and mothers who will not have their own babies killed. We all deserve a society of women who appreciate and treasure womanhood, rather than viewing femininity as an unfair punishment or a disability to be overcome.

A wise man once reminded us that women are the foundation upon which society either rises or falls. Ours is falling fast. Women can change that.

“When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.” (Archbishop Fulton Sheen)