Strange Reasoning

To abortion advocates pro-death=pro-family

By Dave Andrusko
There is an ironclad axiom that you can count on as surely as the sun rising in the east. Whenever they respond to a criticism of their movement, once a pro-abortion activist says “nothing could be further from the truth” the rebuttal that follows will inevitably invites the response “nothing could be further from the truth.”
Sarah Erdreich penned a post titled, “Why the Pro-Choice Movement Needs to Talk About Children” at the pro-abortion site http://rhrealitycheck.org. I am taking a few minutes of your time to survey this nonsense both for what it says about how and why they must pigeonhole us in order to try to wiggle out of their own predicament.

None of this “Every Child a Wanted Child” for Erdreich. Her favorite is “Pro-Child, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice.”

[By way of clarification “pro-child” means pro-child-when-I-want-you; “pro-family” is to suggest that if you eliminate those pesky kids who come along at inconvenient times the rest of the family will be stronger; and “pro-choice”…well, enough said.]

Erdreich tells her readers she can understand why “the mainstream pro-choice movement seems to have moved away from this focus on the family in favor of concentrating on the arenas of courtrooms and state houses.” After all those crazy pro-lifers are passing legislation left and right…
But WHEN, I ask you, was “pro-family” an integral part of the abortion movement’s rhetorical arsenal or a real reflection of its priorities? Never. You have to be some place before you can be said to have “moved away from this focus on the family.”

However the thrust of her piece is that the understandable emphasis on other fronts has left the pro-choice movement “open to charges that it is anti-child and anti-family.”
Which brings us to her “Nothing could be further from the truth” remark. Her evidence?
Planned Parenthood! In its very name is

“embedded the very idea of healthy families and children: the idea that people can and should plan their families. Being deliberate and thoughtful about when to have children ensures that every parent is as prepared as possible for the responsibility of raising a child.”

So what if PPFA takes the lives of over 330,000 unborn babies. Against that third of a million unborn babies who are unplanned, PPFA stands—curette and forceps in hand—to guarantee a “brutal and bloody” solution to the parental failure to be “deliberate and thoughtful.”

Besides, “The majority of women who have abortions are mothers,” Erdreich writes. True. At the same time we have reduced the number of teenagers having abortions, the number of women who have already given birth are aborting subsequent pregnancies.

 

 

Two points. First, they were also mothers when they were carrying that baby whom they would later abort—the mother of that particular girl or boy.

Second, Erdreich (good abortion advocate that she is) makes killing your children merely one option on a decision tree that includes “contraception, access to good prenatal care, and the right of any woman to have a child.”

Preventing the creation of a new life/ending that new life/taking care of the new life that you allow to be born are all equally valid choices, just part of the “continuum.”
But what to do to remedy this weakness? She has a variety of ideas but they are all in service of keeping “conversion” conversations going.

“Emphasizing the pro-family roots and goals of abortion activism is an excellent way to keep these conversations open. If the conversation isn’t so much about abortion per se, but rather abortion’s role in protecting the rights of each family, it can avoid the feeling of discussing a ‘third rail’ and perhaps illustrate that ever-elusive common ground.”

So, as always, the end point is to turn the conversation away from abortion and to conjure up an imaginary moral equivalence. How? Blur everything together under the heading of “protecting the rights of each family.”

If you choose to abort a child, or more than one child, and I protect each of mine, it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.
And second only to the deaths of these children is the sobering thought that people like Erdreich actually believe the tale of sophistry and evasion they have so cunning woven

Source: NRLC News