Courage

Talking about abortion….truthfully

By Dave Andrusko

Christine Flowers

All I can say is, “Wow!” In a mere 486 words, Christine Flowers wrote one of the finest pro-life essays I have ever read.
“So let’s talk about abortion” can—and should—be read at the Philadelphia Daily News.
After beginning, “Conversations about abortion take place on many different levels, including medical, legal, political, and moral,” Flowers quickly runs through each of them, showing how fragile (okay, bogus) is the case for abortion made on each of these grounds. For instance,

“Most lawyers would agree that the constitutional basis for legalized abortion is flawed, and that Roe v. Wade is the perfect example of the ends justifying the mind-numbing means. Justice Harry Blackmun… essentially created a right to a medical procedure out of penumbras. Not exactly a stellar moment in constitutional history.”

But her best and most thoughtful rebuttal is “in the moral realm where the most heated debates take place.” Flowers writes,

“Abortion supporters learned long ago that it helps to talk about the rights of the woman and shift attention away from the child.”

More specifically, Flowers bluntly challenges the notion that “it takes ‘courage’ to have an abortion, as a recent writer for the New York Times opined.” We can disagree on many aspects of the debate over abortion, Flowers writes, but we cannot,

“delude ourselves into believing that it takes more courage to destroy a growing fetus than it does to allow that child to be born. We can’t pretend that it is more selfless to use abortion as birth control than it is to give birth and then gift that child to loving, adoptive parents.”

Flowers then does something that pro-lifers (as a matter of course) do which pro-abortionists (as a matter of course) insist we don’t do: acknowledge that it “hard to be pregnant, especially if you don’t want to.”

As Flowers writes, “Living is sometimes hard,” a truth about the human condition with which we are intimately familiar. Most pro-lifers have either worked in Crisis Pregnancy Centers, or been through an unplanned pregnancy themselves–or known someone who has–or has even succumbed to despair and aborted a child. We know the temptation to “take the easy way out.”
So we know it doesn’t take courage to kill an unborn child.
But it often does require courage to stand up to a boyfriend who is pushing the woman into having an abortion, through emotional or physical coercion.

It takes courage to keep going when your “friends” are advising you that it is stupid to continue a pregnancy that can be ended with a “simple” operation.

It takes courage when most everyone you know says, “Don’t be a fool. Be smart.”
Great column. Read Christine Flowers’ “So let’s talk about abortion.”

Source: NRLC News