Abortion's "Sermon on the Operating Table"

The Visible Conservative:  Christians Unleashed Show
Pro-Life Fridays Monologue - March 16, 2012

For the longest time, I’ve questioned how abortion is sold to the American woman as a “difficult but necessary choice” that women need. Pro-death propagandists sell not the abortion itself (that’s the job of Planned Parenthood) but the right and the so-called need for abortion. This is where, on a certain level, I give credit to Jessica DelBalzo for having the balls to be honest.


In her article called “I Love Abortion,” she points out the problem with standard pro-abortion rhetoric that pro-life people have similarly called pro-deathers out on for a long time now. The Clintonian formula, as I call it, of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare” has always been a point of contention, because if abortion is made safe and legal, why should it ever be made rare?  DelBalzo bites the bullet and says that she doesn’t like how abortion supporters softpedal abortion and assume just what we pro-lifers have said all along that there is something wrong with abortion on demand.

She says,

Safe and legal are concepts I fully support, but rare is something I cannot abide…. there is no need to suggest that abortion be rare. To say so implies a value judgement, promoting the idea that abortion is somehow distasteful or immoral and should be avoided…. we must remember that extenuating circumstances like health, contraceptive failure, and rape mean that abortion will always be a normal, necessary, and reasonable choice for many women. As such, we must avoid stigmatizing it in any way. No woman benefits from even the vaguest insinuation that abortion is an immoral or objectionable option. That's the weak argument made by misogynistic, forced-birth advocates, and it has no place in a dialogue about reproductive freedom. Terminating a pregnancy is not an unethical act, yet suggesting that abortion should be rare implies that there is something undesirable about having one…. Suggesting that abortion be “safe, legal, and rare,” and crowing that “no one likes abortion,” accomplishes nothing for women's rights. Pandering to the anti-choice movement by implying that we all find termination distasteful only fuels the fire against it. What good is common ground if it must be achieved at the expense of women who have had or will have abortions? Those women need advocates like us more than we need support from anti-abortionists. Rather than trying to cozy up to the forced-birth camp, women who value their freedom should be proud to say that they like abortion. In fact, they should venerate it whole-heartedly. Abortion is our last refuge, the one final, definitive instrument that secures our bodily autonomy. What's not to love?

I appreciate this woman’s consistency, but she has done something not even Hillary Clinton was willing to do when she uttered “safe, legal, and rare.” DelBalzo has killed the last vestiges of humanity in the dialogue about whether mothers have a right to kill their children in the womb. In the article she talks about abortion as similar to getting a mammogram or chemotherapy, which, I guess she means are all equivalent to each other (except that all other medical procedures in the world don’t end the life of a living, growing human being or even have the intent to harm or kill another human being).

DelBalzo and others who think like her fail to realize that the mindset she’s promoting is exactly the same mindset behind the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome, Tuol Sleng and the killing fields of Cambodia, and the African slave trade. It is a mindset that says some people have a right by some virtue of superiority to oppress, dismember, and execute human beings for the sake of political ideology, religion, economic gain, or entertainment. Just think what made all these atrocities possible—the idea that there are classes among men, gradations of worth, and rights of some that trump the rights of others either by power or diminishing the humanity of those they have power over. Women are property in most of the Islamic world; slaves are property; political adversaries don’t have the right to have a conflicting opinion, and yes, all this is the mindset of liberals that preach tolerance, compassion, and diversity in society. It amazes me how their heads don’t explode! The inhumanity and cruelty of the pro-death position is breathtaking.

For all the ranting about how religious people are misogynistic, I’ve never known a position as misogynistic as pro-death. It’s right up there with Sharia Law. In order to be pro-abortion, you must look at women as nothing but uteruses with arms and legs. No kidding. It says that a woman is not equal in society unless she gets a specific type of on-demand surgery in her uterus. What kind of message is that for women? Do I tell my daughter that at some point early in her life she wasn’t a person with intrinsic rights and that she wouldn’t have intrinsic rights now if abortion weren’t legal? Well, yeah. DelBalzo is really saying that women have to be given our rights from government, which is saying we don’t really have any rights to begin with.

And let me just say one more thing, especially in light of her line about America being “plagued by anti-feminist, religious conservatism” that shames women’s sexuality. When you say that you venerate abortion wholeheartedly, is this not an admission of devotion of a religious caliber to a death cult known as ultra-liberal feminism that demeans and devalues motherhood and children and looks at pregnancy as some kind of STD? Who’s religious now?