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The inherent tension in the pro-abortion campaign to “tell your abortion story”

Nov 21, 2014

 

By Dave Andrusko

whatsyourstoryLet’s see. You are the Abortion Lobby and now the distortion that sort of, kind of worked for a while—the imaginary “War on Women”—is toast. People finally asked themselves, “Are you serious?”

What to do?

Switch from what might be called angry “hard power” tactic to gentler “soft power.” What do I mean?

The change in rhetoric reflects a realization on their part that the anti-life ethos has hit hard times. If you can touch people’s hearts, you have a chance to take people’s eyes off abortion’s inherent ugliness and brutality.

Granted, in a real sense this is nothing new. The common denominator off all pro-abortion strategy is to forget abortion stops a beating heart…as it tears a baby limb from limb.

But “sharing abortion stories” has a particular appeal for the Abortion/Media Conglomerate. If you can persuade women to talk about their abortions, the first instinct is to feel compassion.

Guess what? That’s been our reaction—and has been for decades. But the motivations for embracing these women are as far apart as the east is from the west.

Pro-abortionists want women to publicly talk about their abortions to eliminate the “stigma.” We want them to talk about their abortions—if they are ready—to help them come to grips with the guilt and remorse and pain and sadness. Most often the conversations are private.

Pro-abortionists want to convince women they are experiencing what they are going through, not because what they have done to the little one whose fate was in their hands has violated their consciences but as one wrote this week on a Washington Post blog because “we live in such an awful conservative, male-driven society.”

Pro-abortionists are now rolling out the big guns, including Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, to tell their “story.” Why did Richards agree after all this time? Two guesses. She was politely blackmailed into it by the increasing zany wing of their movement and/or persuaded this was a viability approach to begin to reverse their downward slide.

What are the dangers—from the pro-abortionist’s point of view? Actually, they are as many and varied as they are dangerous and self-defeating.

Many of the same proponents of this strategy really do believe, to their core of their souls, that abortion is absolutely without a moral and ethical component, no more difficult than…well, fill in the blank. But whatever the comparison, abortion is easy.

They revel in turning the old (absolutely insincere) platitude—abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”—into a new cry—abortion is most often good for women, nobody else’s business, and equally blameless whether five babies are lost or one.

Put simply, the inherent radicalness is no longer being hidden, it is being celebrated. Let me offer just one example.

Jessica Valenti writes for the British publication, The Guardian. Under the headline, “It’s OK to tell your abortion story. Some women just don’t want to be pregnant,” she penned a remarkably revealing column this week.

Her approach is quite clever. She talks about two abortions, undertaken for two very different reasons. One would elicit more sympathy, or at least less disapproval, than the other.

Click here to read the November issue of
National Right to Life News,
the “pro-life newspaper of record.”

Guess what? It’s the same woman—Valenti—who had the first abortion in as a single woman in her 20s, the second as a married woman in her 30s.

She hadn’t previously talked about the first abortion but she wants us to know that it “made” the successful life Valenti now enjoys. She goes on

Maybe you think that’s callous. But the truth is that, despite the abortion stories that often dominate the public pro-choice narrative – the wanted pregnancies that must end because of health concerns or severe fetal abnormalities – most people who end their pregnancies do it for the same reason I did that first time in my 20s: Some women just don’t want to be pregnant – and there’s nothing wrong with that.

They believe that they can mute the public’s uneasiness with abortion if they focus on the hardest of hard cases (usually a catastrophic injury to the unborn baby). Then, they believe, ordinary people will be less uncomfortable when the Valentis of this world tell them they aborted for no more significant reason than that they didn’t want to be pregnant.

Then inherent tension in the new “sharing your abortion story” approach is obvious. It simply doesn’t follow that if people will condone abortion when, for example, the baby will likely die at birth, they will then accept abortion-as-birth control—indeed, then jump on board to agree that abortion really is best understood as a statement against “an awful conservative, male-driven society.”

We reach out to women who have aborted to help them mend their souls. Pro-abortionists treat them the way they treat unborn babies: as fodder in their endless war against the sanctity of all human life, born and unborn.

Categories: Abortion
Tags: abortion