Gail Tierney, head of the Rockville Pregnancy Center, told me this week that an anti-choice group (that is, a group opposed to giving women any choice except abortion) is planning to picket and harass pro-life pregnancy care centers nationwide on Monday. Please keep these centers in your prayers--that volunteers would respond appropriately (even lovingly) and that God would use the evil they intend for good.

Comments

[Gina Dalfonzo]

Can you imagine how some of those conversations are going to go?

Feminist Majority Protester: Don't go in there! They're lying to you! They won't give you an abortion!

Pregnant Woman: But I don't WANT an abortion.

Protester: . . .

[Andy]

Maybe someday there will be no protesters at either type of clinic. Maybe someday both sides will trust women to make their own decisions, like any other (ie: male) adult. I know one thing, if this was a decision focused on actions of men, this argument would have been very different. It would have gone the way of Prohibition decades ago.

Queue "But it's about the babies..." in 3, 2, 1...

[Gina Dalfonzo]

Andy, I'm afraid you've lost me. If it weren't about the babies, what would it be about? The oppression and torture of women? Come now, I give you credit for much more intelligence than that.

[Anne Morse]

Yes, Andy, we should trust all men and women make their own decisions....men should be allowed to brutalize women, women to commit acts of violence against their own children, Muslims to murder Christians, etc. Because we're all responsible people who always have the good of others in mind. The world is NOT fallen....

[LeeQuod]

I was going to say "Andy, old friend, we males have to be very careful about our opinions on this topic; you now have not just one but two of The Point's best debaters who are women training their weapons on you. I see laser spots all over your head and body."

But then I suddenly stopped and thought that this is an Internet medium; I have no idea if "Andy" is short for Andrea... If so, that could put an entirely different spin on the Prohibition remark.

On the other hand, the Sigourney Weaver movie "Alien" was (via John Hurt's character) a celluloid interpretation of the remark "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament" popularized in the 1970s by Flo Kennedy. Per the movie, the only way to avoid death-by-giving-birth is to kill the monsters. Of course, that is (one might dryly remark) far easier when they don't look like you.

Andy, can we agree that the problem here is less the women seeking an abortion, and more the men who impregnate those women? Seems to me in these discussions that it's the elephant in the room.

[Andy]

Yep, Lee, I'll cop to being male. Andy short for Andrew here. Like I've said on this blog before, I have no problem with your movement doing it's best by editorial, advertising, political platform, to discourage abortion. What hacks me off is cohorts of zealots brow beating-women entering clinics. For all they know, they could be women visiting a clinic to obtain affordable birth control, or get a pelvic exam because they have no health insurance. Face it, CPC's are all about anti-abortion tactics, whereas real clinics cover a lot of other reproductive territory.
It is the arrogance of these self-appointed moral police that hacks me. It smacks of the folks in Iran drubbing women for their clothing choices.

[LeeQuod]

Andy wrote: "It is the arrogance of these self-appointed moral police that hacks me."

Reluctant as I am to continue to risk becoming collateral damage here (but maybe Anne and Gina have better things to do today and this weekend), I'll point out, Andrew, that they in no wise see themselves as self-appointed. (Nor do they in Iran.) So they are not being arrogant except (in the view of an atheist such as you have, if I recall correctly, said you are) claiming to act on orders from God. Now, if they had claimed that abortion was wrong for society on the basis of humanistic or pragmatic reasoning, and assumed the role of moral police on such a basis rather than using authorized law enforcement, *that* would be arrogant. (I believe those who would protest outside the CPCs on Monday are being incredibly arrogant, claiming that abortion is *right* for society on the basis of humanistic or pragmatic reasoning.)

I will point out that what hacks *me* off is people calling it "choice", when in many cases it is no such thing. Women are being told by those they trust (including the personnel in the abortion clinics) that it is their *only* option; there is *no* other choice. CPCs exist to actually provide what the "pro-choice" movement only uses as a name.

And I'm further hacked off that there is a huge underreported racial disparity in abortion, even though it necessarily follows: the other day I was stuck watching CNN, and a statistic flashed by that as I recall claimed 73% of unwed mothers were African-American, 46% Latino, and 23% Caucasian. The problem here would seem to be African-American males who impregnate, then shirk. Carpe diem, Mr. Obama?

[Rolley Haggard]

Andy’s got a point. It is a far greater crime to offend someone’s sensibilities with words than it is to countenance with our guilty silence the slaughter of 50 million helpless, innocent children.

By the way, Andy, “hacks off” is what the abortionist does to the baby’s head and appendages.

[LeeQuod]

I fumbled: "... claimed 73% of unwed mothers were African-American".

That should have been "claimed 73% of African-American births were to unwed mothers", etc. So illegitimacy for African-Americans is almost three times that for whites, and Latinos is almost double that of Caucasians.

And I think the abortion rate is roughly proportional. Yet, there are those who claim Planned Parenthood is not racist. If any *other* enterprise had this kind of disparity, ...

[labrialumn]

CPCs are the real health clinics - they heal. Abortion clinics are not health clinics - they are death camps.

The pro-death community uses Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (whether or not they've read that book dedicated to the Devil).

They made it illegal for the same people to both help crisis pregnancy clinics and at the same time protest abortion under a misuse of the RICO laws, then claimed loudly that pro-lifers don't do anything for the already-born women.

Now we hear that CPCs aren't real health clinics because they heal rather than kill.

There really is such a thing as evil, and in those opposed to CPCs, we see that made flesh.