Posted on 01/20/2012 3:21:31 PM PST by Morgana
Abortion is now one of America’s most common surgical procedures performed on adults. As many as one out of three women will have at least one abortion. In some American neighborhoods, the number of abortions far exceeds the number of live births.
Most Americans will pay little attention to the 39th anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision. In 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a woman has a constitutional right to arrange the killing of the unborn life within her. Since that decision was handed down, more than 50 million babies have been aborted, at a rate of over 3,000 each day.
One of the most chilling aspects of all this is the sense of normalcy in American life. Abortion statistics pile up from year to year, and each report gets filed. Moral sentiment on the issue of abortion has shifted discernibly in recent years, as ultrasound images and other technologies deliver unquestionable proof that the unborn child is just that — a child. Nevertheless, the larger picture of abortion in America is basically unchanged. With predictable regularity, cultural authorities call for the emergence of a moderating position between the pro-life and pro-abortion positions. But efforts to achieve a stable compromise on the abortion issue are doomed to failure. The two positions hold irreconcilable views of reality. The pro-life movement holds that the central issue is the unborn child’s right to live. Abortion activists have staked their entire case on the claim that the only determinative issue is the woman’s unrestricted right to choose.
A middle position would require pro-lifers to accept that the deaths of some unborn children are acceptable, and abortion rights activists to accept that some decisions for abortion are wrong. Given the logic of their positions, there is no means of compromise.
In recent years, some on the pro-choice side of the controversy have called for abortion proponents to use language indicating that abortion is a painful and wrenching, but sometimes necessary procedure, and to accept that some reasons for abortion are just not sufficient. Nevertheless, this is received as a call for treason within the abortion rights movement, and these voices are regularly sidelined.
At the same time, there has been an effort to protect abortion with euphemism and evasion. Abortion rights activists speak of being pro-choice, not pro-abortion. The unborn child is reduced to a fetus, or a bundle of cells. Abortion clinics are described as women’s health centers.
There are some abortion activists who will not join that bandwagon. With chilling candor, they defend abortion as abortion, they defend the decision to abort as a morally superior decision, and they lament the evasiveness of their colleagues in the abortion rights movement.
Just recently, Merle Hoffman, a major voice in the abortion rights movement and founder of Choices, a major center for abortions in New York City, has written a memoir, Intimate Wars. In telling her story, Hoffman calls for her colleagues in the abortion industrial complex to defend abortion as a moral choice.
Abortion is the ultimate act of empowering women, she argues. “The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society,” she asserts.
A central portion of her memoir deals with the abortion rights movement’s attempt to defend abortion in the face of pro-life arguments that the fetus has a right to life.
“The pro-choice movement had to find a way to navigate these narratives,” she explains. “The simplest option was to negate the claims of the opposition. And so many pro-choice advocates claimed that the fetus was not alive, and that abortion was not the act of terminating it. They chose to de-personalize the fetus, to see it as amorphous residue, to say that it was only ‘blood and tissue.’”
As she explains, the pro-life movement thought that, if women really knew what abortion was — the killing of an unborn human being — they would decide to keep their babies. She rejects the argument.
Hoffman argues that women do know what an abortion is. Abortion does stop a beating heart and that it is not “just like an appendectomy.” Her conclusion is that women know that abortion is “the termination of potential life.”
She then makes this statement:
“They knew it, but my patients who made the choice to have an abortion also knew they were making the right one, a decision so vital it was worth stopping that heart. Sometimes they felt a great sense of loss of possibility. In the majority of cases, they felt a great sense of relief and the power that comes from taking responsibility for one’s own life.”
Rarely do we see abortion defended in such unvarnished terms — “a decision so vital it was worth stopping that heart.” Merle Hoffman goes on to explain how she can speak of abortion so directly. She has, she tells us, no conception that life is sacred.
“Abortion is as American as apple pie.” Hoffman made that statement in a recent interview about her book. She laments that abortion is the cause of shame in some women and that shame attaches itself to abortion in the larger culture, even now. In her view, if women would start talking more honestly and directly about their abortions, the shame would be removed and women would discuss their abortions like they speak of “a bikini wax.”
Is Merle Hoffman right? Is abortion “as American as apple pie?” To our great shame, she has a right to make that claim. How can it be refuted when abortion on demand has been legal in this country for almost forty years, when one out of three American women will have an abortion, when within some communities far more babies die by abortion than are born?
In Merle Hoffman, the Culture of Death has found a new voice. Almost forty years after Roe v. Wade, abortion remains a central part of the nation’s moral landscape. Over 50 million unborn children have been aborted within the span of just one generation.
A titanic clash of absolutes is taking place in full view, and this clash indicates just how much work remains to be done in the great effort to protect the dignity of every single human life. As those who contend for the sanctity and dignity of each human life try to reach the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens, others are at work as well. If they have their way, Americans will one day openly speak of abortion as nothing more shameful than a bikini wax.
NOTE: I revised the first sentence of the article on advice of medical authorities. Without doubt, abortion has been the most common surgical procedure performed on American adults in some years. This fact was cited in Congressional testimony during the debate over the Obama Administration’s health care proposal. More recently, other surgical procedures may have surpassed abortion in number in some years. The data is drawn from the Guttmacher Institute.
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler
Killing human beings does give some an addictive feeling of power. It lies behind the mentality of serial killers and tyrants and other mass murderers.
Abortion is more like the apple in the Garden of Eden. The choice is to say “no” to God or to say “yes.”
“That quote just stunned me, Morgana. Can you imagine? “What are you going to do today?” “Let’s see... I need to pick up my dry cleaning, get a manicure, have a life sucked out of my womb and pick up some chicken for dinner”. That is what the left wants... normalcy. The killing of a life is equated to something as mundane as a bikini wax or a manicure.”
The left will keep telling themselves that but the opposite will always be true. Just imagine an snake in a garden saying “no you won’t die” and he says it over and over. Just another lie.
“The conscience is a wonderful thing. You are right.. you can run but it keeps up. When a woman sees a baby in someone’s arms... the conscience is right there. When they see ads for Mother’s Day gifts... the conscience is right there. If and when they give birth to a “wanted” baby... the conscience is right there.”
When a woman sees the baby on an ultra sound the conscience is right there and...
When a woman goes into an abortion clinic and an Operation Rescue truck with pictures of aborted babies posted on it as big as life you better believe the conscience is right there.
I was thinking that this is less of the apple are more like the snake telling lies. They tell the lie over and over till they themselves try to believe it.
A lie is a lie no matter what.
Merle, let us also farm the aborted for useful parts, eat what we will of the rest of them, and fertilize our (environmentally harmonious) vegetable garden with what remains. It would be the only ecologically responsible thing to do.
What a brave new world you imagine. What a wondrous vision to draw us forward to it.
he uses another fake quote, often used by pro aborts to stress that aboriton is common:
As many as one out of three women will have at least one abortion. In some American neighborhoods, the number of abortions far exceeds the number of live births.
no, one out of three pregnancies are aborted. but many women have multiple abortions, so the number of women who have had abortions is lower than that.
“he uses another fake quote, often used by pro aborts to stress that aboriton is common:
As many as one out of three women will have at least one abortion. In some American neighborhoods, the number of abortions far exceeds the number of live births.
no, one out of three pregnancies are aborted. but many women have multiple abortions, so the number of women who have had abortions is lower than that.”
That does not mean it is not true. The fact that a woman has more than one abortion or the “one in three” theory it still takes down the birth rate no matter how you look at it. A baby was murdered.
Sure bet it is.
If Muslims overtake Europe and possibly America later, would it really be a loss?
Islamic “civilization” is deservedly criticized on this site often, but is it really worse than the culture of death we live in?
It depends. Would you rather be violently dismembered in the womb as an inconvenient mistake, or later as an infidel refusing to submit to their satanic "Allah"?
We should discuss with the Saudis the possibility of using their technique and their experienced scimitar hands. We could arrange mixed purpose "doubleheaders" so to speak. Jerry Sandusky and Merle Hoffman. Graham Spanier and Frances Kissling, etc. The trustees of Penn State and the Board of Planned Barrenhood would make a Grand Tournament of Justice that could be handled like the Olympics. Technique of the scimitar wielders could be judged on a 1-10 scale: see the judges raise their placards 8.1, 9.4, 8.9, 8.5, 9.8! s/
Sorry, I get extra cynical at this time of night and black humor brings a sense of relief from the insanity of our era.
God bless you and yours.
Thanks to both of you for your excellent posts on this site and on this thread particularly.
The word "empower" is a weird one. It is, in practice, a way of taking a lust for murder and painting it pink.
Tens of millions of women have made the willful decision to kill innocent little pre-born baby sons and daughters.
If that is a "power" which those women glorify, they are something incredibly ugly.
But it isn't one third of women who had abortions, it is a lot fewer women than that percentage.
shows how they are jiggling the numbers.
For example:
it calculates the number of abortions over 40 years with only the number of women who are now in child bearing age.
Actually, you have to use the number of all women who were in child bearing age during that interval.
The liberals use a similar slight of hand to "prove" priests are pedophiles, by not putting the full number of men who were priests over a 50 year period into their calculations, just the number of priests the year of the report.
We are making headway. At the high point, there were about 1.6 million abortions committed per year. In 2008, there were just over 825,000 reported abortions. That comes out to 2,260 abortions, or 700 fewer babies being murdered, per day.
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