January
22, 2003, 11:25 a.m. Spin
No More
Pro-lifers
issue a challenge to the abortion sisters.
bortion
is such an easy, safe way to terminate pregnancies, yet women were dying
for lack of safe abortions," a Minnesota ob-gyn tells Glamour,
remembering life before Roe v. Wade liberated women. She
helps put fear in the hearts and minds of the magazine's readers, so that
their choice is a no-brainer: The Right wants your only choice to be a
coat hanger, starting off a litany of pre-Roe horror stories.
Unfortunately, from
Roe-loving ob-gyns and "women's magazines," one rarely,
if ever, hears a word about the post-Roe horror stories —
real ones women are living today.
Speaking on Capitol
Hill this summer, the actress Margaret Colin (Independence Day)
told
a pro-life gathering sponsored by Feminists
for Life: "While many will remember the 40 million American children
that were never born, I want us to also remember the 25 million women
and girls in America today who have personally experienced an abortion."
Colin continued:
I want you to remember
a 13-year-old African-American named Dawn Ravenell, who skipped junior
high one January day in 1985 to have an abortion. She died 3 weeks later
having never regained consciousness from this legal procedure. Which
part of safe, legal, and rare would this be?
I want you to put
yourself in the shoes of Marion Syverson, who was raised in a very abusive
environment. At age 15, she sought assistance from a local church when
she found herself pregnant. Instead of help, Marion was handed $150,
so she thought that God wanted her to have an abortion. She wanted to
have her baby — where were the resources to rescue her from that
abusive family? We let her down. We didn't give her a place to go, a
phone number to call, a safe haven. We could have saved her from the
abusive situation and helped her to make choices about her pregnancy.
Is abortion the best we could do for her?
I want you to remember
Guadalupe Negron, who sought an abortion at age 33 because she thought
her husband would not be able to afford another child. After infection
set in, one limb after another was amputated until she died, leaving
her husband and 4 children motherless. Didn't she have a right to know
assistance is available for women in exactly this situation?
Colin told the gathering:
"This is violence against women. This is the failure of medicine
to help and heal. This is the failure of our American society to help
and protect women. We need to address the reasons that women seek abortions
and help them find the resources that are available to ease their situations,
to coordinate the resources nationwide."
The idea is to refocus
the debate about abortion — by challenging feminists to tell the
truth.
As Cathy Cleaver,
spokesman for the Catholic bishops on life issues, says, "For thirty
years the abortion experiment has been dominated by a public debate that
embraces an utterly false dichotomy: women versus children. Pro-lifers
are seen as those who fight for unborn children, pro-choicers as those
who fight for women. Women and children are of course natural allies,
not enemies, and pro-lifers fight for women every day, but the terms of
the debate have been set, and they have held . . . the other side of the
abortion debate has offered up the false assumption that abortion is good
for women, and the culture has swallowed it. It is time to challenge this
assumption head-on."
It's a significant
challenge to those who call themselves feminists. Dead babies aside —
they've already made clear those lives are not a compelling interest as
far as they are concerned — for more than 30 years, abortion advocates
(among whom feminists are the most vocal) have ignored the dangers of
abortion. They have, in fact, often
gone out of their way to ensure that questions are not raised, and
information is nowhere to be found when women approach their "choice."
(If I don't have access to all the available information, is it really
a choice?)
As abortion-advocacy
groups bend over backward to pretend they are not for abortion —
most recently by changing their names (the National Abortion Rights Action
League is now NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Center for Reproductive
Law and Policy is now the Center for Reproductive Rights) — they're
eventually going to have to face women, and their hypocrisy, when it comes
to abortion. The concept of post-abortion
syndrome, that women suffer emotionally after abortion, despite feminist
claims to the contrary, is gradually beginning to penetrate the mainstream,
in part thanks to star power — Jennifer
O'Neill, who herself had an abortion, was on The View earlier
this week talking about it. Despite protests from the media that anyone
looking into the linkage between abortion and breast cancer are perpetrating
a "war against women," scientific question-raising is making
a facing-of-the-facts unavoidable. Finally, especially as
younger doctors increasingly want no part of abortion, the renegade
nature of so many of those committed to abortion is slowly being exposed.
(The kinds of doctors who are willing to do abortion are inevitably shady).
It's about time so-called
feminists be forced to face the facts, that without the truth about what
they are getting themselves into, many women are among the abortion casualties
in a real war against women. Mercifully, it looks like the time for feminist
silence and spin is running out. For the most-innocent-the unborn —
it couldn't come soon enough.
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bortion
is such an easy, safe way to terminate pregnancies, yet women were dying
for lack of safe abortions," a Minnesota ob-gyn tells Glamour,
remembering life before Roe v. Wade liberated women. She
helps put fear in the hearts and minds of the magazine's readers, so that
their choice is a no-brainer: The Right wants your only choice to be a
coat hanger, starting off a litany of pre-Roe horror stories.
