NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.lifesitenews.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: Why I lost faith in
the pro-choice movement
DATE: Thursday 1 November
2012
AUTHOR: Jennifer Fulwiler
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Jennifer
Fulwiler is a writer and speaker who converted to Catholicism after a life of
atheism. She's a contributor to the books The
Church and New Media and Atheist
to Catholic: 11 Stories of Conversion, and is writing a book based
on her personal blog, ConversionDiary.com.
She and her husband live in Austin, TX with their five young children. You can
follow her on Twitter at @conversiondiary.
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jennifer-fulwiler/
 |
Why I
lost faith in the pro-choice movement
Thu Nov 01 1:58 PM EST
November
1, 2012 (NCRegister.com) - I was
sitting on a bean bag in my dorm room when I got the call. It was a friend of
mine—let’s call her “Sara”—and she was sobbing so hard it took me a moment to
know who it was.
Finally,
she pulled herself together enough to speak. With a voice that sounded as weary
as if she had aged 100 years since the last time we talked, she said, “I’m
pregnant.”
My
heart sunk on her behalf. I was completely pro-choice and didn’t find the idea
of abortion to be troubling, but I knew that she was not comfortable with it.
She had always said that she respected other women’s rights to choose, but that
she could never do that. Yet I also knew that she was not entirely thrilled
with this guy she was dating, a young man named Rob. He was handsome and
charismatic, but he had a serious drinking problem, and didn’t treat her with
the respect she deserved.
I
listened while she explained through tears that it would ruin her life to have
a child, especially with Rob. She had recently decided that she would break up
with him soon, and even looked forward to doing so; the thought of having an
inextricable, lifelong connection to him made her physically ill. Then there
were the facts that parenting a child would derail her college career, and that
she didn’t even want to be a mother—not to mention the fact that she was pretty
sure her parents would disown her if she came home from school pregnant. “I
knew this would be my worst nightmare. That’s why I’m always so serious about
contraception!” she said. But, despite her best efforts, something had gone
wrong. Her contraception had failed.
I
tried to turn the conversation in a constructive direction, employing the word
that was supposedly so empowering to women of our generation. “Let’s talk about
your choices,” I suggested.
“Choices?”
She let out a hard, bitter laugh as she spat the word back at me. “I don’t have
any.”
Sara
went to an abortion facility and had the pregnancy “taken care of.” We never
spoke of it again. She became distant from me and many of her other friends in
the months that followed, and we eventually lost touch.
I
still think of Sara now and then, especially when I come across pieces like this
one at Patheos that’s making the rounds, in which Libby Anne writes of why
she lost faith in the pro-life movement. Her story felt oddly familiar, as it
reminds me a lot of my own. Though my conversion went the opposite direction,
mine, like hers, hinged on the issues of contraception and personhood, and the
question of what really liberates women. I’ve been thinking about it all ever
since I read her post, and thought I would share my own story.
Who’s
afraid of information?
My
first tipoff that something was wrong in the pro-choice movement was when I
realized that there was a great fear of information. A year or two after Sara’s
situation, another friend found herself in a crisis pregnancy (also due to
failed contraception), and was wrestling with the issue of abortion. She had
asked me to find out how far her baby would have developed at this point, so I
did some research online.
I
found some images and descriptions of fetal development, and was amazed by how
much I hadn’t known. For all the time I’d spent talking about abortion rights,
I’d never bothered to learn the details about what, exactly, happens within a
woman’s womb when she’s pregnant, and no one had encouraged me to do so. I had
never heard that fetuses have arms and legs and tastebuds at eight weeks gestation,
or that they began practicing breathing at 11 weeks. I paused and thought about
that for a long time. It didn’t make me question my pro-choice stance, but for
the first time I could understand how someone could be uncomfortable with
abortion.
The
biggest thing I noticed, however, was that pro-life sites had this information
in abundance. The pro-lifers encouraged women to educate themselves about the
details of pregnancy, suggested that they view ultrasounds to know what was
happening within their bodies, and offered resources to educate women about all
aspects of the female reproductive system.
On
the pro-choice side, it was a totally different story.
I
had started my research on websites for abortion providers and various feminist
organizations, which I had assumed would equip women to make informed choices
by providing them with full information. To my concern and surprise, I could
not find one shred of information about fetal development on any websites
associated with the pro-choice movement. When I read their literature about the
details of abortion procedures, they were full of insulting euphemisms. Even
when describing second trimester abortions, they would use eerily vague terms
talking about “emptying the uterus” of its “contents.” I felt like I had been
transported back to Victorian England, where women weren’t supposed to be told
hard facts, even about their own bodies, because they might get all flustered.
Personhood:
The other elephant in the room
Nowhere
was the fear of information more obvious than on the issue of personhood. We
had always gotten a good laugh out of anti-choicers and their love of zygotes,
and would feel triumphant when we would point out the elephant in the room that
they must not really value these lives as fully human since they didn’t hold
full funerals for, say, early miscarriages. But as my questions about the
pro-choice worldview festered, I began to notice that we were tripping all over
our own elephants.
We
may have snickered at the idea of a three-day-old conceptus being completely
human, but I began to notice a startling lack of interest in nailing down the
question of when unborn life did become human. Folks within the pro-choice
movement would scoff at the idea of a seven-week-old fetus being a person, and
would nod in unquestioning agreement that a baby is fully human the day before
her due date. So that must mean that there is some point at which we’re no
longer talking about a
sub-human “fetus” and we’re now talking about a fully human baby. Yet I
could not get a single answer about when that might happen, not from
individuals, not from official organizational statements. There was absolutely
zero interest in the question of when we should start protecting unborn human
life.
I’ll
never forgot the first time I read the
documents to the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart. Intelligent,
educated people—some of them leaders of our country—coolly debated the most
effective way to kill babies who were close to or beyond the age of viability.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrote an amici brief in
which they advocated for D&X, a procedure in which babies are delivered and
then killed outside of the womb. Their reasoning?
D&X
presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion
procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E’s involving dismemberment,
D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration
because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with
sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can
injure the uterus and cervix. There is also considerable evidence that D&X
reduces the risk of retained
fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause
maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a ‘free floating’ fetal head
that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal
injury. [emphasis mine]
The
ACOG had recently made statements condemning homebirth, in part because they
were concerned about the health of babies. And yet here they were, coolly
saying that it’s better to kill babies outside of the womb because their
decapitated heads can injure their mothers.
I was left speechless by the level of disconnect I was seeing—not just among fringe extremists, but by the average pro-choice person. I had recently visited a friend’s baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at a local hospital, and I recalled that the baby in the incubator next to us was born the week before at 24 weeks gestation, and so was now 25 weeks old. This baby was the same age as the babies whose method of extermination was debated in Stenberg v. Carhart. If he were to be murdered in his incubator it would be a headline-generating tragedy. But if the same thing were to happen to him—at the exact same age—in which he was murdered as part of an induced delivery, it would be an ACOG-approved medical procedure.
I
saw an almost pathological level of avoidance, in myself as well as in the
larger pro-choice community, on this most critical issue of when a fetus
becomes a person, and when abortion becomes infanticide. When pressed on this
topic we would always dodge the issue, usually by responding with the utterly
irrelevant answer that these procedures are rare compared to first trimester
abortions. Even though many of us were personally horrified by the idea of such
occurrences, some great pressure kept us from taking a clear look at this
life-and-death issue, and calling a horror a horror when we beheld it.
What
really takes away women’s reproductive freedom?
What
I was encountering was a level of internal inconsistency and intellectual
dishonesty that bordered on insanity. I noticed it in myself, too: No matter
how many red flags popped up in front of me, no matter how much data pointed in
the direction of the humanity of unborn life, I couldn’t bring myself to think
of myself as anything other than pro-choice. Even though I was increasingly
uncomfortable with the entire concept, something within me screamed that to not
support abortion would be to support women being slaves to their biology.
This
pressure built and built over months, and eventually years. And then, one day
it clicked.
I
was looking through a Time magazine
article whose infograph cited data from the Guttmacher Institute about the
most common reasons women have abortions. It immediately struck me that none of
the factors on the list were conditions that we tell women to consider before
engaging in sexual activity. Don’t have the money to raise a child? Don’t think
your boyfriend would be a good father? Don’t feel ready to be a mother? Women
were never encouraged to consider these factors before they had sex; only
before they had a baby.
The
fundamental truth of the pro-choice movement, from which all of its tenets
flow, is that sex does not have to have life-altering consequences. I suddenly
saw that it was the struggle to uphold this “truth” that led to all the shady
dealings, all the fear of information, all the mental gymnastics that I’d
observed. For example:
—>
If it is true that sex does not have to have life-altering consequences, then
life within the womb cannot be human. Otherwise, when your contraception fails
or you otherwise end up with an unplanned pregnancy, you just became a parent,
and that truth was proven false.
—>
If it is true that sex does not have to have life-altering consequences, then
people should be able to engage in sexual activity as they see fit, without
giving a second thought to parenthood. And if it’s true that it is morally
acceptable for people to engage in sexual activity without giving a second
thought to parenthood, then abortion must be okay. Contraception has abysmal
actual use effectiveness rates, especially when
taken over the long term. Combine that with the fact that the contraceptive
mentality tells women to go ahead and engage in the act that creates babies, even
if they feel certain that they’re in no position to have a baby, and you
see how women would feel trapped, and think that their only way out is through
the doors of their local abortion mill.
Over
the years I’d heard many pro-lifers say things along the lines of, “If you’re
engaging in the act that creates babies, you might create a baby; if you are
absolutely certain that you’re not ready to have a baby, avoid the act that
creates babies.” The pro-choice movement dismissed such statements, often
sneeringly, as being overly simplistic and even oppressive. Yet is it not true?
Now that I had taken a look under the hood of the pro-choice worldview, I came
to see this as yet another example of pro-lifers respecting women enough to
tell them hard truths that they may not want to hear, but need to hear. And far
from blowing women off with pat answers, as I had always imagined pro-lifers
did, when I took a closer look at that movement I found it to be quite
realistic about the complexities of life, and surprisingly understanding that
things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. I was interested to
learn that there are more
pregnancy assistance centers in the U.S. than there are abortion
facilities, and that the Catholic Church, which is the largest pro-life
organization in the world, is also the
largest charitable organization in the world.
Once
all of this set in, I thought of all my friends who had ended up sitting in the
waiting rooms of abortion facilities, and mourned for them anew. In each case
there was an unspoken but palpable question of, How could this have happened?
These young women played by the rules. They tried to do the right thing. None
of them slept around, none lived careless lives. They had dutifully used
contraception, just like they were supposed to. They were told that this was
the path to a life of freedom, and were dazed and traumatized when they found
themselves without real choices, backed into a corner by their circumstances.
I
believe that most people who are pro-choice hold that viewpoint because they
want to help women. I was pro-choice out of loving concern for my sisters all
over the world, and, on the surface, it seemed that this view was the most
compassionate. But when I took a hard look behind the closed doors of the
pro-choice movement, and demanded full information, and acknowledged the
dignity of women of all ages (even those not yet born), and asked hard
questions about what women’s reproductive freedom really means, that is when I
became pro-life.
This
article first appeared on the National
Catholic Register and is reprinted with permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment