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<DIV class=""><A
href="http://et-tu.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-i-became-pro-life.html">How I became
pro-life</A></DIV></H2>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.5em">via <A class=f
href="http://et-tu.blogspot.com/">"Et tu?"</A> by Jennifer F. on
1/28/08</DIV><BR style="DISPLAY: none"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 85%; COLOR: rgb(51,51,51)"><SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">I've been wanting to put this together ever since I
read </SPAN><A style="FONT-STYLE: italic"
href="http://abigails-alcove.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-i-became-pro-life.html">Abigail's
touching post</A><SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic"> with the same title. I've
been dabbling at this post for a few months, and finally feel ready to share it.
I apologize that it is so long, I just couldn't figure out how to condense it
without leaving out important details. I hope that you will find that it's worth
your time to read the whole thing.</SPAN></SPAN><BR><BR><BR><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 130%"><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Who is
human?</SPAN></SPAN><BR><BR>Back in college I remember reading about how in
certain societies throughout history, I believe in this case it was the Greeks,
it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere
to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was
going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of
people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear
about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could
something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire
societies?<BR><BR>Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I
found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing
babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing <SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">babies </SPAN>-- and to imply that those of us who
were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout
history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor
of <SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">killing </SPAN>anything. We simply felt like
women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an
unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be
babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not
making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.<BR><BR>I continued to
be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate
once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I
were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed
to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the
defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle
of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck
with me ever since:<BR><BR>"It just occurred to be that being pro-life is being
pro-<SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">other people's</SPAN>-life," he quipped.
"Everyone is pro-<SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">their
own</SPAN>-life."<BR><BR>It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were
putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose
lives were worth living. <SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">I</SPAN> (along with
doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this
very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they
said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness
of that notion as was my habit...yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable
with my defense:<BR><BR>"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human
life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses <SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">eventually </SPAN>become full-fledged humans, but not
until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When
is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?...Eight weeks? No, they're not
human then, those must be involuntary spasms..."<BR><BR>I was putting the burden
of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a
tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D
ultrasounds <A
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/3847319.stm">showed</A> "fetuses"
touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still
considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at
<A href="http://www.lifesite.net/">Lifesite</A>. <SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks
gestation? Involuntary spasm.</SPAN> As modern technology helped fetuses offer
me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar
of what I considered human.<BR><BR>I realized that my definition of how and when
a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also
depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered
it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability
increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from
suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had
fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.<BR><BR>The whole thing
started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was
more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was
not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On
more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon
reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would
advocate for.<BR><BR>In reading through the Supreme Court case of <A
href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=99-830#section1"><SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Stenberg v. Carhart</SPAN></A>, I read that Dr. Leroy
Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described
some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the
fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to
removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has
observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus
removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which
presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women,
opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought -- because it was plainly
obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form -- but because
dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them
outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's
words in its amici brief:<BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>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.<BR><BR>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.</BLOCKQUOTE><BR>I read the Court documents from
<SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Stenberg v. Carhart</SPAN> in a state of shock.
A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had
visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like
the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other
babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute
little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden -- mommy's big boy!"),
I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent
little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other
preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their
parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was
reading of people -- not just fringe crazies, but the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices -- casually
speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered
babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors
continued when I read <SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Gonzales v.
Carhart</SPAN> [<A href="http://www.inforumblog.com/?p=1326">some excerpts
here</A>...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely
disturbing].<BR><BR>It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that
normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but
completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were
educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I
realized that <A
href="http://et-tu.blogspot.com/2007/09/father-of-lies.html">evil always works
through lies</A>. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice
movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not
pro-choice.<BR><BR>Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself
pro-life.<BR><BR>I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or
the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to
maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some
tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was
going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow
women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the
most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed
aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of
dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive
those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some
arbitrary point during gestation.<BR><BR>It wasn't until I re-evaluated the
societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group,
took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those
fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure
I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on
abortion.<BR><BR><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 130%"><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">The contraceptive mentality</SPAN></SPAN><BR><BR>Here
are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was
formed:<BR><BR>
<UL>
<LI>When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or
sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were
twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard
any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they
were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally
start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.<BR><BR>
<LI>In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that <SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">unprotected </SPAN>sex creates babies. After we
were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should
carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important
concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or
not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated
us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing
readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when
to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general.
Not once.<BR><BR>
<LI>On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make
the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or
even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion
wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly
reasonable to me<SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic"> -- </SPAN><SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">that </SPAN>is how much we desired not to have
babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we
weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had
considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.<BR><BR>
<LI>Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my
husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a
video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called
"Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about
bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came
to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples
should discuss the topic of contraception.<BR></LI></UL><BR>Sex could not have
been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.<BR><BR>The message I'd
heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding,
that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point
of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my
views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life
by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being
struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally
unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal
lives.<BR><BR>Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was
actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to
suffer, to have to <A
href="http://et-tu.blogspot.com/2007/06/contraception-and-womans-self-image.html">devalue
themselves</A> by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent
part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has
sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between
the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most
tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the
enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as
societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other
side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the
enemy of sex.<BR><BR>It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view
of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.<BR><BR>I'd always
thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because
the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as
possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views
expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I
heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it,
the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a
couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might
temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard
position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to
attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a
"contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while
loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we
not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as
the enemy.<BR><BR>To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that
loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain
recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my
viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded
guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy,
expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a
toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.<BR><BR>I came to
see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to
the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a
society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable
and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently
opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act
that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had
been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get
pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if
it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when
they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion
had to be OK.<BR><BR>I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look
at when human life begins and based my views on that alone...but the lie was
just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or
brain activity...terminating pregnancies just <SPAN
style="FONT-STYLE: italic">had to be</SPAN> OK, because carrying a baby to term
and becoming a parent is a huge deal...and society had made it very clear that
sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex
in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even
consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make
women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to
have life-altering consequences.<BR><BR>So this idea that we are always to treat
the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if
we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and
different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins,
opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my
fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the
act that creates these little lives in the first place.<BR><BR><BR><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 130%"><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">The great
temptation</SPAN></SPAN><BR><BR>All of these thoughts had been percolating in my
brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life
positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me,
and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was
reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were
abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do
something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I
thought:<BR><BR><SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">I know how they did it.
</SPAN><BR><BR>I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning
people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of
lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in
every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could
leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life -- "we can't
afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a
good life" -- left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize
other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same
process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme
Court Justices in <SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Stenberg v. Carhart</SPAN>,
with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's
ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.<BR><BR>I bet that as those
Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked
on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't
talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just
involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with
different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they
called them "fetuses."</BODY></HTML>