“I support the rights of women, but I don’t think that means we should be required to secure our liberation from the blood of our children.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The above-quoted statement was made by a female participant in the “Women Betrayed” rally that took place in Washington, D.C. on July 28, 2015. It was one of 65 such rallies that took place across America on that day.
A Catholic News Service report about the D.C. rally begins as follows:
Hundreds of women – along with scores of men – gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday to protest what they see as betrayal of the nation’s women at the hands of Planned Parenthood.
“I have a lot of young women friends, and I’m very concerned about how Planned Parenthood might exploit them, how Planned Parenthood might exploit me if I had an unplanned pregnancy,” Christina Yao, a student at UMBC in Maryland, told CNA.
“There are women being betrayed and profited off of when they’re in crisis situations, when we should be giving them help,” added Lisa Twigg, social media coordinator for Life Matters Journal, an anti-violence and consistent ethic-of-life magazine.
“I think this is offensive, to me as a feminist,” she told CNA.
The protest against abortion-provider Planned Parenthood has been fueled by the public release of videos pertaining to that organization. Regarding those videos, school teacher Jennifer Manning writes the following:
We must not underestimate how difficult these Planned Parenthood videos are for women who have had abortions. Each new video surely brings a flood of memories, perhaps long forgotten or hidden, to the fore. These women are our friends, our mothers, our daughters, our co-workers, our students. They need our love and support. They are women who may have been lied to, may have been pressured, or may have truly believed that they were doing the right thing for their babies and for themselves.
These women were told that their babies weren’t babies. They were simply tissue that could be quite easily gotten rid of. But these videos are forcing everyone to recognize a most uncomfortable truth — that we have been killing humans all along. Little legs, a heart, hands — all of this can be seen at 11 weeks, the gestational age of one of the aborted babies in the video.
Regarding abortion, a GALLUP report published in May 2015 reveals that 50% of women polled consider themselves to be pro-choice, while 44% of women polled consider themselves to be pro-life.
Question #49 of a November 2014 Quinnipiac University National Poll asks the following:
“As you may know, in 2013 the House of Representatives approved legislation that would ban virtually all abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases of rape and incest that are reported to authorities. Would you support or oppose such legislation?”
59% of the women surveyed said that they would support such a ban, 35% of the women were opposed to the ban, and 6% didn’t know.
On the other side of the Atlantic, women in the U.K. aren’t particularly fond of abortion. In an April 2014 article published by The Guardian, Martin Robbins writes the following:
So around 24 to 35% of men want to put more restrictions on abortion, against 43 to 59% of women – a consistent gap of around 20 percentage points. That raises some pretty big implications, the most obvious being that if it were left to women to vote on the issue, with men out of the picture, there’s a good chance that the result would be in favour of restricting abortion.
Women opposed to abortion don’t necessarily base their opposition on religious beliefs. Attorney Kelsey Hazzard is the founder and president of Secular Pro-Life, an organization that bases its pro-life stance on non-religious arguments.
Hazzard has a particular message that she is promoting. In a statement titled “Anti-abortion is not anti-woman,” she says this:
It makes as much sense to say that the pro-life position is inherently anti-woman as it does to say that the pro-choice position is inherently anti-child. If you hate women you’ll want them to have fewer options; if you hate children you’ll want them destroyed before they’re born. But what does that have to do with the feelings and intentions of average pro-lifers and pro-choicers? Nothing.
Pro-lifers fight abortion, not because we want to limit women, but because we want to increase respect and protection for fetal life.
In a June 2013 opinion piece that she co-authored, Hazzard writes, “Abortion advocacy groups refer to themselves as “women’s groups.” They claim that pro-lifers are waging a “war on women.” And the media parrots them at every turn. Under these circumstances, pro-life women can be forgiven for feeling isolated and alone. The abortion movement has worked hard to erase pro-life women’s very existence from the public discourse. The reality is that abortion advocacy groups only represent the tiny sliver of women and men who want abortion to be legal for any reason and through all nine months of pregnancy. Most American women reject that extreme view.”
Hazzard is not the only woman presenting that message. A National Catholic Register story quotes March for Life president Jeanne Mancini as saying, “People need to wake up to the fact that being pro-life and pro-woman go hand-in-hand. To separate a healthy respect and understanding of the inherent dignity and respect for woman from the innate capacity for women to bear children creates a false tension and dichotomy.”
Pro-life women think of themselves as being opposed to an ongoing war against unborn babies, and they express their opposition in events such as “Women Betrayed”.
Regardless of what one believes about the legitimacy of abortion, one fact remains. Any act that permanently stops a beating heart is an act of killing, which is why one will find plenty of political moderates participating in pro-life rallies.
By the way, being pro-life doesn’t mean that one agrees with everything done in the name of the pro-life movement. It is possible for a pro-life person to step across the line and do something that is unethical or illegal.
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The “Wanted” posters say the following about David: “Wanted: A refugee from planet Melmac masquerading as a human. Loves cats. If seen, contact the Alien Task Force.”