The Blog of Joshua and Steve

Still Freedom Through Truth - About Abortion

OK, it's still my blog, but when friends confront me with or present me with the truth, I want to share it with those who may read my blog. Consequently, when friend Joshua sent me this comment a short while ago, I once again wanted to create a separate post for it.

It is a valid response to the post I made last night of what Suzanne Fortin originally said in No Apologies, and which I shamelessly extracted and commented on here.

Here is what Joshua had to say:

It was my generation - or half of it, actually - that ushered in this abortion free-for-all. As men, however, the prevailing feminist ethos of the time insisted that we didn't have a horse in this race. "Our Bodies, Our Selves" and "my body, my choice" apparently applied to the female gender only. There was no "our" pronoun in the abortion debate, such as "what to do about OUR fetus". As such, men who dared voice their pro-life perspective were hushed up and/or ignored.

Around the time I reached 40, I learned that Canada - my country - permitted third trimester abortions. I couldn't believe it until I spoke to a friend's sister - a former RN - who left the profession the night she was assigned the job of holding an aborted seven-and-a-half-month fetus which had survived the abortion procedure until the baby died. "If that baby had come the natural way, we'd have been pulling out all the stops and we'd have saved another preemie," she explained, "but THIS baby I was told to hold and monitor until she died. IT TOOK THREE HOURS! I left my shift feeling so filthy." She was in tears by this point. "I called in my resignation the next day. I never worked as a nurse again."

I was DUMBSTRUCK when I learned this. Since then, there's not an opportunity to talk the truth about "abortion" which I don't take.

Abortion is murder, and this nurse's story serves to underline that fact.Abortion is discriminatory insofar as it is probably more common among the lower economic classes of Canadian society. Appealing to Canadians' sense of egalitarianism on this issue is a half-measure which will likely result in some bizarre piece of legislation acknowledging that, despite the disproportionate incidence of abortion among the lower economic classes of Canadian society, every Canadian life terminated in this manner was/is/will be of "equal value" - i.e. no value at all. Once the state has legislated "no value" to the life of a fetus, we are just a couple of turns away from the state declaring that same about citizens' lives overall. Hello totalitarianism!

While I agree that "Abortion is discriminatory" is LESS OFFENSIVE and thus, perhaps, a more marketable concept than "Abortion is murder", it is also only half-as-true (if that).

No matter which way you slice it, the actual debate necessitates - at some point - the quick summation of each side's perspective. On the pro-life side, that summation IS "Abortion is murder. There is no way around that fact and that reality. Anything else smacks of semantics and compromise.

Reducing "Abortion is murder" to "Abortion is discriminatory" is akin to watering down "God is all powerful" to "God's a REALLY, REALLY strong entity."

Arr half-truths spoken by those who know the whole truth the same thing as lies?

Marketing the FACT that abortion is murder is a Pandora's Box if ever there was one. Then again, who could WATCH a "health care worker" hold a live fetus in
his/her arms for three hours until the s/he died?

You can't avoid the truth when you know it already. Or maybe I'm missing something here...

Thank you, Joshua. There is no doubt in my mind, and I know in the mind of Suzanne Fortin and others in the pro-life movement that Abortion is Murder of the most defenseless people in our society. One of Suzanne's last paragraphs included the following:

Does the adoption of a human-rights framework mean that we have to put aside all our religious-based objections to abortion? Not by any means. One of the most important things that pro-lifers must understand about a social movement is that it must be complex and include a wide variety of approaches and strategies – sometimes competing against one another. There is no magic bullet in this fight. Every perspective or tactic is a channel through which a small number of people will engage.

I said that Pro-lifers can work with this, and I believe it to be true, true that we can work with it. For people who are pro-life, we can never forget that abortion is the taking of a life, where the owner of that life taken has no say in its taking. So, who will speak up for that child, who is unwanted by its own parents, as least momentarily, long enough for it to be put to death?

The point that I was trying to make is that there is some leverage in human rights as a separate component of the overall strategy that has merit. For friend Joshua, I am reminded of another Joshua, in the bible, who when confronted with an enemy too big to defeat, relied on God, and went out to do battle with that foe. The enemy got confused somehow, and basically killed themselves in their confusion. So, God turned the strength of the attacking force on itself, thus destroying it.

If God is putting a bug in Suzanne's and other pro-life people's ears to use the strength of the enemies of life to get them confused and to destroy their own pro-death cause, then as Gamaliel in the book of Acts said:

"For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God."

We need more Joshua's, both my friend and his namesake in this day and age. As a man, I feel a corporate sense of shame that men, who contribute to the DNA of every child on earth, have not as one stood up and said: "Abortion is Murder. It is wrong. We will defend our born and unborn children even to our own deaths. We will protect our women as bearers of our children, because that is our vocation in life."

Thank you Joshua.