Hardly has a week gone by when one columnist wrote a ludicrous and misleading piece on pro-lifers, and already we have another writer doing exactly the same thing. We have another pro-death opinion piece demonstrating similar sorts of mental confusion and moral imbalance.
The earlier piece and my commentary on it can be found here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/11/04/no-choice-from-the-pro-choicers/
The piece in today’s Melbourne Age covers the same story and uses the same twisted logic and suffers from the same ethical diarrhoea. Both pieces mentioned the Occupy protestors, and both complained about peaceful pro-life vigils outside of abortion mills in Melbourne. And both pieces insisted that these pro-lifers must be moved on.
Suzy Freeman-Greene, like Susie O’Brien before her, displays a rather large deficit in clear thinking and moral reasoning. Neither one can see through the logic of their own reckless presuppositions, and neither one will allow facts to get in the way of their pro-death ideology.
The easiest way to cut through their moral fog is to point out the moral equivalence of their position to that of a very similar issue of a few centuries ago. Indeed, simply replace a few terms and we all can see the utter bankruptcy of their positions.
For example, Freeman-Greene says this: “Terminating a pregnancy is a deeply private matter. Women should not be subjected to harassment and surveillance on the morning of the operation. They deserve better.” To see the utter foolishness of this, simply see how others argued the very same thing not all that long ago:
“Keeping a slave is a deeply private matter. People should not be subjected to harassment and surveillance when they purchase a slave. They deserve better.” Like slavery, abortion is not at all a private matter but a basic human rights issue. In both cases those promoting these activities have sought to convince us that the person in question (a black or an unborn baby) is in fact a non-person, and can therefore be treated as we please.
Just as the slave owner could treat a slave as mere property and not as a human being, so today the pro-aborts want to treat the unborn as mere blobs of tissue instead of unique persons with every right to life as they have. We now rightly deplore the depraved logic of the pro-slavery crowd, but we don’t yet seem to see the same conceptual ugliness of the pro-abortion brigade.
Freeman-Greene cites a study which shows that women going to the killing centres feel uncomfortable about the protestors: “70 per cent felt stigmatised by them”. Of course they feel stigmatised. A group of peaceful anti-slavery protestors holding pictures of poor abused black people would also make slave buyers feel stigmatised as well.
In the same way showing pictures of bloodied and battered baby seals makes the seal killers feel stigmatised. That is the whole idea: to raise public consciousness about these bloody activities. If a woman feels guilty about going to an abortion mill, perhaps that is a very good thing indeed. It shows us that she is still a real person with a conscience.
It is only when the conscience gets fully deadened that such guilt and shame no longer can produce the desired effect. Guilt and shame are inbuilt warning devices, seeking to alert us to a course of action which must be reversed, and pronto.
And if the worst these women feel is some stigmatisation or guilt trips, at least they can still live to reflect on it all. The end result of abortion is only always just one thing: a dead baby. The baby has absolutely no choice in the matter, and he or she does not even have the luxury of feeling stigmatised or not – only living people can experience that – or anything else.
I have not been the only commentator to write on these matters. When the first article came out last week, one writer managed to get an opinion piece into a website, and it is worth mentioning. Joel Hodge examined the issue of sidewalk protests, and discussed the calls to move them away from abortion mills.
Says Hodge, the Occupy crowd is not at all like the pro-life movement: “Most people (including the Mayor) see a difference between permanently occupying a public place which makes it inaccessible to others, and occasionally congregating on a footpath that still remains accessible. The irony, of course, is that the great mantra of the pro-abortion movement, about the integrity and control that a woman should have over her body, does not seem to apply to those who have an opposing view. If there is a chance, it seems that the state should take control of the bodies of protesters, disrespect their rights and forcefully move them on.”
And as he rightly notes, the real issue here is freedom of information and informed consent – the sort of stuff choice is all about. Women should be able to hear about the risks they may face, and the options and alternatives available to them. But the abortion mills and their media supporters want to take this choice away from women:
“The clinic supporters want people who are providing information about alternatives to abortion to not have the chance to give women, who are often confused and in difficult situations, information and opportunities about alternatives to abortion. Good information and financial support results in real choices, in which some women decide to actually allow their baby to be born. Yet, the clinic supporters want these information-providers moved on and choice denied. Why? One argument is that it is bad for business and staff turn-over. It is good to remember that abortion is a business, as well as an ideological agenda.
“As some feel threatened by the Occupy movement, it could be that the clinic supporters want the state and the police to protect their economic interests against those who provide alternatives. We should be careful when businesses call on the state, particularly in the form of police coercion, to protect their interests. These are murky waters. I’m not arguing that the clinic should not have its legal rights protected. I am arguing that the state should not be called on to do more than protect legitimate and legal rights, especially in a competitive marketplace where people are supposed to have the chance for ‘choice’.”
Yes, at the end of the day, the pro-choicers care little about genuine choice. The abortionists themselves are simply about making money – lots of money. They do not want women to hear the truth about their greedy practices, and they don’t want the public to know either.
In the same way, the slave traders did not want the public to know what they were up to. They wanted to paint a pretty picture of an immoral trade. But campaigners like Wilberforce did everything they could to let the public know what the reality in fact was.
That is just what the pro-life street vigils are all about: offering important information and real informed choices to the public at large and to these women in particular. People like O’Brien and Freeman-Greene want to strip away that right of the pro-lifers, and ban that information from getting to those who need it the most.
What an anti-choice bunch those “pro-choicers” are.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/some-occupy-to-protest-others-to-hamper-harangue-and-hurt-20111111-1nbn4.html
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3638758.html
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