Politics

Try not to think about the baby

Ruben Navarrete has written a riveting piece for The Daily Beast titled, “I Don’t Know If I’m Pro-Choice After Planned Parenthood Videos.” Navarrete says that he has been pro-choice since his college days 30 years ago. In a rather frank admission, he describes how he came to his position:

I still consider myself pro-choice, as I have for the last 30 years. I staked out this position during my freshmen year in college. Even then, I understood the abortion debate was a tug-of-war between competing rights—those of the mother versus those of an unborn baby. I sided with the mother. And I tried not to think about the baby.

Navarrete goes on to describe how the recent videos have awakened his conscience to the reality of abortion. How had he been able to avoid this reality until now? He explains, “I tried not to think about the baby.”

It has long been the strategy of pro-choice propaganda to get people to do exactly what Navarrete did—not think about the baby. They talk about “choice” and “women’s health” and number of other slogans that do not address the central moral issue—the life of the baby. The pro-choice movement advances only insofar as it suppresses that question.

To anyone reading this who favors abortion rights: Are you pro-abortion on principle? Or are you pro-abortion because you’ve disciplined your conscience not to think about the unborn baby?

11 Comments

  • Gary Good

    They can’t think about the baby. Everyone of them would be utterly appalled by a mother who killed her one-year old baby. They rightly wouldn’t be able to fathom how a mother could kill her baby. Especially if the mother used any of the excuses that are used to abort a baby.

  • David Powell

    And this is the power of what this group has done in producing these videos. Euphemistic language loses its charm when the brute reality is displayed in raw video. Praise God for these people.

  • Curt Day

    The issue isn’t just thinking about the baby. The issue is whether we will recognize the intrinsic value of human life and not just in what we decide to do about the unborn. And those of us religiously conservative Christians will have a stronger defense for the pro-life position if we recognize the intrinsic value of human life in decisions made after the baby has been born. For some legitimately point to our economic ideologies and our defense for America’s penchant for going to war as areas where we fail to recognize the intrinsic value of human life.

    • James Stanton

      I was reminded of this when reading articles observing the 70 years that have passed since the usage of the atom bombs in Japan. For most of my life I had justified that action. Among those killed, however, were innocent children and babies in the womb. I now consider dropping those bombs to be a horrible atrocity that can’t be justified as anything else..

      I think the PP videos have raised awareness of what it means to be pro-life. I think just about all Presidents in the abortion era have supported rape and incest exceptions and funding of PP in one way or another through federal budgets. There’s definitely been a change in opinion on those two issues for candidates.

  • Christiane Smith

    Hi JAMES,
    I like how your support of ‘life’ has extended into thinking about other areas where taking life has been previously ‘acceptable’, and that now you are seeing a change in your thinking that brings your belief in the sanctity of ‘life’ into a more integral point of view. I’m hopeful that many people will begin to view the sanctity of all life in a more unified way, so that we no longer see any kind of killing as part of a ‘solution’, or as a ‘necessary evil’.
    A friend’s step-daughter once wrote these words: ” Let me stop being that thing against which anything, everything, can break. ” She was writing about embracing all living things with love for the Source that gave them life and sustained them in existance. Those words made a deep impression on me and I also was able to ‘widen’ my concern for life in all of its expressions, perhaps especially when in forms that are broken and imperfect. I cannot see things in the same way anymore.

  • Aaron Ginn

    I’m pro-choice on principle. I understand fully that aborting a child is just that – aborting a child. However, there are some issues that are even more important than protecting a potential life. One of these is self-ownership. If one does not own one’s own body – and everything in it including an unviable child – then who does? I think people who use abortion as a form of birth control are reprehensible, but then again, I think children born to them would be in dire straits.

    I believe that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I support making birth control available to all who want it. I support early sex education for children. I support reducing the number of abortions as much as possible without violating the right to one’s own body.

    I don’t like abortion at all. It’s horrible, but the alternative – allowing other people to override one’s right to self-ownership – is just as bad. I don’t expect anyone here to agree with me and I’m not going to argue about it. Denny asked a question about a very difficult issue, and I answered.

    • Curt Day

      Aaron,
      If I thought that the unborn child was or had a potential life, I could agree with you. But that is not what I think. Yes, “self-ownership” is important, but that extends to all who are living, not just the mom.

      I would appreciate it if you provided a precise definition of “self-ownership” and the limits to which one can use “self-ownership” as a justification for their actions.

      • Aaron Ginn

        One, and only one, follow-up comment from me because I know these discussions never get anywhere and never move the meter.

        A child in the womb is not sentient, cannot survive without the mother, and in my opinion does not carry equal status as a self-sufficient human being. Self-ownership has little or no meaning when the individual in question has no sense of self to begin with. In a free society, the state cannot dictate to a self-sufficient individual what he/she can or cannot do with his/her own body. If a person does not have the right to make individual decisions about himself, then no other right carries any weight. The upholding of this right can and does carry negative consequences like the ability to decide when to end one’s own life or when to abort a child. I don’t fool myself like many pro-choice advocates that abortion is not a tragedy, but the consequences of removing the right to self-ownership are even more tragic.

        Sometimes there are no perfect answers. Sometimes we as a society have to accept that some options are less bad than others.

        • Johnny Mason

          “A child in the womb is not sentient, cannot survive without the mother, and in my opinion does not carry equal status as a self-sufficient human being.”

          A child outside the womb can do none of those things either. A baby cannot make individual decisions about himself. Using your reasoning that child has no right to life and should not be protected.

          • Ian Shaw

            With a statement about being sentient/cannot survive w/o the mother, that’s when I always “bring out the toddler”. Same could be said about the elderly as well.

    • Christiane Smith

      Hi AARON,
      I appreciate your forthrightness on this very difficult issue. I come from a place of wanting Christian people to be involved in changing hearts, not using politics and the law to ‘force’ any American citizen to take the steps many did prior to Roe v. Wade . . . back alley abortions, coat-hangar abortions, travel to unwholesome settings where ‘medical’ care is often not what it is believed to be . . . I am an older person who remembers the days.
      For some reason, many in the Church have abandoned hope in a productive ministry in order to put their faith into politics and ‘the law’ to make changes that the Church ought to be pursuing within the framework of the gospel mission. I am concerned because it does sometimes seem that politics is the all and all of this ‘modern’ approach to getting things changed, without regard for the hearts and souls and consciences of individuals whose dignity as human persons should not be disregarded. The short-cut of a political solution seems to me to be an un-Christian one at best. I think it may drive many from Christ.

      I see another way forward for the Church to work ‘as Church’ to change minds and hearts, but for the present, I am more of a voice in the wilderness. The ‘play’ will run its course. People may get their ways politically, one way or the other, but unless the Church is on mission in the world ‘as Church’ and not as a wing of a political party, I think we will not see the fullness of healing that is possible in this ‘difficult issue’. ‘Controlling’ people is not healing them. That, we know.

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