as seen at Target
Abortion. The word ushers tension into any conversation. No matter what I write, someone will be offended. It’s a sensitive, complicated subject and a tough post.
This election season, I’ve been surprised by the ease with which some pro-choice women assert they speak for all American women when, in fact, they don’t. Gallup reports 50 percent of Americans now call themselves pro-life while a record-low 41 percent are pro-choice.
January 22, 2013, is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion in the United States. More than 54 million unborn American citizens have been legally killed by abortion in this country since 1973. More than 54 million American citizens. More than 3,200 a day.
What would our nation look like today if those people had not been killed?
Imagine what our economy might look like if those people had been allowed to live, mature, and enter the workforce. Imagine what the demand for goods and services of 53 million more people would mean to American businesses today. Imagine what 53 million more taxpayers would mean to our underfunded Social Security. Imagine the leadership, ingenuity, talents, and service our country lost when we sacrificed 53 million of our citizens to abortion. About two million families are waiting for children to adopt in the U.S. Imagine what it would mean to them if children who were aborted were adopted instead.
Celebrities like to repeat the pro-choice rallying cry: If abortion is limited rather than expanded, women’s rights will somehow go back 40 years. If you’re not pro-choice, then you’re not pro-woman! Hypothetically half of the people who have been killed by abortion in America were women. That’s more than 26 million women who’ve been killed by abortion in this country since 1973. The pro-choice position cannot support this killing of female babies and call itself pro-woman at the same time.
Guttmacher Institute reports if current rates continue, three in 10 American women will have an abortion by age 45. I don’t condemn women who’ve had abortions. But I wonder about their private suffering. What are the emotional and psychological costs to parents who abort their children? How does abortion desensitize our culture, cheapen the value we place on human life, and threaten the well-being of our society?
Some will argue that the child who is subject to abortion is inside a woman’s body so it’s different. But the child inside the womb is still a child. The old school feminist arguments that the child in the womb is a piece of disposable tissue or an unwanted intruder no longer hold. Science shows and common sense knows life begins at conception. Even feminist Naomi Wolf admitted abortion ends human life.
Other women will say that although they would never choose abortion for themselves, they remain pro-choice because they don’t want to tell other women what to do. They don’t want the government to meddle in our personal business.
as seen at Target
Is killing another person ever really just an order of personal business?
Our government declares it’s illegal to abuse or kill dogs, cats, whales, and all sorts of other creatures. We agree it’s illegal to murder people. It’s illegal to abuse or kill children. How can we apply a different standard to the killing of unborn children?
President Obama and Mitt Romney part ways when it comes to abortion. Obama’s pro-choice position is well-known. For him, gone are the days of “safe, legal and rare.” Liberal media and pundits have tried to spin Romney’s position on abortion as murky. But Romney’s own website states his pro-life views quite clearly.
Pro-life and pro-choice advocates believe the sun rises and sets with Supreme Court appointments. What if Roe v. Wade was overturned or made more restrictive? Would prohibiting or limiting the killing of our own people really be that bad?
There are many questions and no easy answers. I would say the same to Obama and Romney. Whether or not you agree with my beliefs, surely we agree the abortion issue is wildly unsettled in the hearts of Americans. We will continue to struggle with this. As well we should.
To read more of my thoughts about abortion, please see my post entitled Whisper.
Pingback: Aimee: Rosen, Akin, Mourdock, Dunham, Election 2012 from Lady Parts to Voters’ Hearts | Finding (Un)Common Ground
Aimee,
You’ve made an important point: “pro-choice” women do not speak for all women. In fact, I believe one of the greatest failures of the “pro-choice” movement is the unwillingness to address the deep conflict a woman feels when she finds herself confronted with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. Naomi Wolfe’s piece strongly argues for an understanding and acknowledgement of that struggle. And yet, she still comes out arguing FOR the right to terminate a pregnancy. No woman WANTS an abortion, and yet many chose to have one for reasons only they can fully know.
I fully agree with you that making adoption a more meaningful option is important to reducing the rate of abortion. Sadly, we know adoption is riddled with issues of racism. A 2009 study from Yale (http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/apmicro/am10/wexler-100304.pdf) reveals most adopters are white and they prefer white babies over hispanic and African-American babies. Of the 2 million families waiting for adoption, how many are waiting because they refuse to adopt a child of a different race?
Finally, we can disagree until we are both blue in the face about the start of life. Is it at that moment of conception? Is it at the moment of viability (around 24-26 weeks)? Is it somewhere in between? We don’t KNOW. But that isn’t the point. The real question is what to do when a woman finds herself strapped by an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy be it due to a failure of birth control, rape, incest, a “mistake,” or the myriad of other reasons that we all know exist. Requiring her to carry to term forces women into a state of servitude, or into decisions that risk her life.
Remember Margaret Atwood’s chilling novel, The Handmaid’s Tale? If conservative Christian’s have their way, we won’t be far from that reality.
Read farther down that gallup poll you mentioned. While 50% of Americans may call themselves “Pro-Life,” only 20% of Americans believe abortion should never be an option. The remaining believe it should be made available in at least some circumstances. On this point, Romney, who according to his running mate does not agree with his GOP counterparts, may actually be more aligned with the rest of America.
Lisen
Lisen, Romney seems willing to compromise. I’m more comfortable with that (and I think the 50% in the Gallup poll would be as well) rather than with Obama’s less restrictive stance.
I know Wolf remains pro-choice, and I know she took some heat for writing her piece. For me, it’s still so striking and confounding that she can admit abortion kills a human being and still support it.
We have personal friends who’ve adopted children of other races domestically and internationally. They all happen to be fellow Christians we know through our church family. Maybe some of the families in the Yale study are waiting for a certain race, but I know these families were not. And I believe there are other families who would be willing to adopt a child of any race… Size, shape, and color doesn’t matter to them; they want a child. That’s all.
Long, long ago I read Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The story is a bit hazy for me now, so I’ll have to review it. I do remember being creeped out by it. But I don’t remember drawing any similarities to the conservative Christian home, church, or friends I grew up with… I’ll try to grab a copy at the library to see if I can figure out what you mean.
Aimee
Lisen, it occurred to me after I logged the comment above that abortion is the choice actually riddled with racism. Abort73.com reports in America black children are aborted at five times the rate of white children. See this from Alveda King, niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: http://www.christianpost.com/news/alveda-king-calls-abortion-racist-31951/
Aimee,
Not sure about the reliability of the sources you are referring to regarding race. Guttmacher says abortion breaks down:
36% white, 30% black, 25% hispanic, and the remaining from all other races.
http://www.guttmacher.org/in-the-know/characteristics.html
Lisen, here’s the link to Abort73′s page about Abortion and Race: http://www.abort73.com/abortion/abortion_and_race/
Hi Lisen. You’re not comparing the same things: percentage of abortions and abortion rate. You’re repeating Guttmacher’s claims of the percentage of nationwide abortions that are among whites, blacks, Hispanics and others. Guttmacher, by the way, is funded millions of dollars by Planned Parenthood (originally started as a “research” arm within it to help promote its very unscientific propaganda). They’re hardly a reliable and objective source, especially when considering they NEVER reveal any raw data to substantiate their claims. That aside, in NYC, for instance (home of Planned Parenthood), black babies are aborted at 5.8 times the rate (number of abortions per 1000 live births) of white babies, according to the NY State Dept of Health. More black babies are aborted than are born alive in NYC (1,489 aborted for every 1,000 born alive). You want to talk racism? Death is always the ultimate and natural consequence of racism. Abortion ends in death, and vastly disproportionately among black babies. Adoption, which affirms human life and embraces the supposedly “unwanted” child, is often the ultimate act of racial reconciliation.
We’ve documented all of this, extensively, on our site http://www.TooManyAborted.com … the campaign that Planned Parenthood has tried desperately to combat.
I find it amusing that you speak of adoption as rife with racism. You cite the Yale study which specifically states on pg 32, that: “racial preferences over offspring HAVE NOT BEEN documented”. Even relying on anecdotal evidence (because there are no federal stats on adoption since 1997), the Yale study states that “these statistics CANNOT BE directly related to [adoptive parents'] preferences”. You’ve completely misrepresented the study with claims it could not POSSIBLY make. So, as the study is already noticeably biased, they make an inference without doing the research into reasons for the foster care disparities.
I’m black and was adopted into a multi-racial family of 15. Transracial adoption CONTINUES to increase. The “racism” in adoption is from pro-abortion groups like the National Association of Black Social Workers who decreed in 1972 that “black babies should NEVER be placed in white homes for ANY reason.” They’ve worked hard to placed all kinds of racial barriers to black children (especially mixed ones like me) from being placed in loving homes, forcing them to languish in foster care and repeatedly cycle through failed kinship care. The General Accounting Office reports that kinship care (NOT RACISM) is the reason why black children remain in the foster care system. In attempts to “preserve” a child’s culture by only placing them with black relatives, has caused detrimental harm to these children who are denied loving families of another race because of the real racism that exists from those taking an race-based approach (which is illegal according to federal legislation, such as the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act.)
Lisen, your remarks about adoption reveal how little you know about the historical and statistical facts about adoption. Judging from your remark that human life begins at the point of viability shows how much the “progressive” mind is so willing to ignore the facts. There’s NO question among biologists when life begins. It’s an incontrovertible scientific fact that it begins at conception. And yes, it is the point. Abortion advocates have to distort science, history, and the statistics to justify the needless slaughter of 54 million beautiful possibilities. But facts are not what drives a pro-abortion progressive worldview that reduces the humanity of the unborn the same way “progressives” reduced people of my complexion to less than human for more than a century.
Offering death as a solution to “unplanned” life solves nothing. Imagine if that were the solution to all other social ills? Liberal feminism preaches that pregnancy is bondage instead of the miraculous gift by which you, me, and any one else breathing (and responding to this post) can enjoy the sorrows and triumphs of life. When people decide the worth of any other human being, history shows us over and over again the trail of destruction that is left behind.
Thank you for your thoughtful and extensive response. To be clear, I do not advocate a “pro-abortion” stance. I believe the said truth is abortion will exist. I advocate making it safe, legal and very very rare. Cross-race adoptions like the one your family did and like the one of the family below are the dream. I hope we will see more and more of these in the future.
As for the origin of life, we will have to agree to disagree.
I find the comment, “…adoption is riddled with racism” interesting. I think more appropriately it should be stated that our world is riddled with racism and that racism touches adoption just like it touches every other part of our world. Therefore, to suggest that adoption is not a viable option is not fair to the children needing homes. When we were looking into adoption to add to our family, we looked at all programs and felt strongly that God called us to China. So, in addition to our 3 biological children, we have a son from China and we are in the process of going back to bring home a 3 year old little boy with special needs. As a multi-race family, we have seen racism but we don’t give in to it and we try not to let it tell us who we are or who our children are. In fact, in giving our children siblings of another race, we are changing how they view race and they then share that helthy view with their peers. It can actually be an antidote to racism. As a country, I think we give racism too much power in our lives. To make people hesitate about rescuing children or saving them from abortion because the issues are touched by racism is tragic.
Pam, thank you for this eloquent and powerful comment. Your example speaks louder than any words I could write.
Pam,
As the godmother to a beautiful little girl adopted from China, I couldn’t agree more. I love what you have said, “giving our children siblings of another race, we are changing how they view race.” You are also modeling for the rest of us what family can be. Thank you for sharing.
Lisen
Thanks for this thoughtful and heartfelt post. Definitely a strongly divisive issue, I appreciate you and Lisen being willing to address this head-on with civility and decorum!
Thanks, Libby. We’re trying! It’s difficult to remain open to hearing opposing viewpoints, but how else will we ever reach resolution on this?
My husband and I (both caucasian) have four children (three boys and a girl). The boys are our biological children and the baby girl is ours through adoption. Our daughter is African American. When my husband was in high school his girlfriend got into an argument with her math teacher about abortion. His girlfriend was pro-life and the math teacher was decidedly not. The math teacher challenged the girlfriend saying: “that it was all well and good to oppose abortion but what are you doing about it?” So the girlfriend went home to her family that night posing the same question. The family took action. Through an adoption agency they heard about birthmothers in crisis pregnancies who either wanted to place their children for adoption or parent them. Some of these women were in abusive relationships or had been kicked out of their homes. Over the time that my husband and his girlfriend dated, the family took in 3 women (1 at a time) into their home and sheltered, fed and loved these women during the toughest months of their lives. My husband saw this example and decided he wanted to be a part of the solution too. For us, we have lived out our pro-life beliefs and Christian faith by adopting a baby from a teenage mother. We are so thankful for our daughter’s young birthmother and her brave and courageous decision to carry her baby to term. We were open to any race and waited two years before a birthmother chose our family to parent her child. During those two years, we were part of the pool of people birthmothers could choose from… a very important role. We gave birthmothers of all races a choice between families, which gave them some control over their situation.
There will be special challenges being a multiracial family. Our daughter will probably have some identity issues that might prove challenging. Right now, however, she is a ray of light in our family. We all love her to pieces and are sure that she belongs to us. We don’t focus on the color of her skin or the tightness of her curls but we are respectful of them. I am committed to learning how to do black hair. We will also strive to make sure she is not the token black child in her neighborhood, church, dance class, school etc.While we don’t think adoption is for everyone (although more folks should consider it), we do believe that pro-life folks need to be active in supporting this stance. As for adoption being “riddled with issues of racism,” I believe that to be true – to an extent. We were open to adopting many children of differing races before we were chosen. That means there were two years worth f adoptive families waiting and receiving babies before us.But, I believe it is changing and more and more folks are realizing that family’s skin colors don’t have to match.
Thank you, Elizabeth, for contributing your beautiful story to this conversation.