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Disclaimer: The opinions stated in this piece are not necessarily the opinions of Maryland Students for Life. We provide this article as an educational aid for pro-life interests but do not imply official endorsement of the author's views. For more information on our stances, see the About Us page.

December 30, 2004 - The Retriever Weekly (UMBC) opinion page
Amber Sampson
Rethinking abortion: Just a 'single issue?'

   After the first presidential debate last Thursday, the "Daily Show" did a
skit about undecided voters, in which one host brought a group of them together
and-after waiting several minutes for them to pick a chair-cursed them out for
their intolerable indecisiveness.

   Well, color me intolerable.

   I'm all but set on going with a write-in candidate, but part of me is still
waiting to be wooed. Several friends have tried to impress upon me the
superiority of Kerry's policies concerning the poor and health insurance and
global cooperation and other such laudable liberal goals. While I do in fact
have several reasons for my lack of enthusiasm for both candidates, it never
fails to infuriate fellow Democrats that my issues with Kerry, more often than
not, come back to the big one: abortion.

   Many Democrats fail to understand how we pro-life, progressive, undecided
voters can seemingly discard our liberal values for a "single issue." This
failure to recognize the gravity of the abortion problem for pro-lifers,
however, is the biggest signal that the issue is not even remotely understood.

   What makes pro-lifers pro-life (except in Senator Kerry's case) is the
realization that life begins at conception. To a pro-lifer, this is
non-negotiable, and painfully obvious. We draw no arbitrary lines; there is-as
UMBC philosophy professor Susan Dwyer stated in last year's stem cell research
panel-an unbroken line of development from conception through birth.

   That being said, the crime of abortion is not that some people are never
given the chance to live; it's that they ARE living, and their lives are
terminated, legally, at the rate of some 46 million per year worldwide. That
includes about one million deaths of American innocents a year -- a number that
would leave liberals in the streets for days if it came as a result of
state-sanctioned war.

   Many opponents see legal abortion as THE civil rights crisis of our times
because it involves recognizing (again) that our definition of who is human is
too narrow. This time, it needs to expand to include the unborn, who ought to be
offered equal protection to that given to young children and other vulnerables.
"Unborn child" is not simply a catch-phrase or a pro-life euphemism for "fetus"
-- it's a signal of pro-lifers' lack of distinction between children who happen
to be currently growing inside or outside of the womb.

   Having acknowledged that unborn children are no less children because of
their stage of development, it becomes no longer possible to be "pro-child,
pro-choice." To me, stating that abortion is an acceptable way to make "every
child a wanted child" is analogous to stating that the solution to child
homelessness is to run the foster care system like an animal shelter and kill
the ones no one wants to take home. As much as I want to support health care,
social services, and education for our nation's children, I can't do it with a
party that only values the convenient ones. That's not liberal, or morally
acceptable.

   In addition to these "right to life" issues concerning unborn children,
abortion is also detrimental to the health and well-being of women. This line of
argument is not often heard, because it is swept aside by the dogmatic abortion
rights stance of today's mainstream feminism. MTV ran a special last Wednesday
on sexual politics, in which a former intern for Feminists for Life (FFL) -- a
nonpartisan, nonsectarian organization devoted to following in the traditions of
early feminism -- was edited out of the final cut. The producers explained that
they decided to go with sound bites that echoed the common objection to
abortion, that it's murder, and they didn't have time for the "nuanced
objections" that FFL has "so eloquently articulated."

   Eloquently articulated it is, in the tradition of feminist foremothers who
saw the tragedy of abortion, not only for children (well over half of whom are
female), but for the women who participate in it. FFL's stance is that abortion
is a sign that society has not met the needs of women, and that making abortion
the centerpiece of women's liberation is not only deceptive to women who
experience the physical and psychological pain of abortion, but distracting from
other social and political changes that would offer women real choices.

   Pro-life feminist Daphne Clair de Jong wrote in her 1978 book "The Feminist
Sell-Out," "Women will gain their rights only when they demand recognition of
the fact that they are people who become pregnant and give birth-and not always
at infallibly convenient times -- and that pregnant people have the same rights
as others."

   Instead, the demand for abortion rights sends the message to women that their
capabilities for motherhood -- to which the whole of their bodies move and work
-- are something to be disdained and avoided, in order to achieve success and
freedom. It tells women that they ought to be like men -- able to walk away from
the creation of life unchanged. Feminist Frederica Matthewes-Greene laments, "In
no sane country, are women and their own children assumed to be mortal
enemies... When we accept as normal the ripping of a child from her mother's
womb, we violate something disturbingly close to the human story."

   Matthewes-Greene's assessment of a woman's "choice" is that it is ultimately
that between sacrificing her life and career, or sacrificing her children. "If
we refused to choose," she questions, "if we insisted on keeping both our lives
and our bodies intact, what changes would our community have to make?"

   It's not that pro-lifers, ones like me anyway, are just being stubborn in
their preference for the "abortion issue." We truly do want equality, and
economic justice, and social responsibility. But we want equality for all
people, including the unborn. We want economic justice for women, as women. We
want socially responsible policies that don't rip at the heart of family and
maternal instinct. And until we can have all of those things, we will not be
easily wooed.

Used by permission.

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