Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Enough: ultrasounds, abortion, women and blood

While calling us "anti-choice," some "pro-choice" men and women are beginning to look at the true nature of what is being chosen. They're noticing that we who oppose abortion are more likely to accept the woman with an unwanted pregnancy and championing the laws that make adoption and parenting a true choice. They're noticing that we have valid reasons, too.

The Family Research Council blog has a beautiful post quoting the words of one of the many "pro-choice" women that are being convicted about the humanity of the unborn child.

In the May, 2007 Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan recounts a heart wrenching review of two books, The Choices We Made, and The Girls Who Went Away, of abortion, maternity homes and the girls and women who are and have been impacted by it.

Along the way, she tells us,

But my sympathy for the beliefs of people who oppose abortion is enormous, and it grows almost by the day. An ultrasound image taken surprisingly early in pregnancy can stop me in my tracks. In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized: a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle. One of the newest types of prenatal imaging, the three-dimensional sonogram—which is so fully realized that happily pregnant women spend a hundred dollars to have their babies’ first “photograph” taken—is frankly terrifying when examined in the context of the abortion debate. The demands pro-life advocates make of pregnant women are modest: All they want is a little bit of time. All they are asking, in a societal climate in which out-of-wedlock pregnancy is without stigma, is that pregnant women give the tiny bodies growing inside of them a few months, until the little creatures are large enough to be on their way, to loving homes.

These sonogram images lay claim to the most powerful emotion I have ever known: maternal instinct. Mothers are charged with protecting the vulnerable and the weak among us, and most of all, taking care of babies—the tiniest and neediest—first. My very nature as a woman, then, pulls me in two directions.


Abortion hurts us all. As Ms. Flanagan says, abortion has left a trail of blood. It doesn't matter whether the abortion is legal or illegal, the blood flows from the cuts made by the culture that makes so many women throughout history and all around the world believe that they have no choice other than to choose this child or their lives, this child or their future, or (Lord help us) this child or his father.

It's past time to look at abortion and say, "Enough."

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