One of the pro-choice gang’s standard regurgitations is that women never take abortion lightly and only have them for the most agonizing and legitimate of reasons.  With pro-choice people it is not always easy to distinguish when they are lying from when they are simply misinformed.  But such is not the case here.  They are lying and several of their fellow travelers have admitted as much.     

In an interview published in the March 9, 1989, edition of the communist publication, Revolutionary Worker, Marilyn Buckham, who was the director of Buffalo GYN Womenservices Clinic, was asked about the reasons women have abortions.  In her answer, she stated, “Women don’t do this lightly.  I’m sick and tired of hearing this.  Ninety-eight percent of women do do it lightly in here…they think of abortion like brushing their dime teeth and that’s OK with me.”

The reality is, if you go to any abortion clinic waiting room in America you will certainly find women who are there for what they perceive to be difficult circumstances.  But make no mistake, you will also find many who are having their second, third or fourth abortion as well as those who are there for reasons that could never be legitimately described as serious.            

But going beyond that, a recent episode at one of our nation’s “most prestigious” universities has raised the question of whether women ever have abortions after getting pregnant on purpose.  In early April, a pro-choice student at Yale, Aliza Shvarts, claims that she artificially inseminated herself repeatedly during the previous year and then self-aborted using various chemicals and herbs.  This was all done as part of a school art project.  It seems that she had video taped herself sitting in a bathtub doing these abortions on herself, and her plan was to project this video onto a cube that had been covered with blood she had saved from these abortions. 

I will concede that my knowledge of art is not very sophisticated.  My main experience in this field was in junior high school when I drew my own state inspection sticker for my Cushman scooter.  Evidently, it was not very good as a local police officer picked up on the forgery right away.  Needless to say, I was lucky to escape with only a ticket. 

But even though my credentials in this area are suspect, I still have to say that Aliza’s art sounds like it would make those Elvis on velvet things you see sold at abandoned gas stations seem like the Mona Lisa.  I’m also more than a little concerned that we will one day discover that this fiasco was paid for with tax dollars through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In any event, the university tried to extricate itself from this public relations nightmare by informing Shvarts that she would have to publicly state that her story was a hoax before they would allow it to be displayed.  They wanted her to say that the blood was not from abortions but from her menstrual flow.  Apparently, menstrual blood paintings are an approved form of artistic expression at Yale.  (Wouldn’t you love to read the minutes of the meeting where this conclusion was reached.)

Naturally, like any other proud but misunderstood artist, Shvarts refused to compromise and stuck to her story.  She did, however, enter something different in the art show so she would not fail the class.  I don’t know what form the replacement “art” took and I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to know.  Let’s just say that Aliza and I probably have different tastes.  

Surprisingly, the idea that women would abort intentional pregnancies is not a new one.  In the August 18, 1991, edition of the Austin American Statesman, rock singer Sinead O’Connor said she wrote the song My Special Child just two weeks after having an abortion.  She also said that, “It was a planned pregnancy, which I was very happy about.  I was completely in love with the father of the child ... But things didn’t work out between us, and we were both unhappy.  It was too much for him to be able to handle.  He was young and I was on tour, and I was feeling ill all the time because I was pregnant, and I was feeling so awful and I made the decision that it would be better for everybody if I had the abortion.’

About the same time, Oprah Winfrey had a show about women who get pregnant as a ploy to trap men into marriage.  One of the guests stated, with no hesitancy or sense of remorse, that when her attempt at this did not work as planned, she had an abortion. 

There were also revelations about the Olympic committee that oversees enforcement of drug policies discovering a trick some female athletes were using to circumvent the organization’s prohibition against blood doping.  These women were found to be intentionally getting pregnant prior to competition to increase the amount of oxygen in their bodies in order to heighten their performance.  After the competition was over, they would abort.  Olympic officials eventually determined that not only was this happening, it was not an uncommon practice among teams from certain countries.

So how common is it for women to abort an intended pregnancy?  Obviously, no one knows.  But we do know that it is common for women to abort intentional pregnancies when their baby turns out to be handicapped.  For example, in America today, over 90% of Down Syndrome babies are executed before birth and it would be illogical to think that those were all unplanned pregnancies.  On a personal level, through the Life Dynamics abortion malpractice campaign, I have spoken with many abortion-injured women over the years who told me that they had intentionally become pregnant but aborted when something changed in their lives.  One case I remember involved a woman who was forced to have a hysterectomy because of her injury.  She said that she had been trying to get pregnant for two years but aborted after being offered a promotion at work.

From a pro-life perspective, I think we need to keep all of this in context.  In a certain sense, the fact that a woman would have an abortion for frivolous reasons or to end a pregnancy she intentionally sought, is irrelevant.  Some justifications might make us more angry than others, but for the child that’s killed the reasons don’t matter.  The Down Syndrome child carried by a forty-year-old welfare recipient who got pregnant on purpose by a man whose name she doesn’t even remember, is no less valuable than any other child.      

In the final analysis, if the excuses for abortion don’t matter to the children being killed, they shouldn’t matter to us.  Our job is to protect every child in every circumstance.  And that must always be our focus.  

Musing 1

So now, we are being asked to buy Barack Obama’s loopy explanation that he had no idea his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, sometimes threw racist hate-filled tantrums in the pulpit.  Of course, Obama is lying through his teeth and even his most ardent supporters would have to be dumb as a box of rocks not to see it. 

But let’s play stupid for a moment and say that what he is claiming is true.  That means he is telling us that he is so oblivious to the world around him that he can be a member of a church for 20 years and not know about the bizarre antics of the preacher.  But at the same time, he wants us to believe that he is bright enough to run the most complex nation on earth with the world’s largest economy and most powerful military.

This guy needs to pick a lie and stick to it.   

Unfortunately, I think these kind of distractions are causing us to miss the most important issue of all.  There are many people who are certain that Obama is some sort of undercover Muslim and many more who think that Wright is a racist who hates America.  While those things may or may not be true, what is undeniably true is that both claim to be Christians when, in fact, they are both heretics.  And that, my friends, it is the real problem.   

Musing 2

Congress recently hauled in the leaders of the nation’s largest oil companies to discuss the skyrocketing price of gasoline.  You could characterize this hearing as a collection of dimwits who couldn’t run a lemonade stand “investigating” the practices of some of the world’s largest financial institutions. 

Interestingly, while these buffoons were grandstanding in front of the cameras about “obscene” profits in the oil industry, nothing was said about the fact that on every gallon of gas sold in the United States, the government makes several times what the oil companies make.  In other words, if “Big Oil” agreed to sell gasoline at no profit, that would not save nearly as much money as it would if Congress reduced the “obscene” taxes on gasoline.  Of course, we all know that’s not happening.  Getting between Congress and a taxpayer’s wallet is like getting between a hog and the slop bucket.  

But what I do want to know is this: when is Congress going to hold hearings on why Planned Parenthood – a multi-national non-profit corporation with about a billion dollars in assets – made more that 60 million dollars profit last year and is still getting over 300 million dollars a year in taxpayer money?  You can bet the family farm that Planned Parenthood’s return-on-investment percentage is significantly higher than Exxon’s and Mobil’s combined.  So why isn’t Congress getting their panties in a wad over those obscene profits?              

Musing 3 

Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, is being rotated over a low flame for saying that Barack Obama would not be where he is if he was not black.  The interesting thing is, no one came forward to argue whether she was right or not.  The statement alone was enough to brand her a racist, set-off the obligatory media floggings, and force her out of Hillary Clinton’s staff.   

There is a beautiful irony in this.  The intellectual disease of political correctness that currently infects American culture, was invented and unleashed by godless liberals exactly like Ferraro.  For years, these people have painted this image of conservatives and the Christian Right as neo-Nazis and the Republican convention as little more than a four-day Klan rally.  And now, like Frankenstein’s monster, this political correctness has turned on one of its masters.

Ferraro’s response was to look wounded on national television and moan about being unjustifiably castigated.  In the future, perhaps she should remember the saying, “If you’re going to swim with sharks, don’t bleed.”  Apparently, that advice is sometimes even appropriate for those who released the sharks in the first place.

As for me, all I can say about the Ferraro incident is, “Ya’ gotta’ love it!” 

Musing 4

Hillary (Rambo) Clinton continues to whine that the media is so infatuated with Obama that it is not treating her fairly.  For example, she claims that Obama’s “Pastor Disaster” got less media scrutiny than did her preposterous yarn about having to dodge a hail of sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia. 

My advice, Rambo, is to get over yourself.  No two people in American history have benefited more from the corruption and bias of the media than you and Slick Willy.  Sure, the media may be off the reservation right now, but we all know that if you figure out some way to steal the nomination, they’ll come slinking back.   

Musing 5

Speaking of Hillary, did you catch her ad against Obama in which she asked voters who they would want answering the White House phone at three in the morning if an international crisis had occurred?  It was pretty effective in drawing attention to Obama’s inexperience, but if she gets the nomination I think it could backfire in the general election.  First, if experience is the yardstick, wouldn’t McCain blow Hillary out of the water?  And second, the American people surely realize that if Hillary’s on the White House phone at 3am, it probably won’t be because of some international meltdown.  The most likely scenario will be that she is calling the local topless bars trying to get the name of the pole-dancer who took Bill home with her.        

Musing 6

Returning to Obama for a moment, he recently stated that if one of his teenage daughters got pregnant he would not want them to be “punished” with a child.  He even equated an unplanned child to a sexually transmitted disease.  The pro-life movement’s angry response to this is certainly understandable given that anyone with even a shred of human decency would be outraged at classifying children as “punishment.”  

This episode exemplifies the fact that Barack Obama is evil to his core and, as time goes on, the public is going to become increasingly aware of it.  However, it also brings up what I have always believed is a dirty little secret of contemporary American society. 

We long ago reached the point where science and technology made it impossible to deny the humanity of the unborn.  So the question becomes, why didn’t that settle the abortion debate once and for all? 

There are many explanations for that and one of them is as simple as it is ugly.  As we all know, whenever we start calling for a ban on abortion, a significant number of people will immediately want to talk about the need for exceptions in cases like rape, incest, fetal deformity, etcetera.  But this is a smokescreen that conceals the real agenda.  Sadly, because of the general moral collapse of our country, the most powerful interest in America today is self-interest.  And what the public really wants is for any legal prohibitions against abortion to have a “My Daughter” exception.  They just don’t have the guts to admit it so they camouflage it with phony compassion. 

Musing 7

Has anyone else noticed that (a) many, if not most, of the people being touted as John McCain’s potential running mate are pro-aborts and (b) McCain is saying nothing about what he would do to stop the slaughter of the unborn?   

I have said it before and I will say it again.  America’s politicians are never going to take the pro-life movement seriously until we set some new ground rules.  First, we have to make it clear to these people that we are going to be single-issue voters with a litmus test.  Second, they must also be told that we have no interest in what they “feel” or “think” or “believe” about abortion.  The only thing we want to know is what they intend to do to stop it.  And we are not going to settle for some meaningless political gibberish about “reducing the need for abortion” or “lowering the unwanted pregnancy rate” or “creating a culture of life,” etcetera.  That tap-dance has gone on long enough.

The time has come for us to understand that even the noblest rhetoric is no help for the unborn child whose skull is locked in the abortionist’s forceps.  That will only stop when we demand that pro-life votes must be earned through pro-life actions.  Until the unborn are safe, sending that message is the duty of every pro-lifer.

On the surface, it seems illogical that truth can be manipulated to achieve deception.  But the reality is that it happens all the time.  In fact, it is now the fundamental operating principle of the American media.  Of course, it is also a stunt that politicians are not above calling upon when the need arises.  No one, however, is more skilled at it than the abortion lobby.  It is a clever little game these people play in order to keep uncomfortable and indefensible realities hidden from the American public.

An example of their expertise in this field is evidenced every time they are confronted by the issue of late-term elective abortion.  At the moment it becomes clear that they cannot defend the practice, you will hear something along the lines of, “This is a non-issue.   The overwhelming majority of abortions take place before the end of the first trimester.” 

Of course, it is true that, as a percentage of all abortions, only about 10% are late term procedures.  What this truth is intended to obscure is that, because the sheer numbers of abortions done are so large, 10% translates into more than 300 second and third trimester babies butchered every day in the U.S.  Further, virtually all of these abortions are carried out for no medically indicated reason and involve healthy babies being carried by healthy moms.  And that is a fact.  The bottom line is, the sole reason these babies are killed is because someone wants them dead and someone else is willing to kill them.

On April 2nd through the 4th, 1995, George Tiller, the notorious late-term abortionist in Wichita, Kansas, was speaking at the National Abortion Federation’s 19th Annual Meeting, in New Orleans, Louisiana.  The subject was late term abortion and Tiller made the following statement: “We have some experience with late terminations, about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past five years.”

Listen to what this man is saying.  He is admitting to killing 10,000 babies between 24 and 36 weeks in a five year period and over 90% of the babies had no fetal anomalies.  Moreover, it is illogical to assume that the remaining 9,200 abortions were performed to protect the lives of the mothers involved since, (a) with today’s medical technology it is extraordinarily rare for pregnancy to be life-threatening, and (b) abortions done to protect the lives or health of the mothers are done far earlier in the pregnancies. 

The point is, Tiller is admitting that the vast majority of the late-term abortions he does are strictly elective.  To understand how sickening this is, consider that a 36-week baby is almost full term and that it is not uncommon even for babies born at 24 weeks to survive without major health problems.

The next year, the 20th Annual Meeting of the National Abortion Federation was held from March 31 to April 2, 1996, in San Francisco, California.  At this event, Martin Haskell, the Ohio abortionist who invented the D&X (Partial-Birth) abortion procedure made the following statement: “Two of the criticisms that I've been hearing lately about how our side is structuring its debate is that, one, we seem to be taking a position that—in the case of the D&X—that the fetuses are dead at the beginning of the procedure, which is generally not the case.  The second criticism has been that we are really skewing the debate to a very small percentage of women that have fetal anomalies or some other problem that really need the procedure verses the 90% who it’s elected, at least through the 20 to 24 week time period, and then as you get on towards 28 weeks it becomes closer to a hundred percent.  But these seem to be very uncomfortable issues for people on our side of the debate to deal with.”

Haskell is openly criticizing his pro-choice colleagues for lying about, (a) the babies targeted by late term abortions being dead before the procedures start and, (b) the women having these procedures needing them for any kind of health reason.  Amazingly, he even admitted that as the abortions got later, the percentage that was “elective” went up, with 28-week and later abortions being virtually 100% elective. 

This is exactly opposite of what the abortion lobby says when publicly confronted about late abortion.  To this day, they still claim that late abortions are never done except when something is wrong with the baby or the mother’s life or health is in jeopardy. They are lying and these quotes from two well-known late-term abortionists prove it. (The actual recordings of these statements are on file at Life Dynamics.)

  
I realize that, for people who defend legalized abortion, 300 dead late-term babies per day is no big deal.  They lack the basic moral foundations necessary for this to matter.  But they are smart enough to realize that, for people with even a minimal amount of morality or human decency, it is a big deal.  That’s why they always direct the debate toward percentages and away from numbers.

It is time for the pro-life movement to introduce some perspective into this discussion.  Our enemies say that late-term abortion is a non-issue but, from a numbers standpoint, 300 dead babies is equivalent to a fully loaded jetliner crashing somewhere in America every single day.  That is the sort of thing the abortion lobby does not want the public thinking about.

Our job is to make sure they do.  Our job is to show them that 300 babies a day having their legs torn off, their arms ripped from the sockets, their chests crushed, their skulls collapsed, and their pathetic remains ground-up in abortion clinic garbage disposals, is more than just a “choice.” 

It’s a disgrace to the human race.        

I have often observed that, when it comes to defending legalized abortion, the pro-choice mob has more tricks than a monkey on a hundred yards of grapevine.  Of course, this is probably a natural response given that the task they have chosen is to defend the indefensible. 

In any event, among their catalogue of rhetorical gymnastics, one of the most amazing is their contention that the unborn child is simply a part of the mother’s body.  They make this argument hoping that the public will conclude that, since society would never interfere with a woman’s decision to have her appendix out, it likewise has no place interfering with her decision to have an abortion.

The problem is, the underlying assumption supporting this argument is asinine even by the abortion lobby’s standards.  To assert that the unborn is part of the woman’s body is the same as saying that when a woman is pregnant she has 4 arms, 4 legs, 2 heads, 2 hearts, 2 brains, etc.   It also suggests that, if her child is a boy, for nine months of her life she has a penis.

Having said all that, for those of you who truly believe in this “baby as part of the woman” philosophy, I want to raise a serious issue.  I ask you to imagine a photo of conjoined (Siamese) twins and answer this simple question: Is that a picture of one person or two? 

Before you answer, understand that, from a biological standpoint, conjoined twins are far closer to being one person than is a mother and her unborn child.  Conjoined twins are always the same sex, always have the same DNA, are always the same blood type, always share at least one external body structure and often share several internal organs.  And as long as they are joined, if one dies they both die. 

But none of that is true about a mom and her unborn baby.  They are the same sex only about half the time, often don’t have the same blood type, never have the same DNA and do not share any external body parts or internal organs.  Moreover, it is not only possible for one to survive when the other one dies, it is common.

The point is, while it would be biologically incorrect to claim that conjoined twins are not two distinct individuals, even that argument would be more grounded in scientific reality than the claim that a mother and her unborn child are not two distinct individuals.  

The subject of conjoined twins also creates another analogy to the pro-life issue.  It is now common for doctors to perform surgery to separate conjoined twins.  In many of these cases, it is understood that the chances for both surviving is low.  However, no ethical surgeon would agree to intentionally kill one of the twins to increase the chances that the other one would survive.  In every case, the intent is to save both lives and every effort will be made to achieve that result.  It may be true that, prior to the surgery, it is accepted – even anticipated – that only one will survive.  But under no conditions would separation surgery be performed with that as its intended outcome. 

This is the principle that must be applied when the issue is whether abortion is acceptable in those extraordinarily rare instances in which pregnancy poses an immediate threat to the physical life of the mother.  From an ethical standpoint, we cannot say that it is ever acceptable to intentionally kill the baby to save the mother.  Instead, her physician should be required to do everything possible to save both mother and child.  If, as an unintended consequence of that effort, one or both fail to survive, that would be considered an unavoidable – thus permissible – outcome.  However, it is as morally indefensible to say that we will intentionally kill the baby to save the mother as it would be to say that we will intentionally kill the mother to save the baby. 

In the final analysis, the pure “no-exceptions” pro-life position is exactly the same as saying that operating on conjoined twins is never acceptable if the intent is to kill one of them.  In both cases, there are two distinct individuals involved and we must never cross the moral line where we argue that one innocent human being’s life can be snuffed-out for the benefit of another.

Oops, I forgot.  We already did that.  It’s called Roe vs. Wade. 

The foundation of the pro-life position is that, from the moment of fertilization, a new human being exists and has the same right to life as a 5-year-old or a 50-year-old.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems plaguing the pro-life movement today is that so many of our people don't appear to actually believe that.  For me, this was reinforced at a speech I gave recently.  In the “meet and greet” session beforehand, someone came up to me and mentioned that he was a long-time pro-lifer but was working for one of the pro-choice candidates in the presidential race.  His rationale was that there are "other issues" we also need to be concerned about, issues like the economy and the war on terrorism.  He lamented that this had created a nasty and growing rift between himself and some of his fellow pro-lifers, not the least of which was his own wife.  His argument was that he was as pro-life as any of them and was being unfairly attacked despite having worked for years in the movement.   

I asked him if he truly understood what being pro-life means.  He acknowledged that it is the belief that the unborn has the same right to life as the born. So I asked him to imagine that, instead of the unborn, it was his life, or the lives of people he knew, or the lives of anonymous 5-year-olds that his candidate was saying it should be legal to snuff out.  If that were the case, would he still be saying that there are "other issues" we need to consider or does that standard only apply to the unborn?

Recognizing the trap he had set for himself, he never responded.  After making it clear that his mind had not changed, he angrily walked away.  Somehow, this man had convinced himself that helping to put a politician in office that would slaughter unborn children by the millions did not conflict with his claim to be pro-life.

I have often observed that the human brain is the only organism on earth that has the ability to deceive itself.  This guy is a living testament to that phenomenon.  The sad part is, I am seeing more and more evidence that he is not alone.  The problem seems to be that a significant number of the people in this country who claim to be pro-life are only pro-life in the theoretical sense.  As a practical matter, when economic agendas and self-interests collide with their pro-life principle, it's the pro-life principle they will abandon.

Each of us knows that there have always been internal disagreements within the pro-life movement and there always will be.  It is human nature.  Some of these conflicts have been petty and others have centered around matters of legitimate substance.  In either case, however, I think we would all like to see even those pro-lifers with whom we have differences as people of integrity and character.  But when someone says they are pro-life but could support a baby-killer for political office that person can no longer be viewed in that light.  What they have said is that, when push comes to shove, for the right 30 pieces of silver they will drop the unborn in the grease.

By definition, that makes them the same as the people they claim to oppose.  The abortion lobby is willing to butcher the unborn for personal, political and financial reasons, and the faux-lifers are willing to look the other way for personal, political and financial reasons.  It is a distinction without a difference.     

The bottom line is, for those of us who are committed to the pro-life cause, the fate of the unborn will never be merely “an” issue.  It is always “the” issue.  For that reason, a candidate's position on abortion is all we need to know and all that matters.  If a politician is wrong on that, he or she cannot be right enough on anything else to make up for it.  It also makes no difference whether or not the office being sought has any direct impact on abortion.  Those people who contend that it should be legal to execute helpless children are not morally qualified to serve in any public office.  And those who help put them there have no right to call themselves pro-life.

Today, there seems to be a lot of debate about what it means when someone says they are pro-life.  This is especially true for politicians.  For clarity’s sake, let’s define the term.  The pro-life position is that a new human life is created at the moment of fertilization and is, thus, entitled to the same legal protections as any other human being.

Given that, some abortion positions are pretty cut and dried.  For example, someone who supports a universal human life amendment to the constitution is pro-life, while someone who supports the Roe vs. Wade decision is not. 

Then there is the person who says that they are personally opposed to abortion and would never participate in one, but pro-choice when it comes to legality.  As amazing as it may seem, I have actually heard pro-lifers describe people who say this as pro-life.

In reality, this is the most insidious and despicable of all positions on abortion.  After all, there is no reason to oppose abortion other than the belief that it takes the life of a living human being.  So what the “personally opposed” crowd is saying is, "I agree that abortion is the intentional killing of a baby, but if other people want to do it I support their legal right to do so and it’s not my place to interfere."  That is not a pro-life position.  It’s like someone in 1860 saying, “I am personally opposed to slavery and I would never own one, but if someone else wants to own a few that’s their business.”   

Another stance often mischaracterized as pro-life is the “pro-life with exceptions” position.  You’ll hear people say things like, “I am pro-life, but I think there should be an exception when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest” or “I am pro-life, but abortion should be legal when the baby is handicapped.”

It is a complete abandonment of the pro-life principle to say it should be permissible to kill selected categories of children.  When someone says they are pro-life but that abortion should be allowed in some circumstances, the question is whether they would support killing a five-year-old in those same circumstances.  If not, then it is clear that they don’t see born and unborn children as morally equal.  In other words, they do not subscribe to the most fundamental tenet of the pro-life position.

In the grimy world of politics, a new position is emerging to test the boundaries of what it means to be pro-life.  We are now hearing presidential candidates say that they are pro-life but that each individual state should be allowed to set its own policies regarding abortion.  Of course, the problem with that thinking is that the right to life is specifically listed in the U.S. Constitution.  The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that no person shall be deprived of his or her life without due process of law.  Even Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court justice who wrote Roe vs. Wade, said that if the personhood of the unborn was ever established the right to abortion evaporated. 

When a politician claims to be pro-life, he or she is asserting that the born and the unborn are both persons.  So the question becomes, how can they logically claim that only the born have a constitutional right to life?  And the answer is, they can’t. 

To understand how preposterous this is, imagine that a state legislature passed a law allowing parents of newborn children to take a few days to decide whether they are really prepared to start a family.  Under this new statute, if they decided they were not ready for this responsibility, they would be legally allowed to have a physician slit their child’s throat.  In that situation, how many of these “pro-life” politicians who are now saying that the federal government has no constitutional right to intervene on behalf of unborn children, would say that the federal government has no constitutional right to intervene on behalf of these born children?  Of course, the universal consensus would be that they not only have that right, they have the duty to do so.

The point is, when someone claims to be pro-life but says that abortion is a state matter, that is an unmistakable indicator that either (a) they do not truly believe that the born and unborn are both persons or (b) they are unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution. 

It may also be indicative of something the pro-life movement has done.  For 35 years we have hammered away at legalized abortion when, technically speaking, abortion is not the root problem.  In reality, it is only a symptom.  The disease is the absence of legal protection for the unborn. 

After all, if a woman who is not pregnant wanted to submit to abortion, we might find it bizarre and we would probably question her sanity, but in the final analysis it would probably not concern us any more than it would if she were getting a tattoo or body piercing.

So the problem is not that women have abortions, but that children die.  And that only occurs because our nation took away their right to life.  So maybe we need to talk a little less about stopping abortion and a little more about returning legal protection to the unborn.  Perhaps then, all these people claiming to be pro-life would know what being pro-life actually means.

The Godless Left continues its relentless attacks on abstinence-based sex-ed programs, calling them unrealistic since, “teenagers are going to have sex no matter what we do.”

To understand the fallacy in this fatalistic claim, imagine that a teenage girl tells her parents that she is not interested in having sex but her boyfriend is pressuring her.  The question is, should her parents tell her that she is being unrealistic to expect him to be abstinent?  Should they tell her that she will have to either jump in bed with him or just accept that he will go out and have sex with other girls? 

Obviously, no decent parent would say that to their daughter.  They would tell her that abstinence is entirely reasonable.  That exposes the “kids-are-going-to-have-sex-no-matter-what-we-do” argument as a lie.  After all, if it is realistic for a teenage boy to abstain because his girlfriend doesn’t want to have sex, then it is equally realistic for him to abstain because he has been taught that it is the right thing to do. 

Today, people are starting to pick up on the fact that, after public schools began introducing contraception-based sex-ed in the 1960s, America’s relatively small teen pregnancy problem exploded into an epidemic of promiscuity, teen pregnancy, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases.  They are also noticing that children are now having sex at much younger ages.  Whereas forty years ago it would have been front-page news for a 12-year-old girl to be pregnant, today it is not even unusual.

This has caught many liberal social engineers between a rock and a hard place.   They abhor the abstinence message, but they see it gaining popularity among parents who have seen that contraception-based sex education has been a train wreck.  In this environment, the pill-pushers have decided to advocate what they call “Abstinence Plus” or “Comprehensive Sex Education.”  Trying to appear reasonable, they now claim to support abstinence-based programs as an addition to contraception-based programs.  Some even grudgingly, though insincerely, agree that abstinence should be primary. 

This is a scam.  These people know that pushing contraception and abstinence together will neutralize the abstinence message.  It’s no different than parents telling their teenagers,  “Don’t drink and drive, but if you do, don’t spill anything on the seats” or “Don’t smoke, but if you do, use filtered cigarettes” or “Don’t take a gun to school, but if you do, don’t point it at anyone” or “Don’t use heroin, but if you do, don’t leave needles lying around where your little brother can get them” or “Don’t drive my new Corvette while I’m out of town, but if you do, replace the gas you use.”

The fact is, America’s epidemic of teen pregnancy, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases was caused by a dramatic increase in sexual activity among children, and all the condoms and birth control pills in the world will not turn that around.  The only solution is to reduce the sexual activity rate of children, and mixed messages will never do that.

A good analogy can be drawn between contraception-based sex-ed and motorcycle helmets.  As someone who has been riding, building and/or racing motorcycles for 47 of my 59 years, I can assure you that someone is better off wearing a helmet than not wearing one.  However, helmets do not make riding motorcycles safe and I have never heard one helmet or motorcycle manufacturer contend otherwise.

Let’s say, however, that we decided to let our school systems make motorcycle helmets available to every teenager in the country for free and without their parents’ knowledge.  Let’s also say that these kids were “educated” that wearing helmets made them seem mature and responsible because it meant that they were practicing “safe motorcycle.” 

In that environment, it would be pure idiocy to think that the number of children willing to ride motorcycles is not going to dramatically increase or that the number killed on motorcycles is not going to skyrocket.

So, if the question is whether helmets offer some degree of protection to people who ride motorcycles, the answer is yes.  If the question is whether they should be pushed to children as part of a “motorcycle abstinence” or “safe motorcycle” message, the answer is absolutely not.  In fact, it would be criminal to do so.  But that is precisely how the condom/contraception message has been packaged to address teen sexuality, and the results have been as horrifying as they were predictable.

Some people argue that abstinence-only programs write off those children who don’t remain abstinent and places them at a higher risk for pregnancy, diseases, and abortion.  To some degree, that is a valid argument.  However, that doesn’t mean abstinence-only programs shouldn’t be adopted.

When laws requiring children to be strapped into child safety seats were being considered, it was already known that some children would die because they were in these seats.  For example, when cars accidentally go into a river or lake, some children will drown when their parents panic and can’t get them out of their car seats.  Other children will die in car fires because their parents were rendered unconscious during the wreck and not available to get them out of the car seat.  In some crashes, children who might have a better chance for survival if they were thrown from the cars in which they were riding, will instead die because they were strapped into a car seat.

The legislators who supported these child-restraint laws were aware of these risks.  But, in passing these laws, they were not saying, “We’re willing to write off those children who will die because they were in a car seat.”  Instead, they recognized that child safety seats save more lives than they take.  In a perfect world they would be able to pass a law to save every child who gets into a car wreck, but they don’t live in such a world so they made decisions that they believed would save the most lives possible.  

That dynamic also applies to abstinence-based sex education.  No reasonable person could believe that it will save every child or that some children might not actually be harmed by it.  Although the pill-pushers’ argument that teenagers are going to have sex no matter what we do is a lie, we cannot deny that some kids will have sex no matter what we do.  But we have to also accept the harsh reality that there is never going to be a perfect or painless solution to the massive destruction caused by Planned Parenthood’s brand of sex education.  Given that, we must look for the educational approach that will save the most children possible, and that is abstinence-only.  It is the only solution that is 100% effective every time it is used.   

One thing is for certain.  It is the very definition of stupidity and insanity to believe that contraception-based sex education is a solution to the social problems that were created by contraception-based sex education.

Have you noticed how often pro-lifers, unknowingly, use rhetoric that reinforces pro-abortion positions.  For example, when we focus on the horrible and indefensible nature of late term abortion, we are suggesting that earlier abortions are less horrible and more defensible.  This creates an artificial distinction between one human being and another human being based on how old it is, how developed it is or how large it is.  That is not far from the pro-abortion position.  

Another example of this relates to the revelations that some hospitals are doing what are called “live birth abortions.”  This is where they induce a pregnant woman to give birth and then put the baby in a closet and let it die.  Horrified pro-lifers have responded by talking about the fact that these hospitals are “killing living babies!”

As understandable as this outrage is, such language undermines the pro-life position.  It suggests that there is a difference between killing someone inside the womb or outside.  The reality is, whether they are put in closets to die or ripped apart in the womb, all abortions happen on living babies and we must be careful not to ever say or do anything which suggests otherwise.

We also get tricked into supporting the abortion lobby’s agenda by the way we talk about teen pregnancy.  The abortion industry wants people to believe that when a teenage girl has a baby her life is over.  She is doomed to be single forever, poor as a church mouse, uneducated, and on welfare for the rest of her life.  Their goal is to convince people that abortion is her only hope.        

While it is true that no one believes 13-year-old children should be getting pregnant, it is not the end of the world.  In fact, many unmarried teenage girls have babies and go on to lead happy lives.  Moreover, among those who don’t, a significant number come from socio-economic environments where, by abortion industry standards, their chances for a “successful and productive” life are limited whether they have babies or not.  For these girls, the problem is not their baby but their environment.  When we ignore that and focus instead on the pregnancy, what we are really saying is that the baby is the problem.  Again, that’s the pro-abortion position.

It is also common for pro-lifers to attack abortion by saying we may have aborted the next Beethoven, or Mother Teresa, or the doctor who would have discovered a cure for cancer.  While this sentiment is understandable, it is inconsistent with the pro-life position.  The unborn child who might grow up to cure cancer has no more right to life than the unborn child who will spend his life on welfare and living under bridges.  The “aborted Beethoven” argument suggests that it is a bigger tragedy to kill Baby A than Baby B because Baby A is more valuable to society.  Clearly, that is not what the pro-lifer meant to say, but that is certainly what the listener might conclude.

The point is, always be aware that what you say may not be what your audience hears. 

Have you ever noticed that every time the Godless Left promotes any of the moral depravities that they hold so dear, a predictable pattern develops. 

Whatever their “vice du jour” might be, their initial sales pitch will be that it is morally acceptable.  Of course, this inevitably fails because whatever they are pushing is generally so ghastly that it is impossible to sell it on its own merits.  So their fall-back strategy is to play the old “you can’t legislate morality” card.  They will even wrap it around some absurd interpretation of American history in which our founding fathers sacrificed their lives and treasure so we could all live in a nation where laws are made free of any moral considerations.  Then, for good measure, they will toss in something about the constitutional separation of church and state, despite the fact that such a concept is found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. 

Sadly, this scam often works.  America is in such a state of moral and intellectual decay that otherwise decent intelligent people actually suck-up this loopy philosophy.  It is part of the culture of “situational ethics” in which genuine ethics are seen as abnormal and perhaps even unpatriotic.  In our brave new world of unfettered tolerance and moral-relativism, it is not enough to believe that some things are not black and white but shades of gray; you must now believe that everything is a shade of gray and that black and white do not exist.  This philosophy thrives because the American people have become so open-minded that their brains fell out.     

Here are the facts:  No governmental body can pass laws that will make an immoral person moral.  So they don’t try.  Legislation is not about regulating beliefs, it’s about controlling behavior.  When a legislature passes laws against racial discrimination, it does not concern itself with the personal moral beliefs of people who sincerely think racial discrimination is okay.  The legislature has determined that discrimination is not morally acceptable and, therefore, it will not be legally permitted regardless of what some racist might think.  In other words, society imposes its belief system on someone who has a completely different belief system.  Any way you look at it, that is legislating morality.   

So don’t let the Godless Left fool you.  The law is nothing more or less than society’s collective moral values, and it legislates that morality by regulating behavior.  At the moment we abandon that principal, our legislative bodies will be left with no legitimate foundation upon which any law can be justified.  If that happens, our country will be doomed to collapse into a state of bedlam and anarchy.

Abortion enthusiast, Anna Quindlen, recently wrote an article for Newsweek Magazine in which she raised the issue of what the punishment should be for women who have abortions once they are again illegal.  Her claim was that this is a question for which the pro-life movement has no answer.  Of course, she is lying since most of the pro-life movement’s leaders have addressed this issue many times, over many years.  The only problem is that, like the rest of our enemies, she just doesn’t like the answer. 

Having said that, however, I will agree to take the bait and go down this dusty trail one more time.  So here it goes.   

While some of my fellow pro-lifers feel that jailing women who submit to illegal abortions is necessary to be consistent with the pro-life principle, most seem to agree with me that there is no practical incentive for doing so.  Our view is that, for several pragmatic reasons, future laws against abortion should concentrate on the abortionist just as they did before Roe v. Wade.

To begin with, except in the extremely unlikely event that a woman is actually caught in the act of having an illegal abortion, a conviction would be virtually impossible to obtain.  In addition, the woman is the best source of information and evidence needed to convict the abortionist.  If she faced prosecution, she would never admit to the abortion.  That would make it almost impossible for the state to get the evidence needed to convict the abortionist and leave him free to kill again. 

This doesn’t excuse the woman for having participated in an illegal act.  It simply recognizes that the public interest is best served by removing the abortionist from society, and that legal sanctions against the woman would reduce the chances of that happening.  It’s no different than the authorities granting immunity to a small-time drug user in exchange for information on a big-time drug dealer.  Remember, the goal of the pro-life movement is to stop abortion.  Imprisoning a woman who had an illegal abortion would prevent nothing since her child is already dead, but imprisoning the abortionist might save thousands of babies in the future.  If giving women a pass on prosecution is the best way to make that happen, that is a deal worth making. 
 
We should also consider that, given the shortage and expense of jail space in America, it makes no sense to incarcerate a woman who had one abortion when that same cell could hold an abortionist who might do them by the thousands.  And let there be no mistake about it, jail is precisely where abortionists deserve to be.  Their customers may or may not be fully aware of what they are doing, but no such defense can be made for them.  When they pull those tiny arms and legs and heads out of women, they know for a fact that they are committing the most brutal of murders.  I offer no apology for saying that there is not one person sitting in a prison cell anywhere in the world who committed an act worse than performing abortions.  Furthermore, not one of those people victimized someone as helpless as an unborn baby.  So not only are abortionists contract killers with the morals of sewer rats, they are cowards as well.

When discussing this punishment issue, something very curious inevitably creeps into the conversation.  Although some pro-lifers argue for imprisoning women who submit to abortion, the people most adamant that this is the only rational policy are those who call themselves pro-choice.  Like many other things they do, this exposes their cynicism and hypocrisy.  On one hand, they try to frighten women with the suggestion that pro-lifers are going to have them tossed into jail.  When we make it clear that we have no such intention, their response is to say that if we don’t call for women to be jailed the only conclusion is that even we are not really convinced of our position.  It is classic abortion industry double-talk.   

Now, I have a suggestion for the Anna Quindlens of the world that will resolve this whole issue.  If these people think it’s unfair for only abortionists to be targeted, let them be the ones to lobby for legislation to put the women in jail.  If instead of helping women facing unplanned pregnancies find alternatives to illegal abortions, the Choice Mafia would prefer to seek legislation to put them in prison, my gut feeling is that they will find little legislative support for it.  But we’ll see.  In the mean time, while they look for the best way to put all their customers in jail, those of us in the pro-life movement will focus on finding the fastest way to stop the killing.   

America’s Godless Left continually derides Christianity by talking about all the harm its followers have done over the centuries.  Whenever the subject comes up, we are regaled with stories about the Crusades, the war in Ireland, the pilgrims, and a cornucopia of other Christian crimes that are meant to shame us into contrite silence. 

The fact that most of what these people say is at best inaccurate and at worst fabrication, is of no consequence.  Most of them are not bright enough to know that what they are saying is nonsense and the ones that do know don’t care.  As card-carrying members of the Godless Left, they have the comfort of knowing that their lies will never be exposed by their stooges and fellow travelers in the media.  So they can even talk about atrocities carried out by Muslims and cite them as examples of what people do “in the name of God.”  In this convoluted world, every “believer” is the same regardless of what they believe so it is only natural that Christians would be held accountable for what Muslims do.  The fact that much of the violence committed by Muslims over the centuries was actually committed against Christians is inconvenient and, therefore, ignored.  After all, they will never allow truth to compromise their political agenda.        

When they mention recent Christianity-induced violence, the name that most often pops into the conversation is that of Adolf Hitler.  The Left loves to hold him up and talk about how a Catholic envisioned and then carried out the Nazi holocaust.  The major flaw in that argument is that Hitler was not a Catholic.  He was simply born to parents who were Catholic.  Read any legitimate biography about him and you will see that he was virtually devoid of any sort of spirituality and that the closest thing to religion in his life was a disturbing fascination with occultism.  The bitter irony is, if Hitler had indeed been a Catholic it is highly unlikely that World War II would have ever occurred.  

Let’s cut to the chase here.  Uncovering the real motivation behind this Christian-bashing phenomenon begins by understanding that the world just went through the most violent time in its history.  In World War II alone, while Hitler’s thugs were terrorizing western Europe, Joe Stalin and his buddy Lenin were carrying out a genocide – often against their own countrymen – that made Uncle Adolf look like a bumbling amateur.  Meanwhile, the Japanese had jumped into bed with Hitler and Stalin and were piling up Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Filipino, and Indochinese corpses by the millions.  Then came despots like, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-chek, Tito, Kim Il-sung, and others who carried on this tradition of using mass executions as a political tool.

In the end, the best estimates are that government sanctioned genocide during the 20th century stole the lives of about 175 million people.  What the Godless Left does not want the public to think about is the fact that almost all the perpetrators of these atrocities were self-admitted atheists and/or non-Christians.  In other words, the overwhelming majority of the butchery that occurred during the most violent century in world history, was done by people with the same world view and belief system as the American Left.  Their Christian-bashing campaign is simply a scheme to divert attention away from that uncomfortable reality.  In short, they are the embodiment of the “guilty dog barks first” philosophy and, unfortunately, to a large measure it has worked.     

The unvarnished truth is that the Godless Left has always embraced genocide as a means to an end.  One such atrocity is going on right here in the United States as over 3000 helpless human beings are being executed by abortion every single day. 

Of course, there are those who will contend that this holocaust is not associated with atheism since many of the people who call themselves pro-choice, and many of the people actually having abortions, claim to be Christians.  That ignores the fact that just because someone claims to be a Christian does not mean that they are one.  In reality, when someone says they are both pro-choice and Christian they are either heretics, outright frauds, or painfully ignorant about what it means to be a Christian. 

Two non-negotiable foundations of Christian doctrine are that (1) God is the author of life, and (2) He is incapable of making mistakes.  The only logical conclusion one can draw from those beliefs is that when life exists in the womb, it is God’s will that it be there.  On the other hand, support for legal abortion always denies at least one, and generally both, of those two fundamental concepts.  By definition, that makes the “pro-choice” position incompatible with Christianity.

When someone claims to be both pro-choice and Christian, he or she is basically asserting three principles.  The first is that life is not a right inherited from God but a privilege bestowed by human beings who can withhold it if they “choose” to do so.  The second is that God is neutral on whether a child He created is brutally torn limb from limb.  Finally, they are saying that it is possible to reject the innocent new lives that God creates without rejecting God Himself.  From a Christian perspective, all three of these positions are absurd.
 
The bottom line is, there can be no such thing as a “pro-choice Christian” when abortion is the choice.  A Christian cannot be pro-choice about the intentional destruction of innocent human life any more than they can be pro-choice about rape, robbery, slavery, incest, child abuse, etc.

In the final analysis, those who participate in or defend the abortion holocaust are as godless as those who have participated in or defended most of the world’s other holocausts.  To be certain, Christians have a lot to answer for and answer for it they will.  But to suggest that they are even in the same league with these people is preposterous.