Maybe This Will Be the Year

This past weekend was the annual March for Life in Washington, DC. There’s a different air this year. There’s hope, almost anticipation, that this might be the last year that the March goes on with Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.

March for Life 2022
Getty image found here

Marjorie Jackson, at the beginning of the prolifecon.org broadcast of the Family Research Council, done parallel to the March for Life, gave this introduction:

Today is the 17th Annual ProLifeCon Digital Action Summit here at Family Research Council. As well as the somber anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand through nine months of pregnancy. Thank you for joining us as we fight for the unborn. This year the March for Life feels a little different. This could possibly be our last year under Roe v. Wade legalized. Hope is in the air.

Kirk Cameron, actor and Christian, was at the March for Life and gave an interview to Fox News,which was passed along by The Daily Wire.  He said, “I think that we’re at a tipping point. I think that the tide is turning, science is making it more and more difficult for us to pretend like it’s not a baby in the womb. We know that it is.” Cameron's wife was adopted. Their first four children were adopted. They’ve been on the side of life a long time. As he put it, his wife—and each of those first four children—were “one doctor appointment away from not existing.” He adds, about his wife, “She was not a mistake; she was a miracle.” His whole family exists because mothers chose life.

He also thinks there’s a sea change happening in the culture. He says, “Even in Hollywood, there are more and more people who are embracing the idea that life is a gift from God.”

Some of the optimism this particular year stems from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in early December. We went through some of the details then. But as Mary Zach, co-host on the ProLifeCon broadcast, summed it up: “It is about changing hearts and minds as well.” Maybe the law is ready to change now, because the people are ready to change. Not all people, but a growing majority.

Katherine Beck Johnson, Fellow for Legal and Policy Studies at FRC, was given time on that broadcast to offer an overview of what Dobbs v. Jackson was all about.

Katherine Beck Johnson, ProLifeCon broadcast
screenshot from here

KBJ: Dobbs is an incredibly consequential case. It is the biggest abortion case of our generation, the biggest abortion case since Casey in 1992.

Mississippi passed a 15-week abortion ban. This is by no means a radical pro-life law. But it was struck down as it is unconstitutional under Roe, which prevents any sort of pre-viability ban on abortion. And this was struck down at the district court and the 5^th Circuit as unconstitutional. Mississippi then petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case.

Now, the Supreme Court could have just issued a statement saying, "This is clearly unconstitutional under Roe. We agree with the 5^th Circuit.” But they took the case, signaling they might be willing to do something to alter abortion jurisprudence in America.

It was then taken up another notch when Mississippi filed their briefs, and they didn’t just simply ask the Court to uphold their 15-week ban. They went after Roe. They called Roe out for what it is, a disgrace to our nation and to our constitutional law. And they requested that the Court overturn Roe. So, therefore, the case now really before the Supreme Court is whether or not Roe should be overturned and abortion should return to the states. So, like I said, this is a hugely consequential case, and we look forward to the decision that comes down in, hopefully, June.

Later in the discussion, she covered more details of the justices’ questions, and why we have reason to be so hopeful:

KBJ: While it’s hard to always read the tea leaves of what the justices will do from oral arguments, we took a lot of encouragement from the questions being asked, especially from Justice Roberts, who has become quite the swing vote. He really talked about and probed, well, isn’t America an outlier in our abortion jurisprudence? Why are we just in the camp of North Korea and China in our protections of the unborn?

Justice Kavanaugh, who’s also become another swing vote, said himself, "Well, shouldn’t this just be left up to the states?" He said that in response to a growing movement within the pro-life movement that the unborn are actually protected under the 14th Amendment, and that the Constitution forbids abortion, and this should not be left up to the states…. So, we really particularly look to the swing voters on the Court and what they were saying.

And then Justice Alito, who basically closed it out, talking to the United States Solicitor General, Elizabeth [Prelogar], who is of course advocating that the Mississippi law be struck down, and as she was continuously talking about the rights of the woman, he said boldly, “Well, doesn’t the fetus have an interest in living?” And I thought that was just so profound, that here we had a justice willing to say, “What about the rights of the unborn child?”

Another guest on that broadcast was pro-life activist Alyson Centofonte, who had MC-ed the event in front of the Supreme Court during oral arguments. She described some differences in the crowds:

Alyson Centofonte, ProLifeCon
broadcast, screenshot from here

No one [on the pro-abortion side] actually had a very empowering message of supporting women and moms and families. There were no children there that I saw. There were no dads that I saw.

On our rally we had female legislators with their husbands and babies in tow. It’s very empowering to see.

So, I think the shift that is taking place is that the pro-life movement has been so successful at having a consistent message that women and families should be supported in law and society. And that’s really refreshing to a young woman who’s in an unplanned pregnancy and scared. Because, we need to hear, we all need to hear that, “You can do this; we will be with you; we’ll stand with you.” That’s what the pro-life movement says: “We will stand with you.” The other side says, “You’re on your own. Take care of this, and get back to work, or get back to whatever you’re doing.” We want to walk women through pregnancy and motherhood. And you saw that. You saw that at the Court, and you’re seeing it in the pro-life movement now.

If Roe gets reversed, it doesn’t abolish abortion; it returns the jurisprudence surrounding abortion to the states. During the intervening years, the rationale for recognizing the fetus as a living human being has only grown. So in many states that will mean real progress for life.

In South Dakota on Friday, in concert with people gathering in Washington, DC, for the March for Life, Governor Kristi Noem announced two pro-life bills. One would ban abortions after the detection of a heartbeat (similar to the Texas law). The other would prohibit telemedicine abortions in the state. She said, 

We hope that this year’s March for Life will be the last and that the Supreme Court will finally protect every unborn life. But until that comes to pass, these bills will ensure that both unborn children and their mothers are protected in South Dakota.

Governor Kristi Noem's tweet on January 21, 2022
image found here

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, in a letter attached to their fundraising, describes much of the progress: 

FRC’s influence with state legislators this past year has been unprecedented. During the week of the Dobbs case hearing in early December, FRC leaders and experts hosted more than 120 state legislators from 39 states at our largest-ever summit designed to advance pro-life protections to the states.

Such mobilization is essential right now. In the event Mississippi’s pro-life law is upheld, it likely means states will have greater flexibility to set policies to protect pre-born lives.

Our experts are equipping frontline conservative legislators with scientific facts regarding life in the womb—along with moral and ethical reasoning that can inform every policy battle.

In recent months, our team launched an interactive tracking website titled “America’s Direct Deposit to Planned Parenthood,” revealing the outrageous amount of US Taxpayer dollars the abortion industry giant receives every year.

From our detailed policy research to our “friend of the court briefs”—including one we filed in support of Mississippi in the Dobbs case—these resources are informing policymakers at all levels.

He adds a request for prayer,

As this new year begins, I hope and trust you will commit to pray for our leaders—particularly those making life-or-death decisions on the Supreme Court….

God calls us to be intercessors in this hour. Intercession means to intervene on behalf of another, or to put it another way, to stand in the gap.

Will you commit to stand in the gap for our nation?

Let us never neglect to start and end the day on our knees, crying out to God for truth to prevail, for innocent lives to be saved, and for the Kingdom of God to advance.

Being an intercessor starts with prayer…but, in my experience, it doesn’t end there. That’s why our effective strategies including mobilizing Americans like you and informing policymakers—to shape the future of America and save lives in the womb.

That’s their organization’s goal. And it’s a good one. The call for the rest of us, besides prayer, is to inform, teach, help, support, and make it easier for individual women in distress to choose life in a world that has been trying to convince them not to.

I listened to a podcast the other night [Y Religion, episode 48, “The Complementary Nature of Mothers and Fathers” with Dr. Jenet Erickson], about research surrounding motherhood. Worth a listen. One detail was that, biologically, the growing baby and mother interact in ways we never knew. They share health support for one another. They exchange cells. They are forever part of one another. Once the baby is born he seeks his mother; he knows her voice and recognizes her. She is his preferred human for probably the first eighteen months, when he’s ready to turn outward toward father and others. It’s a profound honor to be so significant to another human being. If a woman truly knows that child within her, knows he is alive and interacting with her already, would she ever choose anything but life? The more we learn, the more life makes sense.

This year just might be the year we can more freely help all women choose life.

Forcing Evil

Counties of Ireland
image from Wikipedia

The first of this year abortion became legal in the highly Catholic country of Ireland. That “victory” is apparently not enough for those who promote the killing of unborn human babies. Right now 95% of Irish doctors refuse to perform abortions. That still leaves 179 doctors willing to perform them (although 30 of these ask that their names not be included on a national government list). There are four counties left without any abortionists.

How far does someone have to go, then? The maximum length of the country is just over 300 miles, and width is 170 miles. The whole length is about what we would drive to Baton Rouge, just outside Texas, into Louisiana. Or a tad further than from Houston to Dallas. But you’d never have to go that far. The four counties are spread out, all of them near counties with an abortionist. So the furthest drive is probably an hour (depending on road conditions).

But that isn’t good enough for the promoters of baby killing. The new law (through their Parliament in December and almost immediately enacted)

·         Forces taxpayers to pay for abortions.

·         Forces Catholic hospitals to provide abortions.

·         Limits conscience protections for doctors and nurses.

·         Allows girls 15 and under to have abortions without parental consent or notification.

Also, because there have been peaceful pro-life protests, the promoters of abortions are calling for government to censor pro-life speech and set up no-protest buffer zones around abortion facilities.

All this is in a faraway country. We would certainly find protection of life and liberty (including free speech) here in America, right?

Convincing black women that killing their babies
is self-care, which would have delighted PP founder
Margaret Sanger intended; billboard image found here

Next story. In New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born, 42% of all abortions in the city. Including all races, one in every three pregnancies is aborted. That’s not enough for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Earlier this week he promised to veto a budget that doesn’t make getting an abortion easier. Abortion is already legal in that state up to 24 weeks. [My first child was born alive at 23 ½ weeks. I wrote about that story here. And there's another sad story of a 24-week birth here.] Cuomo wants that expanded. He—along with pal Hillary Clinton—wants abortion legal up to birth for casually undefined “health of the mother” reasons, and to guarantee “abortion on demand” if there should come a time that Roe v. Wade were overturned, returning abortion decisions to the states. Pro-life groups, such as the New York State Catholic Conference, are already admitting that fighting this bill in New York is fruitless.

They’re making sure common-sense limitations, such as parental consent or limits on taxpayer funding of abortions, are squelched. Limit the opposition; allow no limits to killing babies—their tacit motto.

Here are the latest stats, which they wish to “improve”:

In 2016, 82,189 unborn babies were aborted in New York, with about half being taxpayer-funded, according to the local news. Of those babies, 1,763 were at least 20 weeks, meaning they may have been viable outside the womb.

Earlier this week, the new Planned Parenthood president clarified their mission, in a rare moment of candor, on Twitter: 

image of tweet found here

First, our core mission is providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion and reproductive health care. We will never back down from that fight—it’s a fundamental human right and women’s lives are at stake.

What is a mission? A special quest, or core purpose, often carried out to propagate the faith. The core purpose of Planned Parenthood is not to plan parenthood, but to prevent it—even after parenthood is underway, with a new person alive and growing.

Meanwhile, Facebook—a supposedly nonpartisan platform—has been censoring pro-life messages for being “hateful, threatening or obscene.” The Warriors for Christ page was one such target. While they do not promote anything hateful, threatening, or obscene, they have received death threats for their pro-life and pro-purity messages. Facebook hadn’t, at the time the story was written, explained what their specific violation was. Meanwhile, the group tried using their former youth ministry page, but when that also became inaccessible, it wasn’t clear whether that was a technical or censorship problem.

As with other conservative messages, pro-life advocates are noticing more online censorship on various social media platforms—which only have platform status because they do not censor based on political or religious views, but only speech that would be illegal, such as defamation or calls for violence.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn was prevented from placing an ad on Twitter in October, because she mentioned Planned Parenthood’s sales of aborted baby body parts—a decision Twitter had to reverse when news outlets reported on that issue.

Live Action, a youth-centered pro-life organization that has done undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood, found in September that Twitter had been censoring its ads. Founder Lila Rose said they were told to change information on their website before they could get their ads accepted—not content of the ads or on the platform where advertising was being placed, but content they supported in greater detail on their website, which Twitter workers apparently had time to comb through before accepting ad money. Hmm.

The Susan B. Anthony List used the phrase “killing babies,” not of course in favor of such a heinous crime, but against it. But Twitter objected and refused to run their ad.

It’s hard to prove that a platform is actively suppressing certain viewpoints, because they don’t always tell the person or group what they supposedly did wrong. But Facebook employees in 2016 admitted that they were suppressing conservative messages and favoring liberal ones. 

There’s a new movement to “shout your abortion,” to praise yourself for killing your offspring—killing the living being growing inside you. This is a movement started by Amelia Bonow. There’s a book, aimed at children, I believe. And a video, in which she tells children (with children sitting in her presence being told this) that abortion is just a doctor appointment, “like a crappy dentist appointment”—sort of uncomfortable but not that bad, in other words: “You go to the doctor, and they put this little straw inside of your cervix, and then inside of your uterus, and then they just suck the pregnancy out,” she explains. Easy peasy. This ghastly page is easy to find on Facebook.   Now that I’ve checked that fact, I’m a bit concerned Facebook’s algorithm will start marketing pro-abortion messages to me. What is most disgusting is the propagandizing of children in service of, ironically, killing children.

How do you know which side to be on?

One side is about life, perpetuating the species, civilization, persuasion, helping people who are in the position of taking accountability for their actions, and affirming the miraculous life-giving power of women.

One side is about killing, coercing, censoring, savage disregard for human life, refusing to take responsibility for their actions, and denigrating women for their feminine power of life.

It’s a stark difference.

Science and Economics of Life

Our local Tea Party recently visited the local office of our state senator to let him know what bills we were following, and what we are encouraging him to do. The biannual legislative session is underway in Austin, so we met with the staffer.

Normally a staffer is pretty circumspect about saying where the legislator stands on any given issue. But we have a conservative state senator who is generally in agreement with us. He had already authored or signed on as a co-author on most of the Senate bills we were looking at, so we just wanted to thank him. Some had already passed through the Senate and had been sent to the House. A few others hadn’t been moving, so we encouraged paying attention to those. Then there were a few House bills we wanted him to be aware of for when they pass through the House and reach the Senate.

So the staffer was friendly and comfortable with us. He said it was like a breath of fresh air to meet with people like us (people who weren’t hostile or complaining, I’m assuming). He said last week he had Planned Parenthood visit him, from the clinic here in Houston that was filmed selling baby parts.* The Senator represents them as well, so the staffer’s job is to listen politely and let them know he’ll pass along their views to the Senator.

But he shared with us that one of their points was that we should be in favor of abortion, because that would mean fewer people, and that would mean a lower tax burden. So it would be fiscally conservative to favor abortion. The staffer told us they said this with a straight face.

It’s a good idea to try to understand how people with differing opinions think. So I thought I’d explore this belief. It requires some surmising on my part, but this is what I think is their though process:

·         They know our state senator has an excellent long record of being all about lowering the tax burden on his constituents (he used to the be county tax assessor, and was outspoken about making sure homeowners got every property tax advantage they could get). Therefore, a lower tax argument must get his attention.

·         They believe, because he favors lower taxes, he will favor them above any other issue, including abortion.

·         They believe he doesn’t actually value life of the unborn when weighed against money issues.

·         They believe more people mean more tax burden. That must also be true of immigration, and emigration from other states into ours as well.

So a person who is pro-abortion is making some negative and erroneous assumptions, about life in general, and about those of us who disagree with them.

All the while the governor (a conservative) is attempting to attract businesses to the state, and we’re generally pleased about being a state that’s growing. That growth includes children. But there’s an assumption among conservatives that parents take care of their children. There are school costs, but the parents’ taxes plus their neighbors’ taxes cover that so that we have productive adults in the rising generation.

That pro-abortion lobby is assuming babies are nothing but a burden—of money, energy, life.

That’s an unbridgeable divide.

This morning on Glenn Beck’s radio show he referred to a 2013 Melissa Harris-Perry news clip, in which she denies the science that a human fertilized egg is human life. She was holding a model of a fertilized egg and said,

Glenn Beck shows antique zygote models
screen shot from here

[T]he very idea that this would constitute a person, right? And that some set of constitutional rights should come to this.  Look, I get that that is a particular kind of faith claim. It’s not associated with science. But the reality is that if this turns into a person, right, there are economic consequences, right? The cost to raise a child, $10,000 a year up to $20,000 a year. When you’re talking about what it actually costs to have this thing turn into a human, why not allow women to make the best choices that we can with as many resources and options instead of trying to come in and regulate this process?

Glenn Beck also had, in his studio, some antique models of the developing fertilized egg—which were used to teach the science of human development.

The thing is, there isn’t anything a fertilized human egg can turn into except a human fetus, and eventually a full-grown human being. There isn’t any point from the moment of egg and sperm coming together that this “thing” is either “non-living” or “non-human.” That is scientific fact, not “faith,” as she claims. Melissa Harris-Perry is a science denier.

And, like the Planned Parenthood lobbyists at the state senator’s office last week, she is making the economic claim—that life is not worth protecting if a person deems it not economically worthwhile.

By that argument, who besides the not-yet-born human should it be legal to kill?

·         The already born child, if the parent doesn’t want to bear the expense of raising him/her.

·         The elderly, who are no longer contributing economically.

·         The chronically ill or disabled, who are not contributing economically.

·         The mentally ill, or disabled, such as Down’s Syndrome children, who cost more economically than they contribute.

·         Prisoners on death row or life imprisonment, who cost more economically than they contribute.

·         Anybody receiving government support long-term, costing more economically than they contribute.

·         Anybody costing another person economically—tough competitors in the marketplace, unsatisfying employees, dependent spouses and children, doctors and other service providers who charge too much for their services, etc.

What is the purpose of earning wealth? To provide for our lives—our shelter, food, clothing, and other needs and wants. Money is not the goal; it is the tool. It is to be used to support life, not measure its worth and deem it disposable.

Now, I don’t actually believe most on the pro-abortion side are in favor of murder in any other cases. I think they are not deep thinkers; they simply want what they want—sex without consequences—and believe if they keep insisting loudly enough, the entire culture will capitulate.

fetus at 20 weeks
image from here

But as science advances—so that human life is recognized earlier, and is shown more clearly, and the age of viability is lower—more people come to recognize their error. 

It will be the science deniers who hold out the longest. At some point it’s not just a difference of opinion; it is people who rebel against truth. As clear thinker Ezekiel put it millennia ago, “thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a rebellious house.” [Ezekiel12:2] 

  

_______________________________________________________

* The journalists in this case were later exonerated.

Another Word about Life

When I envision what I’m about to write in a blog post, I see an overall structure of what I expect to say, and then I’m surprised about how many words it takes to accomplish my plan. My last post was such a post. I thought, before I started writing, that I would just give a little background, and then I would write my personal viewpoint. But just laying the background turned out to be a long post in and of itself. Then I’ve had to decide if the personal viewpoint is still worth telling. I’m going ahead as if it is.

My experience is that the unborn life is my child to love. The baby moves, has a heartbeat, his own DNA.

I’m going to share a poem I wrote thirty years ago. I am not a particularly accomplished poet. I used to write more; now I manage to come up with about one a year for Mr. Political Sphere for Valentine’s Day. But during the childbearing years I wrote enough that I have a small collection of them I refer to as The Motherhood Poems. This one is from my first pregnancy, about the beginning of the second trimester. I was reading parenting magazines and learning all I could about this new passion and calling. One of the books I read detailed development you could expect at each week’s gestation. That is the essence of the poem below, my first conversation with this child—a boy, but we didn’t know that until birth, back before ultrasounds were as clear as they are today.

This child I was talking to was born about two and a half months later—more than three months early. We got to hold him for only a matter of hours, with all kinds of tubes hooked up to him in hopes of overcoming the first hurdle—breathing. After thirteen hours, we realized we weren’t going to get that miracle and had to say goodbye. But there were some profound things I learned about developing life from that difficult experience.

I learned that a baby can look complete and perfect when born at 23 weeks. He was small, a little over a foot, a little under two pounds. But he looked fully human—enough that we could recognize him and see features of family members that he resembled. I think he may have looked a lot like my husband’s paternal grandfather, who was near 90 at the time. The spirit that was in my baby made him so completely alive and lovable. Days later at the funeral home, my mother-in-law was there with me to see how they had dressed him and prepared the casket. I remember wanting to share with her how beautiful he had been alive, how less than him the tiny remaining body was. I couldn’t express it.

In our religion we believe we will live together as families again after we die; he is not completely lost to us. There are times when I have seemed to see him in my mind, looking grown up, tall like my other boys and his dad. My daughter has a similar vision of him and describes him as I would; she even remembers eye color, which I cannot.

I believe this: my young son was alive within me; he was alive those few hours with us; and as a resurrected human being he lives yet again. His whole person is even more important to our Heavenly Father than he has been to me. Life of this little angel was such a blessing to have. His life matters.

So here is the poem:

Twelfth Week Talk 

It’s strange to me not knowing you,

So close in proximity.

I know my love is growing along with you,

But we haven’t talked together before now. 

I’ve read about you; yes, a little.

This week you’re growing fingernails.

Good luck with that endeavor;

I still have trouble growing mine.

And I saw you, a sort of picture

On a screen the doctor showed me.

I saw your head and form

Enlivened by a heartbeat—and mine quickened.

Yes, now I know you’re more than indigestion.

So much more that I panic weekly

That I may not be grown up enough

For you to grow from me. 

It’s only perspective now that separates us,

Now you know what I have long forgotten.

And I know what you’ve yet to feel.

Remember where you are—will you, for me? 

If you remember, then you will know

Why you must hurt and hunger here.

But I will hold you;

I will fill your hunger while I can. 

I will teach you to remember

That where you are is love-filled home,

For here we fill our home with love

In that same, not quite forgotten tradition. 

I’ve enjoyed this little talk.

We’ll do this again soon

So I can help you feel at home in the neighborhood

Until you’re ready to meet more of it. 

—Linda Nuttall

                                August 24, 1982

Life Matters

TX State Sen. Dan Patrick at TX pro-life rally Saturday
photo from Dan Patrick's Facebook page

I don’t often write about the issue of abortion, because there are so many dedicated civilized people who express well the side of life. I thank them for that. But this past week marked 40 years since the Roe v. Wade decision, and after so many millions of babies have been killed, I want to add my voice at this time.

There is a rhetorical technique used by the opposition to truth: deny and contradict over time, then admit to the veracity of the statement while adding, “So what?” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a classic example. Months later, after all the denials, when the proof was undeniable, he admitted to the original accusation along with, “It was only my private life,” a version of so what?

Hillary Clinton used it this past week in her “testimony” to Congress about Benghazi. She said,

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.

We know for certain—and she knew the day of the event, if she wasn’t entirely out of the loop of national security—that it was neither a protest nor “guys out for a walk”; it was terrorists. So, months after the event, saying over and over, “we don’t know,” when we know, and we know she knows, she deflects by avoiding the real issue and saying, “what difference does it make?” or, in other words, it doesn’t matter, who cares? so what?

I had not expected the so what? technique to be used on the abortion issue. But that is what I recognized this week is now happening.

The argument over abortion has continued to be over whether the fetus is human life or not: if yes, then that human life is to be valued and protected as other human life; if not, then the woman is simply making a choice about a clump of cells that are part of her own body. This same argument has continued for decades.

As technology gets better, it has become clearer and clearer that the growing fetus is a human baby, with its own DNA separate from the mother’s, with the ability to feel and hear within the cushioning environment of the womb—including feeling pain. Technology has improved greatly on moving the viability to earlier and earlier weeks. The result of this technological progress has been that only a handful of doctors are still willing to perform third trimester abortions; people who understand the procedure are virtually unanimous in disapproving of partial-birth abortion. Laws now recognize the death of a fetus as separate and additional to the death of a mother in accidents or murders.

What I expected, being the positive, civilized person I strive to be, is that more and more people would become convinced that the growing life is a valuable human life, and would move from “the choice is up to the mother” to “because it’s human life, we need to value and protect it.” What I did not expect was the so what? at this point.

Mary Katherine Ham wrote a piece last week referring to a Salon piece that I find shocking. The Salon writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, admits, very clearly, as practically any pro-life person would, that the fetus is a human life separate from the mother. These are the paragraphs Ham highlights:

I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

As I said, I would expect such understanding to lead to the decision to protect life. But Williams goes the exact opposite direction. On the pro-life side (actually, on the side of truth for many issues), we are subject to the imposition of terms from the opposition. Pro-choice is an example. This term is particularly repugnant because it’s not about choice to act; it is about choice of consequences. If a woman purposely engages in sex, she has made the choice to risk pregnancy—the creation of a new human life. If she does that and then finds she is pregnant when she doesn’t want to be, does she then have the right to choose to avoid the natural consequences—when a separate human life is now involved? Pro-life people are pro-choice—you get to choose your behavior, but God’s natural laws choose the consequences that follow your choice.

The president revealed his disapproval of God’s law when he said (off script at a Townhall in Johnstown, PA, during the 2008 campaign), of the hypothetical that one of his own daughters could finding herself pregnant, “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” This is the same person who, in the Illinois legislature, went further than any pro-abortionist to insist a mother has the right to bring about the death of a baby after birth if she hadn’t intended for the baby to be born alive.

The Salon writer expresses her distress that the term “pro-life” is too strong to fight against. So, she grants that the fetus is indeed a human life, and then says so what?

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides….

The “life” conversation is often too thorny to even broach. Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.

She believes, unlike our founders, that some human life isn’t worth protecting, but calls those of us who believe “that all men are created equal” are “wingnuts” and “archconservatives” and “right wingers,” while insisting her viewpoint is the reasonable side of the debate.

So let me be clear: there is nothing civilized about a person who chooses to kill a human life because it is not convenient for her to allow him or her to live. That behavior—the very line of thinking that leads to that behavior—is savage.

Thank the Lord if you can still recognize the difference. The slip from apparent civilization to savagery among the Germans and Japanese in the last century was amazingly swift. It coincided with the faulty belief that some human lives are inferior and not worth bothering about.

In a civilized world, we can never say, “So what if it’s human life? What does that matter?” Life matters.