I’m taking deep breaths, and trying to keep this as gracious and straight-forward as possible. This is an appeal, not an accusation nor a polemic. Please bear with me, as I make an appeal to the Left in general and those who are silent on the matter of abortion in particular.
The silence I refer to is deafening. Shoot up a school, and you have memorials at the Super Bowl half time show, and every rock star in creation is speaking against guns. The local Episcopal Diocese has scheduled special meetings to discuss the church’s response to the issue of gun violence. Terrible as Sandy Hook is, the numbers just don’t add up. Here’s this “Doctor” Gosnell in Philadelphia who is the author of horrors befitting a Nazi experiment, and nobody seems to care. The Diocese is silent, the media are silent, and as far as I know, there are no half time memorials scheduled. Yet in the last year for which there are statistics, 2008, there were 1,210,000 abortions performed in these United States. The scale of the two tragedies are simply beyond any comparison, yet here we are. We love our children, as long as they’re outside the body of their mother and of school age.
I digress. Here are cogent reasons the liberal Left should adopt a pro-child stance at every age in their lives:
1) Liberals claim in every instance that they are stewards of the moral high road. Here is a clear-cut case of the weak being exploited by the strong. What is more moral than advocacy on behalf of the weak and the silent?
2 Liberals claim they are peaceful people. A car in Tucson had a raft of bumper stickers on it, one advocating abortion and another saying, “My Religion is Peace.” I don’t follow. By outlawing abortion you are making the place that is supposed to be the safest in the universe, the mother’s womb, distinctly safer. It’s really a question of eradicating violence. Have you ever seen an abortion?
3) Liberals claim to be color blind. Something like 70% of abortions end the lives of black children. Is this fair?
4) Liberals claim to love women. Half the babies killed are female.
5) Liberals are fond of painting conservatives in general and pro-life types as rigid and hateful. Here’s a chance to extend an olive branch and heal the political impasse in our nation. Conservatives view the inconsistency of the liberal, pro-abortion stand as invalidating anything liberals say, and I can’t say I blame them. Why do you care so much about the “right” to have unrestricted sex without any consequences? Who put that plank in the liberal platform? All this talk of “it’s my body” and feminism are specious. To pit a woman against the fruit of her womb has got to be the greatest perversion imaginable. The people who want to have abortions are men who want to be able to relieve themselves sexually without commitment and without consequences. It seems to me that women and their standing in society would be better served by making it a little harder for men to exploit women in this way. The issue is not going to go away through unrelenting pressure. The only way it will go away is when liberals realized that they have been fed a philosophical line that just doesn’t hold water.
So please excuse the irritated tone of this letter; I’m really doing the best I can possibly do all things considered. Try to ignore the expressions of anger and fatigue, and instead give thought to the points I’ve made. Here’s a chance for the liberal left to rethink something that has been accepted uncritically for decades, but which is exposed in the Gosnell case for what it really is: murder. Two parting quotes, one from a bumper sticker, one from a poster at a Right to Life march in the 80’s. The first, “If it’s not a child, you’re not pregnant,” and “Choice begins with sex, not your child’s life.” Enough said.
