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Monday, February 08, 2010
Respect For Life: After The Tebow Ad
It would appear, from some of the fusillades aimed at Focus on the Family's innocuous SuperBowl ad, that there are pro-abortion types so fervid that they believe that Pam Tebow should have aborted her son Tim -- that "doctor's advice" trumps a mother's discretion and the dictates of her conscience. Those same folks will drone your ear off about "a woman's right to choose."
Perhaps grasping that takes more capacity for doublethink than a mere Curmudgeon Emeritus can muster. All the same, your Curmudgeon is greatly entertained by the foofaurauw over the Tebows' pitch for the family and the sanctity of life. The hysteria of the pro-abortion crowd makes it perfectly plain that they don't believe in the power of their "choice" argument -- that even one dissenting voice, however gentle, is too threatening to be allowed. Beyond that, it would appear that there's only one choice they really respect.
Perhaps we should welcome those who actually "come out of the closet:"
There may be some pro-choice people who state that it should be infrequent, but others who don’t....I’m pro-choice and I don;t believe abortion should be infrequent. Quite the opposite, I think that it should happen as often as women want to have it happen. They should have as many abortions as they care to, and they should deal with the moral issues themselves, because it certainly isn’t any of your business. And I definitely doubt that the world is a significantly better place with this egotistical, over-paid enabler of the greatest distraction from our problems that we have. We’d be better off if a lot of people, including Tebow, hadn’t been born. We’d be better off if you had been aborted, and I bet, like Tebow, your poor mama considered it. I say these things to illustrate the rank stupidity of this argument. If there is reason to be elated that someone was born, then also we should wish that others hadn’t been. That is if you want to live your life fantasizing about processes over which you have no control in the past.
This gentleman is more honest than his colleagues; he's willing to state openly that he's in favor of legalized infanticide. His hostility toward the unborn is right out in front of God and everybody. More, he hates anyone who dares disagree with him, so greatly that he'll tell that person "We’d be better off if you had been aborted." A few more like him and the pro-life forces would sweep the field.
In truth, the masks have been off for a long time now. They started coming off when the horror of partial-birth abortion was publicized. They were torn in half when books such as LIME 5 showed us the inner workings of the abortion industry. When pro-abortion advocates attacked John Roberts and Samuel Alito because of their hostility to "women's health and safety" and "safe medical procedures," there could no longer be any doubt.
All that remains to the pro-abortion community is invective and insult.
In a way, the key document of the abortion wars is Mark Steyn's fabulous study America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Steyn's survey of the demographic disappearance of the Western nations due to anti-natalist policies lit a lamp -- admittedly, a small and subtle one, about the intensity of a night light -- in many undecided minds. His unchallengeable projection of the bleak future likely from the "one designer baby at age thirty-nine" syndrome has awakened Americans to the consequences of present-tense self-indulgence, especially our immersion in the sex-for-pleasure-only ethic that's pervaded the West since the 1970s.
Allow your Curmudgeon to be candid: children are a burden. They cost money; they take work to raise; they get into scraps with the neighbors; they impede their parents' pursuit of adult pleasures and fulfillments. Anyone who's reared a couple will concede all of that without question.
Many a Boomer couple that averted child-bearing and child-rearing congratulated itself on being "childfree." In the present tense of early and middle adulthood, that probably looked pretty good: no encumbrances, no extra costs, and no responsibilities for barely controllable spratlings. But a nation that eschews child-bearing is a nation aging at the rate of a year per year. It will progressively lack workmen to do the strenuous and painful jobs older adults can't or won't do. It will lack the fire of innovation that emanates from younger workers. It will mow its own lawns and shovel its own driveways into its sixties, seventies, and eighties.
That progression is why Americans' resistance to illegal immigration is as low as it is. It's why Europe, whose native populations average 1.3 children per couple, has opened its doors to mass immigration from the Muslim Middle East, with all that implies.
But wait: there's more. What young people we allow to be born will progressively regard us, their aging and ever more needy progenitors, as an irritating and unwanted burden. They'll become ever more friendly toward such "solutions" as legalized euthanasia...perhaps, as has too often been the case in the Netherlands, whether or not the guest of honor concurs in the decision to euthanize him.
Can we lay all of this at the feet of abortion and its proponents? No, of course not. It's a component in a syndrome of wide embrace: the dismissal of the future in service to present-moment satisfactions and concerns. But families are specifically about the future. No one marries for present-moment satisfaction; no one bears children for the pleasures of parturition. Those are strictly forward-looking commitments.
If our immediate lusts and demands are to be fully satisfied, free of any and all encumbrances, the family has to go.
The most strident, best funded proponents of unlimited abortion on demand are its "business partners:" organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, which have a pecuniary interest in the growth of abortion. Planned Parenthood operates abortion clinics; NARAL's money comes from pro-abortion fundraising and activism. Both stand to take serious hits to the pocketbook should abortion fall out of favor among young Americans.
NARAL in particular has been militant against crisis pregnancy centers, not-for-profit institutions that counsel unwillingly pregnant women and attempt to find them non-abortion options. Such centers have been strikingly effective at persuading mothers-to-be to spare their babies' lives. The proliferation of ultrasound equipment, the images from which make the unborn child visible and real to the mother, has been a particular blessing to their cause. NARAL has lobbied legislatures to regulate crisis pregnancy centers more stringently than abortion clinics, in particular to prohibit them from acquiring ultrasound equipment.
It's quite clear that unless the "choice" is for an abortion, the "pro-choice" groups will have nothing to do with it. There's too much money at stake.
The Tebows' ad, an utterly innocuous statement about family love and the possibilities inherent in every unborn child, has evoked the ugliest imaginable sentiments from pro-abortion activists, as the above should suffice to demonstrate. Comparisons of pro-lifers to the Taliban -- "you both want to control women's bodies" -- are frequent. Dismissals of the humanity of the unborn child -- "It's just a blob of tissue" -- are de rigueuer. And of course we have the endless flood of euphemisms for abortion: "women's health and safety," "safe medical procedures," and your Curmudgeon's favorite, "effecting fetal demise en utero."
The struggle is far from over. It could get uglier still.
When the ugliness gets to be too much for your Curmudgeon, he'll re-run Focus on the Family's Tebows commercial. Nothing dispels the irritation from pro-abortion activists' endless repetition and insult like the faces of happy people -- happy to have chosen life.
Comments
When I first heard about the Tebow’s ad and what exactly was being talked about I flashbacked to this. And though the excerpt is “dramatized”, the story is none the less true, or I wouldn’t be here.
Though I am against abortion, I don’t know if we can get that particular beast back into
“Pandora’s Box”. Perhaps the best we could hope for is a repeal of the federal standings, returning it to each individual State, allowing for them to decide if such a choice should be legally allowed.Then there is the pesky part of “where do we draw the line”. One month? First trimester? Second? Partial birth? One imagines when this was first legalized, that anything past the first trimester would have been unthinkable by most people across the country, but incramentalism has a way of pushing boundaries to unthinkable parameters, as we are witnessing today.
I am probably one of the worlds lousiest fathers, but the three greatest gifts I have ever received were my three sons. (The next four greatest being my step-children.)
Posted by Guy S. on 02/08/2010 at 10:49 AMI call the shrews pro abortion all the time! You go Curmudge!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/08/2010 at 04:09 PMI wish I could remember where it was that I had read someone comment on the Tebow ad that no doctor would have suggested to his mother that she do something illegal. I was dumbstruck. Such a comment could only come from one too young to know anything about it, or too ignorant to speak with their own mother about it.
Posted by Deb S. on 02/08/2010 at 05:52 PM
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