OPINION:
Someone please call Piers Morgan. There is a weapon that kills more children in an hour (about 159) than died at Columbine, Aurora and Sandy Hook combined (55). That’s an average for every hour of every day since 1973, or more than 55 million lives in 40 years.
This weapon is called “choice.” That is, it used to be. After loudly wearing the “pro-choice” label for years, pro-abortion advocates are finally and quietly admitting that the game is up.
Americans do not want to identify themselves as “pro-choice.” Gallup records the number of people identifying themselves as “pro-choice” is at an all-time low. “Americans now tilt ’pro-life’ by [a] nine-point margin” (50 percent to 41 percent). The trend is nothing new, but Planned Parenthood’s admission is.
At a recent news conference, Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said, ” ’Choice’ as [a] word sounds frivolous.” After 40 years, with more than 55 million aborted babies and countless women scarred by believing in their lies, now it is “frivolous,” and they just want to move on.
What Planned Parenthood refuses to acknowledge is that we are witnessing a strong pro-life trend. Ultrasound technology gives us a window into the womb, exposing how ridiculous Planned Parenthood’s lies were about a “blob of tissue.” The countless women hurt by abortions who are now speaking out, like those at Silent No More, are also having an impact.
Even the Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Carhart, a partial-birth abortion case, recognized the pain the abortion deception can cause women: “It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child.”
Yet that’s nothing, according to “pro-choice” advocates. The problem is their label. They came to that conclusion after — in their panic to stop the pro-life trend — they found many women confused. As one woman in a Planned Parenthood-commissioned focus group said, “I’m neither pro-choice nor pro-life. I’m pro-whatever-the-situation is.”
They can label themselves however they want. The one thing we know for a fact is they are not pro-woman.
A recent Time magazine cover article titled, “What Choice?” chronicled how abortion advocates have been losing significant ground, especially at the state level, on this issue. Even more revealing than author Kate Pickert’s ultimate pronouncement were her observations at abortion clinics. The stories are heartbreaking.
“Eye contact can be hard to come by. Many patients walk the halls with their heads down and their arms crossed. In journals scattered throughout the clinic in which women are invited to express their feelings, patients write about nonsupportive husbands and boyfriends and ask God for forgiveness. They write about how they can’t afford to support another child.”
These women are confused; they need help and support. Planned Parenthood’s idea of support is limited to signs along the walls that, according to the story, read, “You are beautiful. We trust women. Well-behaved women rarely make history.” Apparently, that’s Planned Parenthood’s idea of good messages for women in such distress.
Once in the abortion room, the story continues:
“’Are you confident in your decision to have an abortion today?’ If the woman says yes, the abortion begins; the whirring of the vacuum aspirator used to extract the fetus can be heard in the hallway.”
It is interesting that the author noticed the sound. Post-abortive women frequently recount how that sound still haunts them years after their “choice.”
The Time article recounts the experience in the recovery room, where a young woman declined offers of birth control after an abortion. The doctor “runs through a few ancillary health benefits of birth control anyway, hands the woman some condoms and pats her shoulder.”
Another young woman at the profiled clinic was not sure if she wanted an abortion. “* nce it’s clear that the woman is conflicted, [the doctor] gives her prenatal vitamins and sends her home.” This is unbelievable. These young women need help. They are in desperate need of guidance and support, of love and care. They get none of that. A pat on the shoulder and a few inspirational slogans on the way out are apparently enough.
Not surprisingly, according to the Time article, the young woman returns a week later and has the abortion.
Abortionists do not care about women. Planned Parenthood does not care about women. The pro-life community has always decried the mischievous “pro-choice” branding, as we have seen time and again that abortion is usually something women resort to when they feel they have no choice. It is the pro-life community that tells hurting women they do have a choice, and that someone knows what they are going through and cares. That has been the message of the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers around the country, which love and support hurting women.
Ironically, Planned Parenthood’s more “nuanced” deception to move away from the “pro-choice” label involves a campaign to tell women the exact opposite. They say pregnant women are alone, and no one knows what they are going through. Buzzfeed quotes from their new public relations campaign: “We just don’t know a woman’s specific situation,” says the ad (not yet online). “We’re not in her shoes.” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards raved about “this theme that nobody can be in another person’s circumstances.”
This shameful strategy is destined to fail as miserably as the previous one. The truth is out: Pro-life is pro-woman. That’s the truth, and there is nothing they can do about it.
Mario Diaz is legal counsel for Concerned Women for America.
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