OPINION:
People often ask how I can be Republican and pro-choice. It’s really quite simple: I am more comfortable with a party that embraces life and protects the unborn, than one that is apathetic and squanders life. Although I identify with Republicans on most issues that are collateral to abortion, I still tend to believe that first-trimester abortion is between the pregnant woman, her partner, her doctor, her spiritual adviser, and her God. Recent revelations about Planned Parenthood, however, have caused me to question those beliefs.
As science unravels the mysteries of reproduction, it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that life begins at conception — upon fertilization, the building blocks of life (DNA) are immediately set into motion and cells rapidly begin to differentiate into primitive organs and systems. We can disagree about whether the fetus is a “person” entitled to the full panoply of rights attached to personhood, but would be hard-pressed to deny the ironclad scientific evidence that it is life. If one-celled organisms on a distant planet are life, so is a fertilized ovum.
It’s ironic. The very science that allows us to understand the wonders of reproduction is the same science used by Planned Parenthood and the Democrats to justify the harvesting of fetal tissue and organs: the quest for scientific gain and human betterment.
What turned me off to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) decades ago was their rabid enthusiasm for the most painful decision any sentient female could make. But the Democratic Party and its henchmen at Planned Parenthood nonchalantly act as if it the decision to abort is no different than deciding what to wear that day.
More and more women have come to question the DNC’s extreme policies regarding abortion. Once they experience their own pregnancies and births, the “inconvenience argument” is no longer that convincing. Yes, a baby can be inconvenient. It can disrupt a career, kill a job, change one’s body, affect one’s marriage, tie one down, and be a financial burden. But it can enrich lives in profound ways, bring us closer to our spouses, prompt us to question our career aspirations, and make us better people. Once the pounding of the heart is heard or the sonogram is viewed, it’s not that easy to snuff out.
While these women are staunchly pro-choice, they are uncomfortable with the fevered pitch of the Democrats and are unsettled by their knee-jerk eagerness to oppose reasonable limitations designed to prevent us from crossing ethical red lines. After the 2012 Democratic Convention, a very liberal neighbor told me she was disgusted by the DNC’s “abortion fest.” She believed they had gone so far overboard that they alienated people like her.
This is precisely what has resulted from the Planned Parenthood videos. When we take something so precious and so serious and treat it so frivolously, we sacrifice a part of our humanity. If only activists bent out of shape about salmon spawning upstream or sea turtle nests gave the same consideration to burgeoning human life, we might not find ourselves in such a dark place today. But once we started chipping away at our humanity, it was only a matter of time before we would be indifferent to lopping off huge chunks of it.
Not long ago, iconic Democratic women proudly wore “I had an abortion” T-shirts to erase the stigma attached to abortion. (How can there be a stigma when one’s privacy is protected? Perhaps this wasn’t about stigma in as much as guilt.) It’s not that much of a leap to go from wearing an abortion on one’s chest like a badge of honor to the stolid reaction of Dr. Deborah Nucatola.
A whopping majority of Americans are revolted by Planned Parenthood’s Josef Mengele-like attitude that the flesh of the unwanted — the subhuman — is flesh to be toyed with and profited from. I have been so appalled by the turpitude of Planned Parenthood that I am now questioning views I have held for some 35 years. I understand why we are repulsed by tissue and organ harvesting. What I don’t understand is how we can be so horrified by that but relatively unfazed by abortion in general?
What causes us to recoil is not that Planned Parenthood has done something illegal and has profited from it, or that forceps-wielding Frankenstein-like doctors playing God display absolutely no remorse, or that longstanding ethics have been violated by failing to secure the consent of the mother. We recoil because of the procedure — if harvesting were legal, sales yielded no profit, the doctors were remorseful, the mothers had consented, or we developed the cure for Alzheimers from harvested tissue, we would still find the procedure abhorrent. Whether the baby is discarded in a garbage bag, incinerated or picked over for its salable parts, it has still been destroyed.
I fail to see how one’s support for choice can honestly be reconciled with one’s opposition to harvesting. Is aborting a life to lessen the mother’s burden really more palatable than aborting one in the hope of curing devastating diseases? A least in the latter case — as perverse as it sounds — the goal is to help humanity.
The only good thing to come of this is the acknowledgment by millions of pro-choice Americans that abortion for personal convenience is just as sickening as abortion to harvest fetal tissue.
• Sally Zelikovsky is a former attorney who founded the San Francisco Tea Party and the Bay Area Patriots in 2009, and was active in Republican and conservative politics in California.
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