(American Life League) – The Guttmacher Institute worries intensely that it is no longer able to co-opt half of the pro-life movement, hoping that incrementalist measures — long derided as the pro-regulation arm of the abortion industry — might become the norm. By its own admission, so-called 15-week bans are nothing of the sort when 97% of abortions occur within the first 15 weeks.
Even six-week bans are still a six-week open season on babies, when Guttmacher’s own tally shows 63% of the abortions performed in America are done so through chemical means.
Let us be clear once and for all. The pro-life movement is not interested in half measures or compromise. Either the abortion industry is correct and human life is a cheap and disposable thing, or the pro-life movement is correct and every human person deserves the basic right to exist.
The argument was never one of settling on when one can kill preborn children, but rather whether the practice is ever acceptable in a civilized society. This was never about ending Roe; it is about making abortion a moral impossibility.
While Democrats continue to be held in thrall to abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood, Republicans seem to hope that remaining in a state of superposition will somehow help the electoral math in November. For pro-life Americans, such superposition is and remains utterly insufficient — and they know it.
Of course, the abortion industry is defending a multibillion-dollar business convincing young mothers to destroy their babies.
Again, by Guttmacher’s own numbers, Planned Parenthood is a $2 billion organization subsidized by nearly $1 billion in donations and another $700 million in federal and state taxpayer dollars. Such a behemoth is constantly on the lookout for new victims. How do they collect them? By convincing otherwise rational people to reduce themselves to mindlessly pleasuring themselves and then providing the escape for the consequences of doing so.
Let’s be clear on this matter as well. When public figures such as the comedian Bill Burr and late-night talk show host Bill Maher can say the quiet part out loud — that abortion really is taking a life — this is no longer a public conversation about when life begins, but rather who has the power to decide when life ends.
In this, the Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood will defend what is commonly defined as a salient feature of modern neo-liberalism, namely that each person is a property unto themselves and that neither government nor law has the right to impede upon one’s personal autonomy and individual freedom.
Yet there is a deceit in claiming that individuals are the final ends of a society. Turning personal pleasure into the highest good and hard choices into its opposite doesn’t create a just society. Instead of a society of equals and respect, the abortion industry has helped to create a society built on manipulation and abuse.
Women are no longer respected for their femininity, but rather are asked to throw away what makes them most feminine so as to participate in a neo-liberal society.
Guttmacher’s own numbers in 2005 indicate that nearly three out of every four abortions occur because young mothers believed they would be unsupported. Nearly half cited relationship concerns or fear of being a single parent. One in six — a number that should horrify us all — said their partner was coercing them to have an abortion.
Another 2017 study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons states that nearly three out of every four women who had an abortion felt either pressured or coerced into doing so.
This is the hellscape that Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood defend in the name of personal autonomy. If the old truism holds that in every abortion the result is one dead and one wounded, how does the abortion industry sleep at night knowing that the vast majority of its victims are pressured into accepting one form of violence in the hopes of offsetting another?
The answer is $20 million split among 53 Planned Parenthood affiliate CEOs, nine of whom are men pushing abortion on women, and 70% of those victims being minorities, according to Pew Research.
When former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg told The New York Times in 2009 that abortion policy in America was crafted due to a “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” the question goes larger than who decides in matters of life and death, but rather it strikes deeply at the heart of other questions. Do we value each and every human person? Are we supporting women as mothers? Or as mere cogs in the economy?
One doubts there is any disagreement that both Democrats and Republicans could do far more to support mothers who choose life. Yet the question as to where to set the number isn’t six or 15 or 24.
Bill Maher is right. There are only two honest options: 0 or 40. Pro-life Americans should not settle for half measures, or will we? Doing so is both dishonest and selling out millions of pro-life Americans as the pro-regulation arm of an already materially enriched abortion industry.
Shaun Kenney is vice president of American Life League, the nation’s oldest Catholic pro-life organization in the United States.