Opinion

Letter to the editor: Pro-lifers respond to 10 question challenge

Dear Editor-in-Chief,

This letter is in response to last week’s letter by Emily Young, “10 questions for Clarion pro-life supporters.” Last week, Students for Life held our annual “Pro-Life Week” where we focus on different events to educate students and the community about abortion. After reading Emily Young’s letter last week, we would like to respond to her questions posed to the pro-life community. However, two clarifying points about our Students for Life organization:

1. Our organization is not based on contempt for women. In fact, it has been women-led since its inception in 2004. Our advisor, Dr. Rourke, informs us that female membership has never been under 80 percent. In six years, there have been only two male officers, or around 7 percent overall male membership. Nationally, the pro-life movement is young and female. At the March for Life, young women in the tens of thousands attend. By way of contrast, the pro-choice movement looks to be dominated more by the older advocates of the feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

2. Concerning the display of crosses (what we call “The Cemetery of the Innocents”), it is neither illogical nor “hyper-religious.” The use of the symbol of the cross in the ground is to communicate a grave. A cross is a universally recognized symbol of a grave. No one, even those who disagree with us, seems to misunderstand that we are trying to underline one point – that abortion results in the death of a human being. As Dr. Jerome LeJeune, one of the world’s foremost authorities in the field of genetics and most notably the founder of the genetics of Down’s Syndrome states, “At no time is the human being a blob of protoplasm. As far as your nature is concerned, I see no difference between the early person that you were at conception and the late person which you are now. You were, and are, a human being.” Our organization does not take any religious stand and we have many members of diverse religious affiliations. Our members are only members because we all agree that abortion is wrong.

In response to Emily Young’s 10 questions:

1. SFL constructed a symbolic graveyard because the death of the unborn is a specific focus of our organization, and not other innocent victims of injustice – many though they are. We do not deny that there are many other victims of violence. In contrast to Emily Young’s opinion, we firmly believe that abortion is a universal tragedy as more than 46 million human lives have been lost in the United States alone since legalization in 1973.

2. Whether or not we believe in the right to bodily autonomy depends on what one means by it. If it means that one should not have to engage in sexual intercourse against one’s will, we hold the doctrine as strongly as anyone. However, an aborted child is a different human life from the mother, and that can be scientifically proven by DNA analysis. Since the unborn are separate, genetically unique individual lives, and abortion is the ending of a life, then the argument for the “right to control one’s body” has no validity in the abortion debate. We do not support the deliberate ending of another person’s life, and we not do believe a woman has a right to kill the child in her womb.

3. The argument about putting women in jail for choosing abortion is an old canard used to discredit pro-lifers. Even before Roe v. Wade, it was not the practice to jail women who had abortions, and no credible pro-life organization argues for such a bad policy. Alice Paul, an American women’s suffragist leader, is reported to have said abortion was the ultimate exploitation of women. We concur. Jailing women who have suffered through abortion is counterproductive in every conceivable way. We also fail to see how chasing down women picking herbs would be a good use of the resources of our criminal justice system.

4. In terms of how we spend our time aside from advocating against abortion, we reached out to pro-choice advocates (most notably FMLA and Dr. Burghardt of Women’s Studies) on campus and worked with them to have the first ever Pregnancy Forum here at Clarion in 2008. We were on the ground floor of the Parenting and Pregnancy Resources Initiative on campus. At least three members of our organization attend every meeting. We worked with others (most notably Dr. Girvan and Dr. Boyden) to try to save the Siler Center to assist parenting students. We have conducted clothing and baby-item drives for young mothers every year of our existence. We are painfully aware that the existing resources for parenting and pregnant students are inadequate, as they are in most places. Just this very day, our adviser, Dr. Rourke, with Dr. Girvan and Dr. Smrekar, met with Vice President for Student Affairs, Harry Tripp, to find the next best step to establish day care again at Clarion. Just like there are other tragedies and evils in the world, there are other organizations dedicated to ending them. We are committed to defending life as well as finding the resources and ongoing support that pregnant women need in order to continue their pregnancy.

5. The relationship between promoting contraception and having fewer abortions is not as simple as some suggest. If we examine the proliferation of contraceptives, most notably the pill, since 1960, they most surely did not decrease the number of abortions in the United States. Furthermore, the simplistic argument ignores the broader impact of the contraceptive mentality on morality in our culture. It undermines the moral connection between sex and marriage and encourages an explosion of sexual activity among the young and unmarried. This cultural change normalizes sexual activity for teens, which tends to increase unwanted pregnancies. Contraception facilitates the kinds of relationships and attitudes that are most likely to lead to these unwanted pregnancies, and therefore, abortions. No serious analyst contends that the introduction of the contraceptive pill led to fewer abortions in the United States from 1960-1990. Although pre-1973 numbers are debatable, we know that abortions almost tripled from 1973-1990 (600,000-1, 600,000 approx.) despite the widespread availability of contraceptives.

6. Just like tracking down women who pick herbs, it would also not be of beneficial use of our criminal justice system to investigate miscarriages as negligent homicides. Also, just like no credible pro-life organization advocates the jailing of women who have an abortion, no credible or serious pro-life organization advocates investigating miscarriages.

7. Due to reasons of space, we cannot address this purely speculative scenario in this letter.

8. Concerning the old argument that laws prohibiting abortion cause more deaths of women, The Center for Disease Control reported 37 deaths from illegal abortion in the year prior to Roe v. Wade. As a matter of public record, it is known that Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former director of the National Abortion Rights Action League and former abortionist, verifies deliberate fabrication of the figure 5,000-10,000 deaths per year prior to abortion legalization. He said, “In NARAL… when we spoke of [mass statistics] it was always 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year. I confess that I knew that the figures were totally false… [but] it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it?” The common belief that thousands of women died yearly from illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade is false. We are not denying that women did die then, but it is important to acknowledge that women continue to die from legal abortion today.

Additionally, there is no credible evidence from any nation that has legalized abortion to support the claim that the number of abortions remained the same as before legalization. In the U.S., we know that legalization caused a huge increase in the number of abortions. Since there are really no nations that legalized it and then banned it again, no one can honestly say they know what the numbers would be. Global studies by the Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) used to underline the dangers of illegal abortions (and no one denies the dangers!) are based on highly speculative numbers as to both the number of abortions and the number of deaths from illegal ones in nations that frequently have no reliable data. We do know that abortion advocates have inflated and invented numbers historically. Women in developing areas need health care, just as women here do.

9. Rape is a difficult case. Ninety-three percent of abortions do not involve rape, incest, or the life of the mother, and we believe the focus should be on these 93 percent of cases where we can get the consensus we need to limit abortion. Nonetheless, it is difficult to understand how a second act of violence against an innocent victim is the good solution. Does the unborn child deserve the death penalty for the biological father’s crime? Just as some women consider giving birth in these circumstances as “being raped and violated a second time,” just as many women have said that giving their child life aided in their healing process.

10. Concerning the important issue of war, many would argue that there are conditions under which war can be justly waged. There is, in principle, the moral right to self-defense, which makes the morality of war quite a bit different than terminating the life of an innocent child in which self-defense is hardly a legitimate dimension. Pro-lifers have varied opinions, but again – we have no organizational position about war. Our focus, in addition to trying to create a better environment for women to choose life, is our opposition to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. These keep us busy.

Sincerely,

Katy Nolan, President, Junior

Amy Denison, Vice President, Junior

Emily Mosher, Community Outreach, Sophomore