By Dave Andrusko
“Let us not forget that there is always a moment when a moral choice must be made.” — Elie Wiesel, from his book, “Legends of Our Time.”
I may (and do I ever) have many shortcomings as a writer and editor, but writer’s block is not one of them. In 45+ years of writing hundreds of stories and even more opinion pieces, I don’t think I’ve ever paused more than five minutes before beginning to hammer away at the keyboard.
And, of late (alas), there has been an especially egregious run of awful behavior by the Abortion Industry and its legion of media apologists and enablers that should be addressed.
Here’s a thought experiment. For multiple decades whenever events would turn against NARAL and PPFA, they knew they could, like children playing a schoolyard game, “return to base.” But I would argue that this sense of ultimate security – – a place where they were safe from challenge – – is far less sturdy than it once was.
Think of this haven as if it were constructed in the shape of a triangle. One side consists of rhetoric reducing the unborn child to the status essentially of an inanimate collection of purposeless tissue. Nothing there to get excited about, so it doesn’t matter how early in pregnancy or how late they are dispatched. That is an exceedingly hard lie to peddle, however, at a time of four-color ultrasounds and a tidal wave of advertisements that talk about your “unborn baby.”
It is true that the anti-life set has awarded this whatever-it-is (who is going to “die anyway”) with a kind of significance by proxy: “its” existence can make a difference if “it” can be harvested, like a cash crop, to address the diseases of “real” people.
The second side of the triangle is a vicious caricature of the women and men who make up the pro-life movement. Every derisive, demeaning, dehumanizing label you can think of has been attached to people who’ve devoted their lives to speaking up for the voiceless.
To NARAL Prochoice America, their sworn enemy is pregnancy help centers. Why? Because they give women in a crisis pregnancy a choice.
Do these pro-choicers see the contradiction? Probably, but so what? Didn’t Emerson write, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”?
And pro-lifers, to the little minds at NARAL, are foolish to be consistently championing mothers and unborn children. To the Abortion Industry, pro-lifers are, at best, modern-day Don Quixotes.
When we provide physical and moral sustenance to pregnant women and girls in need, to everyday Americans that is the hallmark of decent, loving people.
But without the third side, pro-abortionists would hardly have gotten past first base: the media’s all-in willingness to accept whatever comes out of the mouths of pro-abortionists as if had been inscribed on tablets brought down from Mt. Sinai. That was, is, and likely always will be the ultimate fortifier for an industry that makes its living off the misery of women who feel trapped and the deaths of unborn children who are defenseless.
Yet as I have argued in many, many posts, while almost all “mainstream” reporters are pro-abortion, not everyone is immune to new evidence and new ways of understanding the threat abortion poses to our core values.
For example, “discrimination-based” abortions. If you, as a good progressive reporter, are against invidious distinctions (as everyone should be), how can you not be unnerved when pro-abortionists insist it is okay to abort a child precisely because she is the “wrong” sex, he is the “wrong” color, or he/she is deemed less than “perfect”?
These reporters may be able to persuade themselves that helping pregnant women in desperate need is somehow an evil. Some may convince themselves that giving women who change their minds in the middle of a chemically-induced abortion an opportunity to save their babies is an “infringement” of their rights.
And finally, reporters may continue to talk themselves into believing that unborn children cannot experience unimaginable pain as they are torn apart, limb from limb.
But my strong suspicion is that at some point the incongruity—the cognitive dissonance—between support for the equality of all human beings and accepting the deaths of babies because they are females or a member of a minority group or “imperfect” will be too strong for reporters to ignore.
Who knows, perhaps at that point they may treat what National Right to Life has to say with the same respect they afford Planned Parenthood.