When I read pro-abortion articles, I am struck that nine times out of ten, the writers never confront what the issue truly is:
The Unborn Child.
They completely ignore the issue. They frame it in terms of women's needs. If they talk about women, then they don't have to deal with the issue.
After all: if the unborn child were not considered a human being, there wouldn't be an issue, would there?
The rhetoric centres around the result of the act, and the person it serves not the act itself. And certainly not what is objectionable about the act.
Just yesterday, I was on a pro-life facebook group, when a pro-abort poster made the usual objections: what if the woman is raped? What if she's poor? What if she cant' raise the baby?
Well what if she has the newborn? Do we allow newborns to be killed for those reasons.
Why don't pro-aborts ever come up with that reasoning on their own? It's an easy rebuttal with, and if you think through the debate, it's pretty obvious.
The reason they don't is because they're narrowly focused on the woman and feminist ideology. They do not understand the debate.
But even those who do understand the debate never address *the* issue.
Think about it.
Feminists often say that pro-lifers have lost the debate on fetal rights.
If that were the case, talking about the fetus would be the easiest way to refute our side of the argument.
But they never do. They talk about the woman.
They don't debate the fetus. They evade that discussion.
For most people, a woman is more real than a fetus. A woman is a more tangible reality than an unborn child. It's easier to mask the reality of the unborn child-- seeing as he is hidden-- than the social problems facing women.
So of course they are going to talk about women-- not fetuses. It is a far easier sell to say women will die from illegal abortion than fetuses will die from legal abortion
There are 100 000 abortion deaths in Canada every year.
Where are these dead fetuses?
Nowhere. They don't show up. They're non-existent to the vast majority of Canadians.
It makes it very easy for pro-aborts to avoid *the* issue.
This is one reason why pro-aborts do not like the abortion pictures. They say these pictures are divorced from the "complex realities" of women. The abortion pictures finally confront *the* issue.
If the fetal rights angle was so detrimental to the pro-life position, all the pro-aborts would have to do to make their case is show a picture of what a "real" abortion looks like, and that would be the end of it.
The truth is, the fetus angle is what they want to suppress. If that angle wasn't part of the abortion debate, there would be no debate. The vast majority of people do not have a problem with "women controlling their own bodies". They do not sanction rape. They don't care if women want to get tubal ligations or colour their hair purple or pierce every part of their body. Most people don't even care if an individual woman wants babies or not. This notion that right-wingers want to make women into baby incubators is demagogic rhetoric. Practically nobody wants to criminalize anything a woman does to her body...but feminists have to create this rhetorical reality that right-wingers are out to criminalize women and women's sexuality.
It's all verbiage to suppress the real issue.
I think that if pro-lifers want to advance the pro-life issue, there has to be a greater emphasis on this point: that feminists evade this issue, and that unborn children are equal. The more we take unborn children seriously, the more the public will. And that is how equality for the unborn child will be achieved. We have not lost the fetal rights debate. We never had it to begin with.
Visit Opinions Canada
a political blogs aggregator
_________________________
