Consistent Life Weekly Peace & Life Connections

Get clothing, buttons, bumper stickers, magnets, mugs and cards promoting a consistent life ethic at the CL Online Store

Search our site

Peace & Life Connections #257
April 24, 2015

Note: Editor Rachel MacNair is in The Hague this week to attend the 100^th anniversary conference of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom, which unfortunately has an abortion-as-women’s-rights position. In honor of the conference, we offer quotations from those whose “pro-choice” positions remain intact while reflecting on what’s wrong. Look next week for a report on how CL actions at the WILPF conference went.

Special Issue: Hesitations
Abortion Defenders Reflect on What May Be Wrong

Naomi Wolfe
“Our Bodies, Our Souls: Rethinking Pro-choice Rhetoric,”
The New Republic, October 16, 1995

257 Naomi

So what will it be: Wanted fetuses are charming, complex, REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, but unwanted ones are mere “uterine material”? How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. Free women must be strong women, too; and strong women, presumably, do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.

^^^^^^^

Germaine Greer
The Whole Woman
book published in 1999 as a sequel to The Female Eunuch
chapter on Abortion

257 Germaine

These days contraception is abortion, because the third generation pills cannot be shown to prevent sperm fertilizing an ovum… Intra-uterine devices, medicated or not, work by creating inflammation of the uterus, often accompanied by infection; women who accepted them as contraceptive devices were actually being equipped with a do-it-yourself abortionist’s tool. The outcome was frequent occult abortion, heavy bleeding and pelvic inflammatory disease, with the accompanying elevated risk of ectopic pregnancy… Whether you feel that the creation and wastage of so many embryos is an important issue or not, you must see that the cynical deception of millions of women by selling abortifacients as if they were contraceptives is incompatible with the respect due to women as human beings. You must also see that expecting women to be grateful for the opportunity to have inserted into their bodies instruments for sucking and scraping out the products of avoidable conception shows them as much contempt… What women don’t know does hurt them. If we ask ourselves whether we would have any hope of imposing upon men the duty to protect women’s fertility and their health, and avoid the abortions that occur in their uncounted millions every day, we will see in a blinding light how unfree women are.

^^^^^^^

Don Sloan
Don Sloan, M.D. with Paula Hartz, Abortion: A Doctor's Perspective, A Woman's Dilemma. (New York: Donald I Fine, Inc., 1992)

pages 239-240:

As the pregnancy advances, the idea of abortion becomes more and more repugnant to a lot of people, medical personnel included. Clinicians try to divorce themselves from the method." [Sloan then goes into graphic detail and describes the need to check the body parts to make sure everything is out. "Want to do abortion? Pay the price. There is an old saying in medicine: If you want to work in the kitchen, you may have to break an egg. The stove gets hot. Prepare to get burned.

page 84:

Is abortion murder? All killing isn't murder. A cop shoots a teenager who "appeared to be going for a gun," and we call it justifiable homicide – a tragedy for all concerned, but not murder . . . And then there's war. In theory, soldiers shoot only at each other. But in practice, lots and lots of other folks get killed.
We drop bombs where there are non-combatants – women and children and old people – and when they die we call it not murder but “collateral damage.” Our soldiers get killed by “friendly fire” – often by people who aimed directly at them. Is that murder? All killing like that, to me, is morally wrong. But murder?

=======================================================

Rest in Peace – Rose Evans

Rose Evans was active since the first meeting CL was founded and served many years as Secretary. She was editor of Harmony magazine, which educated about the consistent life ethic for several years. She died peacefully in her sleep on Monday, April 13. She could always be counted on for cheerfulness (even when an airline lost her luggage) and was crucial to the long-lasting stability and success of Consistent Life.

Photo, left to right: Rose with Joan Baranow and Lisa Stiller
after the West Coast Walk for Life, January, 2015

Go to previous issue

Peace & Life Connections Main Page

Peace & Life Connections Index

Topical Index to Quotations

Go to next issue

To submit a possible item for Peace & Life Connections, or if you believe there is an error, please contact us at Peace & Life Connections.