Pro-Choicers Don’t Understand What Makes Us Tick

Posted by John Jansen (June 9, 2011 at 12:09 pm)

In her post earlier this week about the fire at The Women’s Center CPC in Chicago, Ann Scheidler noted that five (5) members of Walk for Choice Chicago had picketed outside The Women’s Center last week, where they passed out cards [PDF] claiming that the center was “operated by the Pro-Life Action League”.

To be clear, while we wholeheartedly support the lifesaving work of The Women’s Center and often work closely with them, the center is not now, nor has ever been, operated by us.

Quite frankly, I have no idea how the members of Walk for Choice Chicago ever got the impression that it is. Are they really that uninformed about the organizations that make up the pro-life movement?

Pro-Lifers’ Motives Lost on Our Opposition

To some extent, at least, I think they are. And I don’t think their ignorance about us and our motives — in short, what makes us tick — is by any means limited to this particular group of pro-choice activists in Chicago.

On the contrary, I think to a great extent, the pro-choice movement as a whole doesn’t “get” the pro-life movement. They may think they have us figured out, what with their rhetoric about us being “misogynists” intent on waging a “war on women”, but in reality, well, they don’t have a clue.

I remember several years ago, during one of the first Face the Truth Tours I participated in, we encountered a gaggle of pro-choice counter-demonstrators who were chanting at us, “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!” to which one of our sign-holders yelled back, “I’m Protestant!”

The counter-demonstrators looked at each other quizzically, dumbfounded. It was quite clear from their reaction that they hadn’t the foggiest idea of the most basic differences in devotional practice between Catholics and Protestants. I remember thinking to myself at the time, “They just don’t get us, do they?”

Abortion Gang Blogger Clueless about Our Opposition to Contraception

A similar thought crossed my mind last week when I read a post by an Abortion Gang contributor who blogs under the pseudonym “Not Guilty”. The topic of her post was a new form of male birth control that is currently being tested on men in India.

Here’s how Not Guilty concludes her post:

I’m also a little bit excited to see how right-wing nut jobs deal with it. They currently have a field day denying contraception to women since they think sex is a moral issue. I wonder if they will gleefully deny men the same access. Something tells me this will be different in their eyes.

On the one hand, I have to give her where credit is due. While I can’t speak for everyone Not Guilty would consider to be part of the “right-wing nut jobs” camp, I will admit that most of us do still cling to the allegedly antediluvian view that sex is indeed a moral issue.

But considering our well-documented opposition to pre-marital sex and all forms of contraception (including condoms), not to mention our opposition to masturbation and pornography (see here and here), the fact that she actually thinks we would have any hesitation about opposing a new form of male birth control shows that she really doesn’t understand us.

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