The first ever South Dakota Face the Truth Tour kicked off Tuesday, April 13 in Sioux Falls, the site of the state’s only abortion clinic, which happens to be run by the Wal-Mart of the abortion industry, Planned Parenthood. Pro-Life Action League staff members Joe, Ann, and Eric Scheidler and Matt Yonke, along with other League stalwart volunteers from Illinois and Wisconsin are conducting the Tour at the invitation of South Dakota pro-life activists led by Al Carlson.
SoDak Truth Tour Presses on Despite “Savage Weather”
Eric Scheidler reports that in the middle of the first site of the day, downpours and chilly, driving winds forced the pro-lifers to take shelter at a pregnancy resource center located near the Planned Parenthood abortion facility. Once the “savage weather” passed, the time spent at the first site was extended to make up for the rain delay.
At the second site of the day in downtown Sioux Falls, a young girl who was four weeks pregnant happened beheld the images of aborted children—which she had never seen before. This girl told League staffer Matt Yonke that she was considering having an abortion, but after seeing the reality of what abortion is, she couldn’t help but think things over. Matt referred her to the pregnancy resource center where the pro-lifers had taken refuge from the rain earlier in the day.
Please keep this young mother in your prayers.
“What If Your Mother Had Aborted You?”
Former president of so-called Catholics for a Free Choice Frances Kissling posted an entry on the RH Reality Check blog two days before Mother’s Day that addresses the question, “What if your mother had aborted you?”
As one might expect, her response to this question is pitiful.
Kissling says:
“In the beginning, my answer was fairly abstract, philosophical. I’d note that the ‘I’ who stands before them is not the ‘I’ that was once a fetus. The I of today is the result of a mother who continued a pregnancy and the process of becoming that made me who I am today.”
Perhaps even Kissling herself realizes this is idiocy, as she now answers the question differently:
“I feel a need to turn that question around and to ask instead: What if your mother’s life would have been significantly happier and healthier if she had not had you? If you as a fetus had the capacity to make decisions, would you have given your life for your mother’s life, health and happiness?”
Kissling: “Frankly, [My Mother] Never Should Have Had Children”
Pro-life blogger extraordinaire Jivin Jehoshaphat offers trenchant analysis of Kissling’s post:
The simple response to this question is that human beings don’t have the right to kill other innocent human beings even if killing other human beings makes them happier and healthier. Presumed future happiness is in no way proper justification for killing a human being.
Kissling’s answer gets even more ridiculous as she says her mother “never should have had children.” She then describes various hardships her mother went through until Kissling hired her mother to work as “the head of the telephone appointment staff” at Kissling’s abortion clinic. Kissling’s mother “flourished” at the position her daughter hired her for and eventually “moved to DC and was the practice manager for a busy orthopedic practice. Her pleasure and first time security was cut short by lung cancer and at the age of 58 she died.”
Kissling then notes,
“As a fetus I would have gladly given up my chance to enter the world and become Frances Kissling to have given my mother a better chance at happiness.”
Well, that’s something which is much easier to state when you know it can no longer happen. It’s much easier to claim, “I’d rather have been killed in the womb” when your born and enjoy the legal protections birth brings. The statement also erroneously assumes that as a fetus Kissling wasn’t in the world. She was in the world, she was just in the womb at the time. If Kissling’s non-existence would have helped her mother out so much and Kissling cared so much about how mother’s happiness, then would Kissling have been willing to have been killed once outside the womb? Probably not. She hasn’t made any argument for why it’s okay to abort for presumed future happiness but not okay to kill infants/toddlers/adolescents for presumed future happiness.
Kissling concludes:
“If we are going to imagine, as some do, fetuses as part of the human community, we are going to have to accept that if they could make decisions, they might be as willing to sacrifice for others as we demand that women and only women be.”
So if fetuses could make decisions, they might be willing to be intentionally killed for their mothers’ presumed future happiness? And as unlikely as that is, would that make killing them okay? Is it okay to kill someone for your future happiness if they’re willing to be killed for your future happiness?
Also notice Kissling’s play on the word “sacrifice.” It’s true that mothers often make tremendous sacrifices for their children. But they typically aren’t killed for their children or willing to die to raise their children’s level of presumed future happiness. Yet that’s the sacrifice Kissling is claiming hypothetical decision-making fetuses might be willing to make. Kissling is equating making sacrifices with being a sacrifice.
More Pro-Aborts Grasp at Straws at Princeton Bioethics Symposium
Another example of pro-aborts grasping as straws was seen recently at a Princeton bioethics symposium titled, “Is It Wrong to End Early Human Life?”
The participants included Princeton’s own Robert George—one of the pro-life movement’s heavy hitters in the American academy today—along with a few other pro-life intellectuals who are no slouches themselves.
The participants also included several professors who see absolutely nothing wrong with ending early human life under certain circumstances.
The panel resulted in some comments that could best be described as “clarifying”. Princeton’s Elizabeth Harman, for example, had this to say:
In my view, fetuses that die before they’re ever conscious really are a lot like plants: They’re living things, but there’s nothing about them that would make us think that they count morally in the way that people do.
Not to be outdone, Rutgers professor Jeff McMahan tried his own hand at bafflegab, who states his belief “that there is a period in early human life when we don’t exist”, because, in his words, “We are not essentially or substantially human organisms.”
McMahan even went to far as to declare, “I was never an embryo”—which First Things editor Ryan Anderson notes “drew noticeable (and decidedly skeptical) chuckles from the audience”.
Anderson also observes:
It was gratifying to see that all of the panelists agreed that the pro-life argument did not rest on illicit theological beliefs (something the Princeton biologist Lee Silver absurdly charges), though it was frustrating to see that, while pro-choice philosophers feel they have to take the pro-life argument seriously, they frequently respond to caricatured versions of it.
And, even more tellingly:
…[I]t must be said that the internal inconsistencies among the various pro-choice views was telling: Whereas the pro-choice panelists all agreed that there was nothing wrong with killing an unborn baby, they couldn’t agree on why. And their internal disagreements actually undermined aspects of their competing pro-choice views.
Of course, Anderson is right.
What was it Abraham Lincoln said about a house divided against itself? Ah, yes—that it cannot stand.
Florence Lococo, R.I.P.
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Florence Lococo, mother of longtime pro-life activist Nick Lococo, who died Sunday, Mother’s Day, at the age of 89.
Visitation and funeral will be held Wednesday, May 14 at St. Bernadine of Siena Parish in Forest Park, IL, at 7246 W. Harrison Street. Visitation will be at 9:30am, and the funeral will be at 10:30am.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.
