The Kansas City Star recently chronicled a protest staged on August 9 by the Abortion Rights Freedom Riders outside A Better Choice, a pregnancy resource center in Wichita, which shares a parking lot with the pro-life group Operation Rescue.
A couple items included in the article are worth highlighting. For starters: its mention that the protest consisted of “about 15 activists from around the country – and a couple of Wichitans who joined in.”
In other words, the vast majority of the pro-abortion demonstrators were astroturfers. This should surprise no one.
The article also provided our good friend Troy Newman with a golden opportunity to explain the night-and-day difference between a pro-life pregnancy resource center like A Better Choice and an abortion clinic. And he couldn’t have been clearer:
“I don’t see anybody coming out of that place (A Better Choice) with a sad face,” he said. “Unlike an abortion clinic, everybody who’s going in and out of there are happy.”
The article also notes that the Wichita chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) opted not to join the Abortion Rights Freedom Riders.
Think about that for a second. When the local chapter of one of the most prominent national pro-abortion organizations — and which has tried every trick in the book to try to shut down pro-life activism — doesn’t want to join your protests, that says a lot about how “out there” the Abortion Rights Freedom Riders are.
Among the slogans displayed on signs held by the group at last week’s protest, perhaps the most ridiculous of all was “Stop Forced Motherhood.” Notice first the implicit assumption: namely, that pro-lifers want to force women to become mothers.
But do we?
Abortion: The Real Violation of a Woman’s Body
I can understand how someone might think that trying to get abortion clinics shut down or working to get legal protection for the right to life of unborn children would amount to “forcing” some pregnant women to become mothers.
But let’s back up and take a look at that word “force,” because it seems that the real violation of a woman’s body is something else.
Looking at just the physical act directed at her body, abortion is a violation. It is the act of abortion (whether chemical or surgical) that literally forces a genetically distinct, whole human being — her own child — out of a woman’s body.
Whatever her attitude towards being pregnant might be, a woman’s body is so strongly directed towards carrying that pregnancy to term that extraordinary means have to be used to stop her body from doing so.
The Abortion Rights Freedom Riders say that pro-lifers want to “force” women to become mothers, but this is absurd. On the contrary, it’s hard to see how it’s a violation of a woman’s body to actually prevent the use of force to cause her body to abort a pregnancy.
If a woman really had the kind of control over her own body the way the “pro-choice” movement declares, she would simply will herself not to be pregnant (that is, not to be a mother) — or, better yet, will herself not to become pregnant in the first place. But nobody really has “control” over his or her body in any absolute sense.
“Stop forced motherhood”? Please. Once a woman has conceived a child, she is already a mother.