Pro-Abortion Writer: Pro-Life Support is a Dirty Trick

The death toll from Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion 40 years ago in the U.S.A. is already approaching 55 million. As America enters its fifth decade since that infamous U.S. Supreme Court decision declared that a woman’s “right to privacy” trumps her unborn baby’s right to live, a staff writer for Salon has come out and plainly proclaimed the foundational and inherently selfish belief behind the pro-abortion “pro-choice” movement. Mary Elizabeth Williams protests the “semantic power” of those who “try to control” the “reproductive choices” of women. She writes:

Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word “life.” Life! Who wants to argue with that? Who wants be on the side of … not-life? That’s why the language of those who support abortion has for so long been carefully couched in other terms. While opponents of abortion eagerly describe themselves as “pro-life,” the rest of us have had to scramble around with not nearly as big-ticket words like “choice” and “reproductive freedom.”

Williams makes a startling admission for those who think the battle against abortion is primarily about debating when life begins. She writes:

I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.

Williams goes on to declare that making distinctions about how far along a pregnancy is when deciding on a fetus’s fate is logically absurd. This, incidentally, is precisely the logical absurdity promulgated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, and on this one point I agree with Williams. She explains:

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

Though as an obstetrician, a woman, mother, and a Christian, I have long been involved in efforts to demonstrate that human life is a continuum that begins at fertilization and to encourage women with unexpected pregnancies to “choose life,” and so I was not totally surprised to read Ms. Williams statements. Some women are awakened to the truth by an ultrasound of their moving baby’s hands and choose to let their child live. But frankly, in my experience, it is not often the question of whether or not the baby growing inside them is a human life that ultimately determines what most women decide in the throes of their “choice.” It is instead what they already believe about other things. Things like how their personal wishes, plans, and convenience rank when weighed against things like the rights of another human being to even exist or the authority of their Creator.

Williams is quite correct in her assertion—or admission—that the unborn are human beings. But her conclusion—that the inconvenience or even the distress occasioned by an unwanted pregnancy justifies a woman’s choice to kill her baby—is based on the “me first” philosophy that Adam and Eve espoused 6,000 years ago. That “me first” philosophy is at the heart of the sinful nature all humans have had since our first parents rebelled against God (Genesis 3). And that “me first” sinful philosophy of life has been responsible for the many curses of sin that have corrupted humanity and our world ever since.

In sharp contrast to this self-centered sinful philosophy that leads to corruption and death—including the death of the unborn—we see Jesus Christ the Son of God, who sacrificed Himself by coming from heaven to live in this corrupt world, finally dying on the Cross to pay the price for all (Hebrews 2:9). And thanks to Christ’s sacrifice, we do not have to remain slaves to the “me first” attitude Williams encourages us to embrace. “Me first” ultimately leads to death. Jesus Christ, through His self-sacrificing love for each of us, offers us life, abundant life, now and forever.