Barack Obama was elected. The Democrats control the House and the Senate. The Freedom of Choice Act, which will eliminate all restrictions on abortion, will be signed into law. Obama will make America’s abortion regime look like Canada’s. I’m sure all the feminists are happy that soon it will be legal to stab a half-born baby in the head and suck his brains out. It must make them swell with pride.
The silver lining in all this is that it should make pro-lifers—American and Canadian—work harder. The election has showed that pro-life values are a mile wide and an inch deep. Pro-lifers have made great strides in uncovering the evil of abortion. American pro-lifers are second-to-none in this world. Now what they must do is not just promote an anti-abortion agenda, but a fetal rights agenda.
There are too many people in this world who think of the abortion issue as an attempt to suppress an evil action. It’s a puritanical angle. It’s like people who want to ban alcohol or sanitize the airwaves. Regardless of whether this is right or wrong, trying to stop people from doing bad things makes one look like a great moralizer. And no one likes a moralizer. After all, don’t we think people should be free to make their mistakes?
The pro-life struggle is not ultimately about the action of abortion. It is about upholding the humanity and equality of the unborn child. It is a great and noble cause, and we should treat it as such. “Abortion is murder” is, generally speaking, a useless slogan. Because if people don’t believe the unborn child is a human being deserving of the same rights as anyone else, the phrase makes no sense. Of course we should continue showing the evil of abortion, and the results of abortion—a dead unborn child.
But the ugliness of abortion is not enough to make people recoil and speak up. Outrage is not enough. People must feel good about the politics they espouse. Abortion is such an ugly thing, and opposing it entails long arguments about “what if”—what if a woman is raped? What if the baby is deformed? Etc.
Making the pro-life struggle a struggle to uphold the equality of the unborn by-passes all those discussions. Because if the unborn is equal, and all human beings deserve protection, then it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are: you don’t kill humans for the sake of convenience.
I’m not saying we have to give up on all past tactics. I believe that every effort to denounce abortion has some good effect, although some are better than others.
But I think we have to go beyond pictures of bloody fetuses and talk of the evil of fetus-killing. We have to talk up the idea that the struggle for the unborn is the human rights struggle of the 21st century.
What does this mean in an electoral context? Another silver lining about Obama being in power is that Republicans will no longer be on the defensive. They won’t have to spend time defending George Bush’s policies that are unpopular. That will leave more energy to devote to spreading the message of life and attacking Obama’s blatant discrimination against the unborn child. The Clinton years were bad for abortion legislation, but good for revving up pro-lifers to fight the good fight. Remember the early days of fighting for the partial birth abortion ban? Didn’t the pictures of the half-born baby being stabbed in the head fire up pro-life sentiment? Pro-lifers can do it again.
It’s not all over folks. Tomorrow is a new day. We survived Clinton. Pro-lifers, when they put their mind and heart into it, are good at what they do. The cause is right and the truth is obvious. Obama’s election was a detour. It was not the end of the pro-life struggle.
