On Being Pro-Life and Pro-Choice

I think Bill Harlan at Mt. Blogmore and the folks at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are smoking something if they really believe the debate over abortion can be resolved by some touchy-feely talk.

Here are the excerpts of a Star Tribune editorial cited by Harlan:

Might that change if abortion were discussed not in terms of absolutes and inflexible rights, but of moral ambiguity? What if those discussions moved out of the confrontational environment of the courtroom, into the conversational arena of politics?

And

The South Dakota experience is also being analyzed for the tantalizing possibility it appears to offer. It might be that a peaceful resolution to America’s long-running culture war is possible, at the polls.

In other words, if liberals can just find the right words to fool the average American into believing what they're offering isn't really what they're offering, then liberalism will have won.

This sort of thing is always what the Left wants: they hope that if they can appeal to people's heart strings and emotions rather than their heads, we'll all sit around, sing Kumbaya and John Lennon's "Imagine" will come to fruition.

But it won't happen. Liberals forget that, unlike themselves, conservatives are primarily motivated by logic and intellect, not emotion. The pro-life response to such calls for peace with (or rather, unilateral disarmament of) pro-lifers would be something like, "Yeah, getting along is nice. But abortion still kills a human being." You can feel all you want, you can sympathize with the pregnant mother all you want...but that truth that a human life is ended will never change. To the rational mind, the right to simply live trumps all other rights.

The editorial even admits what I knew all along last year: that the pro-abortion folks had to base their appeal on emotions, not facts.

A change in language by those seeking to overturn the ban was crucial to their solid 12-point victory in South Dakota, Stoesz attested. They set aside phrases like "defenders of reproductive rights," and stopped emphasizing the "choice" theme that has been their movement's signature. That's the language of litigation, not persuasion.

Instead, the ban's opponents united under the banner "South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families."

To include the words "healthy" and "families" in a group that advocates a procedure which ends a human life, and one that terminates the newest member of a family, and brings increased risks of infertility and breast cancer and depression and substance abuse on the women who do it, evokes powerful Orwellian images of 1984 doublespeak.

We see more of this Orwellian language when the Star-Tribune piece says

...a truth that has been obscured by four decades of fightin' words emerged, and could be embraced: It is possible to be both "prolife" and "prochoice" at the same time.

Oh, really? Can you be pro-free market and advocate government control of the economy at the same time? Can you be pro-woman and pro-choice about rape? Can you be pro-life and pro-murder at the same time?

Such idealistic notions might appeal to people who can't deal with hard choices, but they wilt quickly in the light of logic and reason. But of course, pro-abortion folks are betting the average voter won't employ either.

Their hope is to unilaterally disarm the average voter with the soothing Novocaine of the notion that they can avoid a difficult decision by passing the buck to "choice." This way, they don't have to say "no" to the mother who is inconvenienced by the new life growing inside her. They also believe they don't have to say "no" to the unborn child whose only drive in the womb is to grow and live; someone else may be saying "no" to this child's right to live, but it isn't them. This moral Novocaine says that murder can be excused by saying "it was the other person's choice."

The idea of being pro-life and pro-choice at the same time might be appealing for those who have to live with advocating the murder of unborn children, but it doesn't fly with people who tend to favor facts over the shifting sands of the human heart.