Why we march for rights of unborn
This afternoon I will be speaking at the Chester County March for Life. These are my remarks:
I had just turned 11 when the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that a woman had the right to abort her preborn child, with very few restrictions. I was not fully aware of the gravity of that ruling, because at age 11 I was more worried about passing whatever math test I was doomed to fail, or attracting the attention of Bobby Sherman (I’m actually still working on that one) or maintaining my privileges in the home as the firstborn child of five. Abortion wasn’t a word that was even in my vocabulary, and I didn’t know anybody who’d had one.
But going to a Catholic girls school, we were taught to pray for “the least of these,” and after Jan. 22, 1973, unborn children became a focus of our care and concern for life.
I credit the good Mercy nuns for giving me a clear sense of the dignity of the child that wasn’t seen and of the life that wasn’t felt by anyone other than its mother, and by God, who said through Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
During my teen years, I am sure that I met women who’d had abortions, although no one spoke of them. Despite the legality of the procedure, women seemed to sense that the act was wrong, immoral, vile, unclean, and selfish. They were urged to accept it as a legitimate “solution” to whatever problem they experienced, but women who carry life within them have a knowledge that can’t be erased by feminists with their platitudes about “choice” and “my body.” They may have chosen to kill the child within them, and they may have pretended that this was the exercise of a justified right, but at least the ones I knew did not “celebrate” that choice.
When the act was undertaken, it was accompanied by sorrow and desperation, not relief and a sense of accomplishment.
That is where the abortion-rights movement, or the pro-choice movement, or the pro-abortion movement, has failed miserably even though abortion has been legal for 45 years. They have managed to cling, with their fingertips, to a supposed right that was cobbled together like some Frankenstein monster from the “penumbras” of “emanations” of the Bill of Rights.
They have battled back against restrictions and limitations placed upon that so-called right, which was created to satisfy Harry Blackmun’s doctor friends at the Mayo Clinic. It has been heralded as a super precedent, a thing that cannot be changed or rolled back by our late Sen. Arlen Specter.
Legal abortion has been propped up into legitimacy by the nervous efforts of people who think autonomy trumps human dignity. And they are nervous, because the truth of the matter is that life will impose itself and its inevitability and its beauty on even the most nihilistic system that can be created by men and women. It is like that plant that pushes its way up between the cracks in a city sidewalk, up towards the light.
We here, today, are evidence of that tiny plant, even though we are numerous and our voices are getting louder. Society and the legal system has tried to keep us silent and impotent for many years. We who rally in support of the dignity of unborn human life have been called everything from misogynists, which is laughable since so many of us are women fighting for women, to bigoted. And there is laughter, and raised voices and fists, and people wearing pink crochet hats saying they march for women but who have kept us out of their groups for fear that we might bring a message that dilutes and drowns out their own.
But we are here today, and we are fighting for those who cannot, and we will be heard here and in the halls of Harrisburg where our governor believes women should have the right to dismember their children in the moments before they are born, as they inch toward the light. We will be heard in oped columns like my own, refusing to back down and swallow the Mario Cuomo “I don’t want to impose my religion” on you philosophy. Mario Cuomo was a lawyer and a politician and not a biologist, and he didn’t realize that it wasn’t religion that proved the humanity of the unborn child, but the science of DNA.
We will be heard in our children, who are an increasingly pro-life generation and who are tolerant of many things that we did not accept, but who will not tolerate the destruction of unborn babies. I see young people all the time, and I used to teach them at the Haverford School and Villa Maria and Friends Select, and their hearts and minds are much more open to ending abortion than our generation ever was.
And we will be heard in the society that we create from here on out, one that cares about the disenfranchised and the weak. I am an immigration lawyer, and every day I deal with people from countries that allow women to be beaten, kidnapped, raped and killed with impunity. The systems of laws that exists in those countries view women as property.
And I look at them, when they come to see me, and I realize that we have a similar nihilism baked into our own laws when it comes to abortion. We do not stand by when our women are beaten, kidnapped, raped and killed.
We fight for them, in our courtrooms and in police stations and shelters and in the home.
But one thing that we share with the countries from which my clients are fleeing is an ability to dehumanize humanity, the ability to reduce a living creature to material, the ability to ignore the dignity of the spirit because it serves our purpose. We do that every time we say abortion is a “right.”
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