To topple abortion, we must strike at the root...

Like many of you, the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress have dominated my thoughts for the past two weeks. I attended the defund Planned Parenthood rally here in Bloomington, and I am glad to see what appears to be real momentum to defund Planned Parenthood. I pray that it continues.

But the very political and social momentum caused by the videos has led me to consider various "what ifs". What if government money was taken away from Planned Parenthood? What if abortion after 20 weeks was made illegal? What if all abortion was made illegal? What then?

As it currently stands, over one million abortions are performed in our country each year. That's over one million sisters, mothers and daughters who decide to kill their own child. That's over one million brothers, fathers, and sons who encourage it, pay for it, or simply split and ignore it. 21% of all U.S. pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. That's nearly one in four. (Statistics found here.) There is an enormous demand for abortion in this country, and outlawing abortion will not remove that demand...

If we're going to defeat abortion in this nation, we must understand why this demand for it exists. At the #DefundPlannedParenthood rally this week, I watched as the volunteers stood silently in front of our local Planned Parenthood. I kept wondering, "Haven't you seen the videos? How can you not admit that we're talking about a real human being?" How can there continue to be a demand for abortions when these videos make it so clear that we're dealing with a human life?

The fact is that these recent videos are a powerful reminder that the "debate" over the humanity and personhood of a child growing within it's mother's womb is a farce. Of course everyone knows it's a human child. The more thoughtful–and perhaps therefore the more depraved–pro-abortionists admit that it's a human being. Back in 2013, Mary Elizabeth Williams made waves online for declaring, So what if abortion ends life? She writes,

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

She concludes,

My belief that life begins at conception is mine to cling to. And if you believe that it begins at birth, or somewhere around the second trimester, or when the kid finally goes to college, that’s a conversation we can have, one that I hope would be respectful and empathetic and fearless. We can’t have it if those of us who believe that human life exists in utero are afraid we’re somehow going to flub it for the cause. In an Op-Ed on “Why I’m Pro-Choice” in the Michigan Daily this week, Emma Maniere stated, quite perfectly, that “Some argue that abortion takes lives, but I know that abortion saves lives, too.” She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

Did you catch that? "...the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing."

Worth sacrificing... for what? What is the driving force behind these women? They're so determined to maintain something that they are willing to justify taking a life.

I went down the rabbit trail of links from the article written by Williams, and found this: We Do Abortions Here, by Sallie Tisdale. If you skip Williams' article, don't skip this one. I urge you to read it, particularly if you are pro-life. Here's an excerpt:

I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. "Let's do an abortion," they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting needles striped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls. Abortion is the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it is still violence—merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death.

Maggie, one of the nurses, received a call at midnight not long ago. It was a woman in her twentieth week of pregnancy; the necessarily gradual process of cervical dilation begun the day before had stimulated labor, as it sometimes does. Maggie and one of the doctors met the woman at the office in the night. Maggie helped her onto the table, and as she lay down the fetus was delivered into Maggie's hands. When Maggie told me about it the next day, she cupped her hands into a small bowl—"it was just like a little kitten," she said softly, wonderingly. "Everything was still attached."

Pro-abortionists know that this is the slaughter of little babies, and we conservatives should be embarrassed that we ever thought otherwise. Of course they know: they're the ones knee deep in the blood of performing abortions. And yet, these same women justify these atrocities. They're willing to go through terrible pain and horror every day for "the cause".

Among modern feminists, there is a debate about the place of pornography in our society. Feminists like Camille Paglia and Sallie Tisdale argue that pornography can be a good, liberating force. Other feminists, not necessarily Christian or even religious, argue that it's always dehumanizing and bad. Regardless of the debate within the feminist camp, here's what Tisdale writes in her book, "Talk Dirty to Me":

There is so much wrong with the traditional pornography. It just plain disgusts me sometimes, with it’s juvenile assumptions, boring repetition, lack of depth. But as much as what is wrong with porn, I see what is right: In porn, sex is separated magically from reproduction, marriage, and the heterosexual couple, all of which most feminists would agree have been oppressive to women. (emphasis mine) In porn, people have many and many different kinds of orgasms, and intercourse is only a part of sex, sometimes a small part. That alone, sex which doesn’t focus on intercourse, is a very important image.

The feminists I’ve quoted have argued that the desires of the mother should always trump the rights and desires of the baby growing inside of her. Furthermore, there should be no necessary connection between sex and physical reproduction or marriage. The right to an orgasm is inviolable, and there should be no connection between sexual gratification and physical reproduction. These are two pillars of feminism.

And so the “cause” which is used to justify the slaughter of babies is at the very center of feminism itself: It is that sex should bear no more weight of responsibility or sacrifice for women than for men. It is the demand that God must not require something different from women than from men in the care and raising of children. Indeed, it is the demand that we be allowed to define our lives the way we want to without regard to biology.

We must never forget that the blood sacrifice for feminism is abortion, and if we really desire to live in a nation free from the bloody slaughter of abortion, we must repent of our feminism. Regardless of the brand of feminism we're talking about, the vampire that has been feeding on the blood of our children for decades was unleashed by our sexual sin and our rebellion against the very simple and easy to understand words of Scripture regarding manhood and womanhood. Whether it's the hard-core leftist feminism of Camille Paglia and Sallie Tisdale, or the soft-peddled feminism that's increasingly common in the PCA, or even the Sarah Palin style of feminism within the GOP, the rejection of God's clear Word is the same.

I’m concerned that even the most ardent anti-abortionists fail to see this connection. Our politicians in Washington are putting on a big show right now, but their efforts are doomed to fail without our willingness to clear out the feminist heresy that is the root of the problem. The enormous demand for abortion can only continue if we remain committed to the feminist heresy currently at the center of our society.

Many thousands of words have been written on this blog about feminism. If this is news to you, and you haven’t studied up on it already, I encourage you to start here. For more, you can browse through the posts labeled with the tag "Feminism."