by Hans Johnson
Chris Matthews of MSNBC frets, along with Kate Michelman, that Paul Ryan is “crazy” for believing that personhood applies to women of all ages. Do you believe Ryan’s personal pro-life stance is truly controversial?
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Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
“It’s so radical … to declare abortion basically murder.”
It’s difficult to understand how he could be so incredulous over such a simple fact. Apparently, Mr. Matthews never passed his 5th grade biology class.
Kate Michelman sure struggles to find the right euphemisms while talking about abortion. But I guess when logic is optional, it’s easy for your statements to become disjointed.
“Knee jerk voting for people that get a better tax break because they’re in the higher brackets…”
What a dumb point (was there a point?). It makes more sense for politicians to promise tax breaks to the lower brackets because there are a lot more voters there. It’s hard to defend the position that says they’re promising tax breaks for the rich in order to get elected.
Is Chris Matthews crazy? And does he know what he’s doing when he starts playing around with common law and what a person is!?
If Ryan things the birth control pill causes women to murder their children, then yes, he is way out of the mainstream of American political culture and is going to lose a lot of votes.
Hal,
The birth control pill can cause very early abortions. In fact, it’s designed to do so, and Planned Parenthood even admitted it up until recently:
http://www.1flesh.org/plannedparenthoodpills
More and more women are deciding – of their own free will – to get off the birth control pill for this very reason. What’s sad is they had to find this information out for themselves. No doctors told them that their birth control prescription could actually kill their children.
Since when is the mainstream opinion the indicator for what is right or wrong?
It makes one wonder what Matthews thought pro-lifers believed abortion was prior to this revelation? Did he just wake up, or are we really that bad at making our point these last 40 years?
But what do we make of the fact that the Romney campaign says Romney and Ryan support abortion in cases of rape? Isn’t that still killing a human being? And in Ryan’s case, doesn’t that put him out of step with Church teachings? Maybe he needs to clarify his position.
I think that’s a fair question, Lee. Now that I think about it some more, this may have put Ryan in a very difficult spot. He HAS to go with whatever Mitt says… can you imagine him publicly disagreeing with his presidential running mate at this stage? It would cost them the election. But he really should distance himself from such a horrible position. I think the real problem was that Ryan agreed to be Mitt’s running mate in the first place. When you align yourself in such a stakes way with someone who has a history of pandering to pro-choice propaganda and then that person caves in again, you are caught between a rock and a hard place. Dissent from Romney’s position and cost the Republicans the election (and thus, 4 more years of our god-king) or remain silent and cause grave scandal.
This whole situation makes me despise Romney even more.
Pot to kettle: “You’re crazy”.
(Michelman to Ryan).
It makes one wonder what Matthews thought pro-lifers believed abortion was prior to this revelation? Did he just wake up, or are we really that bad at making our point these last 40 years?
It’s hard to get more clear than “abortion is murder” and “life begins at conception,” both of which have been stand-bys for the pro-life movement since before Roe. The point is simple and uncomplicated. A lot of abortion apologists are consistently surprised by it, though. I suppose they go around so much telling each other that pro-lifers mean anything but what we actually say that they have completely lost the ability to understand what words mean.
Conclusion: Matthews is an idiot. Situation normal, really.
I think the position is workable, BB. I know a lot of anti-incrementalists here are going to be FURIOUS with me for saying this-I hate myself for having to admit it-but CC posted statistics from a poll over on the Quote of the Day that show MOST people support rape and incest exceptions, and she’s right-they do. Now, think about where we started. Think about where we were in our fight 10 years ago. Think about how only recently have we gotten to squeak out of SOME of the Pro-Choicers that yeah, abortion kills, and yeah, abortion kills a human being/child. Think about the shift in public opinion. We have to START with exceptions. Eventually, once MOST children are protected from plain ‘ol elective abortion, we can start the same process with children conceived in rape and incestuous situations. The Gianna Jessens of today will tomorrow be replaced by the Rebecca Kiesslings of the world. And then there will be none.
@xalisae: I think you’re right, but I can’t “like” your post because it’s pretty damn depressing how slowly we are forced to gain ground to get people to recognize that killing other people is a bad thing. And everyone calls us radicals and extremists and dangerous and anti-woman for having the gall to care about wrongful death. *sigh* At least the ground has been gained and the momentum is on the side of life. I just wish it wouldn’t take so long.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and the Personhood folks will prove us wrong? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that.
No, I see what you’re saying, X. But even the absolutist vs incramentalist debate aside, I just think that Paul Ryan has been personally put in a very bad spot.
Oh, I definitely agree. Just trying to see the cup half full, friend.
Well, the other view is that the exceptions prove the rule. That is, the pro-life view is most distilled to its essence (the child is innocent and has a right to life) when various complicating circumstances weigh against that. The question is “what weight does the child have?”
It’s a tough question, I know.
I think that as far as Paul Ryan’s position, at least, he could maybe take a page from pro-choice Catholics and maintain (not actively campaign it but not hide it, either) that he is personally against abortion even in cases of rape, but will side with, and support, his party and his presidential candidate, because he is an elected official serving a constituency etc etc. I mean, no one gets all het up when “personally pro-life” politicians are put in key pro-choice political positions, but then again maybe that’s because no one even really believes that they are “personally” pro-life in the first place.
xalisae,
That’s exactly what I was thinking, but you put it much better than I could have. Incrementalism is why 2011 and 2012 have been record-setting pro-life legislation years. All-or-nothing will always get us nothing.
Let’s put it this way: if Planned Parenthood is scared by any action — incrementalist or otherwise — enough to rant against it and go on the attack, then it’s probably something we should all be glad of, and not too worried about.
Just pretend PP is a biological science experiment — a kind of slime mold with reflexes. “OK, poke it there. OK, now jus–oh! It twitched! Hey, do that again. Wait, no! Bring that cattle prod over here…”
Lather, rinse, repeat. And never stop.
Incrementalism has already been tried. It didn’t work. We’ve continued to try it and fail for 40 years. We were told it’s success is right around the corner, but it never worked. We set the bar low so society felt at ease to go even lower. We are still further away today from ending abortion than we ever were when most older pro-life groups were founded.
We’ve tried it all – every immoral compromise and it’s backfired a hundred times over. We supported exceptions for rape, incest, waiting a few day, having Parental Consent, and saying “Korban”, and none of it moved society back to where it was even in the early 1980s. We leaned on our own understanding because we couldn’t believe walking around the city seven times would ever make the walls fall down. We thought that Jesus would come down from heaven and give us the power to barter on His commands saying “Well if they got Parental consent I guess you can teach that it is okay”. We tried to be utilitarian instead of leaving the 99 to save the 1 — because we were so smart.
Most of the big movements towards pro-life we’ve seen have been in the past few years coincide with the rise of certain groups and strategies contrary to the standard incrementalist approach. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think society is finally the one compromising, just holding out still yet from going all the way.
I am sorry you feel that way PD.
There are children alive today because of prolife laws passed. The children and their mothers were spared the devastating effects of abortion.
I do not discount them when I see their faces everyday.
AND I do not believe there is only ONE WAY to win this war.
I agree with Carla. I don’t see how some lives saved is worse than no lives saved just because we couldn’t save them all. It’s terrible anyone is still dying, of course, but at least saving a few is something.
Well, I think both methods are needed, and the reason we’ve been making so much headway this year is because we’re applying both methods together.
I’m also mostly concerned with the final outcome. Incremental measures are more likely to succeed than entire Personhood initiatives. When an incremental measure succeeds, results are immediately seen-lives ARE saved, even if not ALL the lives. When a Personhood measure fails, what ultimate, immediate reward is seen?
I need to correct myself. I was too broad by saying all-or-nothing gets us nothing. I do support the personhood amendments and I am eternally frustrated when supposedly pro-life people and even some pro-life groups work against them. Why they end up on the same side as Planned Parenthood and don’t see anything wrong with that, I’ll never understand.
I do believe we should work both ways: incremental and absolute. After all, it’s thanks to the personhood initiative in Oklahoma that we are potentially 30 years closer to overturning Roe v Wade than we were last summer.
Unfortunately, as others have said, we don’t have (m)any practical benefits just yet from the absolutist approach. But a lot of lives are being saved right now thanks to fetal pain bills, ultrasound requirements, parental notification, limits on federal spending on abortion, etc. Abortion rates have been in decline for a while now, and it’s thanks to the incremental measures and movements changing public opinion.
Maybe that tingle shot up Matthews’ leg and zapped his brain. Being that he sits on it, the tingle wouldn’t have had far to travel.
So, Mary, what you’re saying is that Matthews actually has a brain. You’re more optimistic than I am.
Hi JDC,
LOL. Point taken.
You guys shouldn’t joke about the stroke Matthew’s obviously had that damaged his brain. The second he said he was feeling a tingle in his leg, he should’ve been rushed to the hospital and put on blood thinners. Now it’s too late. :(
I used to watch Matthews all the time. Then he turned on a dime and pretended that Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t such a good idea after all, only two years in. He’s reverted to total partisan mode. We’re now crazy and Neanderthal.
The only thing that would give me pause is that he’s an expert on those conditions.
Andrew, I’m not sure there are many lives being saved by these laws. Pro-aborts claim that the handing out of contraceptives to teenagers are as much a part of that as our “pro-life” laws (we call them pro-life, though God likely wouldn’t). That’s hard for a lot of us to swallow, but add that to more effective sidewalk counseling, baby boomers entering menopause, and the rise of the personhood debate on a national level and there are many factors at play in why abortion rates have gone down.
Before you ask, I would imagine God would call all of those laws “pro-abortion” laws. I suppose if you had rose-shades on you could say that it is “pro-life” when compared to the world, but as a Christian I’m coming to the realization that the world is not the standard. There is but one standard. His standard is “do not murder” and we’ve broken that, and while praying to the very one that said do no “break the least commandment or teach other’s to do the same”. On that standard I’d say these are pro-abortion laws we’ve been passing. Someday, we may have to work to repeal them as they very well could keep abortion alive in states even if Roe was overturned at a national level.
The fetal pain bill was the worse. In one of them Steve Ertelt was promoting we actually offered to prep the baby for the abortion on behalf of the abortionist by giving anesthesia. How sick. If an anesthesiologist had refused to comply with OUR law because he didn’t want to take part, he would have been a pro-life hero.
xalisae, I’m skeptical that any results are “immediately” seen when these laws are passed. We ban PBA, and abortionists simply use a different technique (or just pull the baby to the belly button and kill it there) — and how much money and blood did pro-life lawyers get rich off of for that? However, when the Personhood measure failed in Mississippi, society immediately was open to passing a regulatory measure that for a short time may shut the doors to the last clinic in the state. Laws like that always failed prior to Personhood. Now, we can see it as a sign of the death groans of a godless culture being drug into the light.
Ok, PD, forgive me for a second, but I’m confused. You go to great lengths to outright condemn anything that doesn’t say “all abortions are illegal.” But then, you said this:
However, when the Personhood measure failed in Mississippi, society immediately was open to passing a regulatory measure that for a short time may shut the doors to the last clinic in the state. Laws like that always failed prior to Personhood.
So, are you saying that the law requiring hospital access for abortionists is a good law? Because that’s an incremental law that still says abortion is legal. Thus, my confusion. These are the kinds of benefits we pro-incremental-ists have been talking about, which you denied in the first 4 paragraphs of your comment.
The problem with allowing rape exceptions is that it is too hard to administer. First, how many rapes that are reported within 48 hours also result in pregnancy and subsequent abortions? This number may actually be discoverable, at least statistically. Now, how many women who ask for abortions and cite rape as a reason also reported the rape within 48 hours? This is an important consideration in evaluating unreported rapes if nothing else.
Okay, a third and really unexplored angle is this, what about a woman who is in a sexual relationship, who is then raped by someone else? This would describe most women right? I mean most women are sexually active either in a marriage or not. So, how could they be sure that the conception was the result of the rape and not their other recent sexual activity? Well, that is a problem in more than zero cases.
Now with all these confounding elements being very common, it makes a rape exceptions pretty pointless in general.
Rather than answer stupid questions about exceptions for rape, savvy politicians will seize the opportunity to bring up the intransigence of their opponents on late term abortions on healthy babies with healthy mothers. They need to just skip over the stupid question and answer the question they wish they had been asked by addressing the unpopularity of late term abortion of healthy babies.
Just 2˘
The bottom line is that human beings have a right to life.
If we want to have a death penalty for forcible rape or incest etc., then we need to have that conversation. Even a convicted and admitted rapist cannot be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law.
The actual function of Roe v. Wade establishes a sort of absolute matriarchy akin to the Roman patriarchy where the father had absolute life and death authority over his children. Roe v. Wade just gives mothers that authority instead of fathers. And we see that women are today, like men were in Rome, not above abusing that kind of absolute authority.
Okay, I know it sounds mean, but Kate hasn’t aged well at all.
Andrew, you used quotes, but I’m not sure where the quote comes from. I do however see and agree that what I said could be confusing. I was not clear and I will explain it.
I have done sidewalk counseling and that is an incremental tactic. I have helped buy property to evict the abortionist offices from a building complex. That is an incremental tactic. I don’t regret these incremental tactics. I have no knowledge why they would be wrong. The same is true incremental strategies. I would work to end abortion in my state knowing that there are 49 other states in my country, and many more countries that practice the barbaric practice. That is an incremental strategy. I wouldn’t regret that sort of incremental strategy.
What I regret is where I’ve backed incremental strategies that did “evil that good would come of it” (Rom 3:8). Laws that teach people that abortion is okay so long as you wait a few days, get parental consent, or say “Korban” and think it is okay to change God’s law and “teach others to do so” (Matt 5:19).
My point about Mississippi was not to highlight what a great law the resident law is (can you really argue that it is okay to kill a baby if the doctor is a resident?) but to point out that this is an example that society as a whole is being moved towards the pro-life position due largely to the personhood amendment that failed. People forget that abolition of slavery took many defeats. Getting women the right to vote went down numerous times before it succeeded. But each effort moved the populous towards the position of givining into that civil right. There is no doubt that the world will not go unless kicking and screaming. That is the way it has always happened in the past.
Personhood Dad,
I see better where you’re coming from now. Thanks for the clarification. So it sounds like you’re not offended by the intent of the incremental approach. You acknowledge that they have done good in at least one situation (Mississippi), by limiting/eliminating abortion. What bothers you is that the law itself is evil for ultimately allowing even one abortion.
I think we agree (mostly). I don’t enjoy knowing that incremental legislation still allows most abortions, but that’s not the intent of it. The intent of the legislation is to limit the killing any and every way possible.
Where we disagree is that incremental legislation absolutely does save lives. For example, studies and statistics have clearly shown that ultrasound requirement bills in particular are very effective.
More importantly than the lives it directly saves, incremental legislation saves more lives indirectly by drawing the public’s attention to aspects of the abortion issue they wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
The best example I can think of for this is the recent failure of the ban on sex-selective abortions. Over 70% of the U.S. supported banning sex-selective abortions, yet only 51% of the U.S. identified as pro-life at the time. Passing the ban would have forced that >19% to consider why killing children based on their gender was wrong, but not otherwise. It also would have greatly weakened the pro-choice stance considerably by forcing everyone to acknowledge that this “clump of cells” or “blob of tissue” has a gender in the first place. That is hard to explain from a “this is no different from removing an appendix” standpoint.
Absolutist pro-lifers actually voted against the sex-selective abortion ban bill for the very reasons you mention. They objected to it because ultimately, it allowed abortion as long as it wasn’t “sex-selective.” Because of this, they ended up on the same side of the issue as Planned Parenthood, Barrack Obama, and every pro-choice Democrat. Again, I do not understand how they could not see a problem with that.
If you have three babies in front of you, but you can only save one, would you choose to let all three die because you can only save one? At the end of the day, that’s what the “pro-life” politicians who voted against the “sex-selective” abortion ban did. They let three babies die because they could only save one. I cannot accept or support that stance.
This just in:
Thirty years after the fact the democRATs notice there is a pro-life plank in the republican platform and they are ‘shocked’.
democRAT Nancy Pelois is still trying to remember what she did NOT know and when she did NOT know it about ‘waterboarding’.
But the democRATs are showing what appear to be signs of improvement.
It only took the Congressional [Liberal] Black Caucus 6 months to notice they had been insulted and finally realize they were offended.
How long before they discover their emperor has no clothes…of his own.
phillymiss says: August 22, 2012 at 4:19 pm “Okay, I know it sounds mean, but Kate hasn’t aged well at all.”
Well, she ain’t no spring chicken.
“She must have been something to look at….before there was electricity.”
Rodney Dangerfield from ‘Caddyshack’
Kate could have aged as well Sophia Loren, but she would still be a horrible monster.
“Beauty is only skin deep [too many face lifts makes it even shallower], but ugly goes all the way to the bone.”
[Source unknown, public domain]