July/August, 1997 Volume XII Number 7 - COMMENTARY "Pro-life's" own empty rhetoric by Cathy Ramey She didn't think the attacks were the workings of lone, crazed people. "We do believe there is an organized effort," [Eleanor Smeal] said. [A] Right to Life [spokesperson], disagreed. She issued a statement Friday calling the arson a "deplorable act of violence against personal property" . . . [further] "To be truly pro-life is to respect all innocent human life, whether the person is unborn or born." The Oregonian, Saturday, May 24, 1997 On Friday, May 23, 1997 it seems an act of God occurred at a local abortuary; an act of God in that apparently someone displayed some righteous anger at the fact that babies are butchered at 933 NW 25th and Lovejoy. It brings to mind the actions of a young Gideon who encountered the Lord and subsequently dealt a terrible blow to the sentimental-sounding secular humanists of his own day. Read Judges, chapter six. That Asherah pole that the Israelites had been so tolerant of came down in a night. It must have been a glorious sight, as I'm certain the Lovejoy SurgiCenter was, all wrapped up in flames. Now, mind you, this was and is a building devoted to targeting unborn infants and destroying them. Imagine encountering a force so powerful that, in what must seem like an awfully long two minutes, your arms and legs are torn from their sockets, leading the procession of other body parts down a long thin plastic tube. This is, after all, a building in which some are torn limb by limb, their tiny soft bodies pulled through a powerful suction device. Others go the Dahmer way: dismembered with a sharp instrument, body parts sorted for "harvesting," and put on ice for a trip to another so-called "health" establishment for research. Explain to me if you will what the significant difference is. The ghoulish Jeffrey Dahmer killed young men by cutting them up and storing their frozen body pieces for a later use. He dined on human flesh, taking parts of another's body into his own; depriving them of life with a warped plan to benefit himself. Stack him up against an abortionist who slices and dices smaller people, storing some body parts so that they too may be cannibalized in a warped plan to benefit another. The benefit to the abortionist is a matter of dollars and cents; lots of them. Now, ask me if I care that the building where such atrocities take place was harmed in some manner? No, I do not care. I do not harbor any sentimentality for a structure devoted to such ghoulish practices. Were I a fireman, called in the middle of the night with the news that such a structure was engulfed in flames, I imagine I would roll over and catch another 40 winks. Perhaps my dreams would be sweeter after hearing the news. That brings me to the reaction -- not too surprising -- of the "right to life" representative. Her name is unimportant because she represents a considerable constituency of others who own up to a certain amount of dislogic. I place the organization name in modest quotes because apparently there are exceptions to be made when we are talking about the right to life of an unborn child. Exception number one: don't expect that your life is of more value than stones and mortar. Any harm to a building constitutes "a deplorable act of violence." Weighed on a scale, you, the surviving fetus of such an act, will never be able to weight the scale in your own favor. Those bigger persons who might throw their weight behind you are more concerned with "personal property" issues than your right to survive. In fact, should you survive to be born, you ought to bear the burden of some terrible psychological complex or another for the whole of your life. You survived while a building was destroyed. It should have been you. Exception number two: "personal property" ought to act as an effective barrier against any effort to save a life. Such a restriction, carried to its natural conclusion, means that beating down a door to interrupt a man who is attacking his son-in-law with a metal pipe; tearing apart a heating system to save a born baby who has fallen into a vent; breaking window glass to enter a home where a three year old is in peril; busting up a yard fence in order to rescue a drowning man; or disengaging wood and plaster in order to stop a man from killing and cannibalizing his house guest -- all of these acts resulting in damage to personal property are equally deplorable. But that merely brings us to exception number three. Exception number three: don't expect that the rules of care and protection which apply to born persons apply to you as an unborn person [read: fetus]. Yes, it's true. We often call the destruction of an unborn child "murder," but in reality we don't actually mean it. After all, if we really meant what we were saying, well . . . it would mean that any discussion of personal property violations would be tempered by our understanding that innocent human life was being preserved. Such harm to a building might be seen as unfortunate, but not one of us could hold our heads up if we insisted that the blood of an "innocent [born] person" was insignificant when set alongside an investment in building materials. Quick, another exception is in order. Exception number four: don't confuse the debate by attempting to offer any clear definition of "guilt" and "innocence." Just who are the "innocent" that the RTL rep refers to? Is it "innocent" fire-fighters who risked their lives to preserve the building? Another fire in town started hours later and utterly destroyed a large warehouse. But exultation was in order as the firemen risked their lives to save a seventeen year old trapped inside. Hummm. This is confusing. Did RTL denounce those efforts to save one life by risking several other "innocent" fire-fighter lives? No. Must not be the fire-fighters that RTL was concerned with. Is it innocent abortionists?! And if they are innocent, why, pray tell, does Right to Life or any similarly minded organization beg for donation dollars to end the apparently "innocent" practice of killing unborn babies? Let's see how this works out: If that is the case, it appears that in the end innocence matters little. Weighed on a scale, dollars and cents -- whether lining the pocket of an abortionist or comprising the bank account of a "pro-life" organization -- count more than anything else. Such rhetoric makes no logical sense. And we wonder why we can't seem to gain ground in the fight to save unborn lives. Copyright © 1997 AFLM