Pro-Life

It has been my observation that once "The Pill" made in debut in the 1960's, sex went from something largely forbidden to something that was everyday and OK. Abortions were frowned upon, spoken of in terms of trips to Mexico or back-alley abortionists or self-inflicted-coat hanger jobs. The movie "Alfie" had effects on the public attitudes on abortions.

Once Roe v Wade made it all OK in 1973, two publicized perceptions helped make abortions "normal". The first, which has since passed into obscurity was the widely publicized belief that the use of any drugs or alcohol damaged one's chromosomes and made offspring much more likely to be deformed. Since no one wanted deformed children, and a lot of the 60' hippies were now into the child-bearing age, the number of abortions skyrocketed, and thus abortion became "normal". The other perception was that it was a "woman's right" as if there was no one else involved (such as the father, or the fetus being aborted), and in an age where feminists were burning bras, the perception became accepted and abortion was now fully "normalized".

I can remember, back in the 1960's, thinking that this was a woman's right and that surely no one wanted to produce deformed babies. I thought that aborting might be a necessary evil. I may have thought that way for several years. Once, when I was an Emergency Medical Technician, and during one of those event-less evenings I had occasion to get into an argument with a physician about abortion. He asked me if a I were to become a physician, what would my opinion be on the following scenario: A woman is pregnant, her first child was born dead, the second was deformed and blind, the third dead, the fourth blind and retarded, now what would you recommend for the fifth pregnancy. "An abortion" I replied. "then Beethoven would never have been born" he said. More than anything, that little parable taught me that the deck comes stacked, but you have to live with the deal. What if, back in 1973, the fetus that would have grown up to find the cure for AIDS, Cancer or a perfectly clean source of power had been aborted. I have had contrary arguments regarding Hitler, but I counter that, while Hitler was alive, an almost equally great evil in Josef Stalin lived and exterminated uncounted millions of his own people.

As case law changed Roe v Wade (which is not the controlling case holding at this time- Casey is) we see abortion clinics popping up under the friendly names like family clinics and family planning as if they were cheerful places that were helpful. In reality they had dumpsters full of fetuses out in back, some still moving. I began to question why procedures such as late term abortions were being preformed far more frequently than they are said to be. Well, give them an inch and they will take a mile, and they will claim Constitution protection to boot. There is a industry built on killing and removing perfectly good fetuses. We need to educate the youth of this country that this is not normal, that it is the constantly sold sex on commercial TV that raises the curiosity and develops attitudes that are permissive and lack self control. Most ads on TV sell instant gratification, many use sex, overtly or subliminally to attract the desires of the viewer. The cure for the results of sex (pregnancies) is as easily obtained as the sex act was.

Rarely do we see the state or the media really helping adoption programs. I say we have a real problem in this country when sex and abortions are cheap and easy, but the adoption process is hard, lengthy and expensive.

Recently, at Boise State University, there was an abortion protest where several large sign were put up on the campus quad. One of these sign showed a pile of Jewish corpses during the Nazi Holocaust and next to that a 1930's picture of a black man hung from a tree, and the third photo was that of a chopped up fetus, the parts placed around a twenty-five cent coin to show the relative size. There is no doubt that the picture were disturbing. Any person would be horrified at any of the pictures. There were many other sign showing other relationships and messages of protest.

I felt that the sign described above did have a valid message. In the 1930's, the Nazi's made a movie that showed rats eating stored grain in a warehouse, the narrator spoke informatively of the way that Jews were feeding off the lives of Germans, devouring their sustenance as well as polluting the population. Well, the minimizing of the Jews as a part of the human race worked, and it became acceptable to fire them, beat them, chase them, arrest them, herd them, and finally execute them en masse. The black man had been enslaved, finally freed, but minimized thru Jim Crow laws, prohibitions on blacks owning guns, and voter restrictions that blacks could never meet. These served to minimize blacks as part of the human race and so it was that some were able to magnify that minimizing to the point that killing them in a great public display was accepted. And finally, they call fetuses a "tissue mass". To me, as a former EMT, a tissue mass is a wart, a tumor or some such invasive disease that endangers the body, or is infectious. By reference to the medical term as if a fetus was a alien invader, the speaker minimizes a potential human to the point where killing it is accepted.

All fetuses are potential human life. All human life has potential for good or evil. Is not all human life worthy of the opportunity to thrive.

A 30 year-old Norwegian gal sits next to me in some of my political science classes. On the day the protest display began I brought a camera and intended to take some pictures of the whole event, the display, the counter-display across the walkway, the passerby, the police there to keep the peace, etc. The Norwegian walked with me, I told her I was going to photograph a protest. As I started to take pictures, she realized what this was and began loudly questioning whether this protest was legal. She asked the sheriffs deputies how they do this. She explained that in Norway, there is a right to freedom of speech, but that it is restricted. I told her that in Berkeley, CA (or is the proper spelling Berzerkeley?) the local police arrested a display such as this on obscenity as some pre-developed pieces could be genitalia and as such obscene. She got more and more incensed and angry and she went to ask my Constitutional Law professor about the law (he is a strong proponent of first amendment rights). She did not sit by me nor talk to me nor even look at me for a week. I thought she was not going to be my friend anymore. It was a full week later that she cornered me, and it became apparent that she had felt that I had hurt her by taking her there, and I had to say that I would not have let her accompany me had I any idea that it was going to affect her so. She then told me that she had spoken to the law professor about the first amendment, she had gone back each day to the week-long abortion protest display and spoke to others, then to the counter-protest people and their display, finally she spoke to the protest folks and discussed at length each and every sign. The she went and created a questionnaire and went back and managed to get well over 200 people to fill out her survey, which she will be providing me.

A sample size of 30 is minimal, 50 is good , but with a sample of over 200, she will have a fairly accurate sampling of the greater BSU population. She told me that she had initially been very angry and hurt and offended, because the display used a miscarried 24-week old fetus in the display (to compare to a 24 week-old aborted fetus)and she had lost a child and felt saddened. But, she admitted that she learned about the abortion rules from the protest and that she was shocked that Norway actually had more restrictions than the USA and that many of the things permitted in the US would be frowned upon or despised in Norway.

She did not know about late term abortion laws and how often the proceedure is used, and abused when it is not truly necessary. She was horrified. She , having been an ardent critic of the protest, to the point of wondering why they were not being arrested, had, after studying the issue from all angles, came to disagree less with the protesters than the great disagreement she had initially taken. Although she still disagrees with the graphic displays used in the protest,I believe that she has a greater understanding for the first amendment as well, for without it, the protest could never have taken place and she would never have cared enough to learn the truth of the sins of our society. I am proud of her, and I am pleased that the protest did precisely what it was intended to do...raise controversy and awareness of the dark side of American politics.