One of my favorite stories as a child was the Emperor’s New Clothes.
It tells the story of a king who falls for a massive con, believing two tailors, who are actually swindlers, when they tell him that they can weave new royal clothes for him that are invisible to people who are hopelessly stupid. The king can’t see the clothes, but because he doesn’t want to appear hopelessly stupid he doesn’t ask any questions of the tailors, instead he pretends that he can actually see the garments and he ends up walking the main streets of his kingdom in a royal parade while absolutely naked.
And even though their king is completely naked, the king’s subjects simply participate in the great con and act as if he’s wearing the finest clothes they’ve ever seen as he strolls buck naked through their streets.
The ruse is finally brought to an end when a humble little child, who still has an uncorrupted paradigm of the world, shouts aloud that the king isn’t wearing any clothes, at which point the deception is finally accepted for what it always was – a great lie.
In many ways, the Emperor’s New Clothes is actually the story of the pro-choice ideology and Western society over the last 40 years.
The weavers are the ardent pro-choice ideologues who have sewn the pro-choice ideology into the very fabric of Western society over the last 40 years or so, successfully convincing many people that what was being sold to them was the greatest and most impressive freedom they could ever possess.
The king is like the majority of our populace, who have all sorts of personal reservations and doubts about the ethical nature of abortion, and who have never actually been comfortable with it, but at the same time have been too fearful of being considered foolish, or branded as anti-woman, or a radical, etc if they spoke up. So instead of saying anything they just quietly went along with the pro-choice ideology.
The loyal subjects are like the mainstream media, and other information transmitting entities who simply went along with the whole pro-choice pretense in the public square, never willing to actually allow a robust and open debate about the ethics of abortion, or to allow any substantial challenges to the naked flaws in the pro-choice ideology.
And then there’s the little child.
Firstly the child represents the younger generation, who are not bound by the stuffy old conventions of the king’s subjects, and who are not afraid to ask the difficult questions and point out the obvious flaws in the pro-choice ideology. They are truth seekers, not interested in pretense, or simply going along with the rest of the crowd because they have been told that they must. So they ask the hard questions, and point out the obvious flaws in the pro-choice ideology.
Their unabashed commitment to honesty and reality is a game changer, one that the pro-choice tailors, the king and the general populace have no real answer for – their willingness to seek out the truth holds a mirror up to the rest of society and challenges us to face the serious problems with the pro-choice ideology that we have so willingly gone along with.
I am talking here about things like the willingness of pro-choice ideologues, like New Zealand’s very own Richard Bock, to turn a blind eye to gendercide abortions (where human beings are aborted because of their gender) in order to keep up the pro-choice pretense.
Or there was the seeming unwillingness of pro-choice ideologues to speak out against infanticide when two Italian ethicists associated with Australian universities made international headlines over the last week for proposing that the very same arguments that the pro-choice movement uses to try and justify the act of abortion can also be used to justify the act of infanticide.
One can’t help but sense that the reason they never actually spoke about publicly against this was because they realized that their pro-choice rhetoric CAN actually be used to try and justify infanticide, and the last thing they wanted was a light being shone on that important and extremely problematic truth about their ideology.
Last week’s infanticide story was actually also symbolic of the little child, for it suddenly and out of the blue forced Western society to confront the frightening and inconvenient truth that the pro-choice ideology we have unquestioningly embraced over the last 40 years does actually also provide an ethical justification for ending the lives of newborns as well as pre-borns.
Yes, just like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the con men have had their day, and it is now only a matter of time before the pro-choice pretense comes to an end because of the fearless and inquisitive truth seeking of the next generation.
Another article appeared in the Herald a few days ago about how the Waikato Hospital has decided to stop performing abortions itself and instead contract abortions to the Auckland Medical Aid Centre.
The pro-choice movement is against this apparent decentralisation as it might result (at least temporarily) in longer waiting times and distances to travel for women and girls living within the Waikato region who wish to have an abortion.
Over the last 30 years in the US, a significant trend has been observed with abortion procedures moving away from being performed in public hospitals and mainstream practice into being done almost exclusively with abortion clinics. This trend has been completely unintended and undesired by the pro-choice movement. As Emily Bazelon in the New York Times states:
“In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of the country’s abortion facilities. By 1981, however, clinics outnumbered hospitals, and 15 years later, 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. were performed at clinics.”
This significant shift in the US, has been brought about my a number of factors including the objection of some doctors in mainstream practice as well as an unsuitability of some hospitals to actually continue the practice.
Abortion advocates have responded with a counter-movement to push abortion back into hospitals and integrate it into mainstream medical practice. Unfortunately with some success: the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has established a ‘family planning fellowship’ abortion program, a program designed to attract physicians entering the practice which has spread to 21 medical schools. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has also made abortion training a requirement for all OB-GYN residency programs seeking its accreditation.
The pro-choice movement here is attempting even to force those who have a conscience objection to abortion to be required nonetheless to refer those seeking an abortion to an abortion provider and therefore be part of the overall process that leads to an abortion. Fortunately (and much to the annoyance of ALRANZ), the Medical Council has backed down on enforcing this after a group of pro-life doctors took the issue to the High Court.
Even though it probably won’t be any time soon for abortion in this country to be pushed away mainstream practice, any movement or trend towards moving abortion out of mainstream healthcare should be considered a positive development if it ultimately leads to any reduction in abortions. The best place for this to start is for more doctors to object to performing or being trained in any abortion and abortion-related procedures.
A brief report from ProLife Auckland on a recent guest speaker to one of their discussion lunches.
Last Wednesday during our fortnightly discussion lunch, the Club was hugely privileged to have John Fox of the UoA English Department to come in and speak on his prolife experiences and give his thoughts on ‘what a culture of life looks like’. Over pizza, John, who having been born ten weeks premature knows a few things about appreciating life, talked how a woman’s choice of abortion is never made in a vacuum, but in fact represents the failure of society in a myriad of ways.
In an inspirational, thought-provoking 40 minutes, John presented kiwi prolifers with a challenge: that our goal of restoring New Zealand to a culture of life, means a radical- that is explicit and uncompromising- commitment to community, the truth, and human dignity.
It would be a grave hypocrisy, John continued, for us prolifers to argue for the protection of the unborn while failing to extend the same human dignity to our friends, family, the elderly, the disabled; even the stranger on the street. We show our respect for all human beings in how we treat the person who makes our coffee in the morning; our bus-driver; the homeless person in Albert Park. As Aristotle reminds us (via John), Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. We’re all in this together.
If you are looking to take the next step and get involved with an organisation that is part of realising John’s vision, click here to get in contact with us and we can work out how we can get you involved.
According to a recent Gallup Poll there appears to be a consensus on a number of abortion-related views.
The main areas of consensus include:
-Requiring informed consent for abortion procedures from the woman having one
-Making abortion illegal during the third trimester
-Banning partial-birth abortions
-Requiring parental consent for minors who may undergo abortions
-Being legal when the mother’s life is in danger and in the cases of pregnancy from rape and incest.
Surprisingly, a slim majority (52%) of self-described pro-choicers agree with making second trimester abortions illegal.
Click on the image to see it more clearly:
There are of course significant differences in views too including:
-The legality of first trimester abortions
-Abortions for when the developing unborn may be impaired either physically or mentally
-Whether it should be permissible for financial reasons
-Whether abortion should be allowed in consideration of the mother’s mental health.
Click on the image to see it more clearly:
You’ll also notice that a percentage of self-described pro-lifers support the legality of abortion in issues which would be strongly attributable to pro-choice views. Why might a minority of pro-lifers support abortion in these aforementioned cases? Because the ‘pro-life’ term here is a self-descriptive term; amongst pro-lifers there are those who consider themselves pro-life in regards to themselves (they would never personally undergo or be involved in an abortion), but pro-choice in regards to whether others should be allowed to have one, which just goes to show the variation in perception and usage of such labels.
These findings suggest that there may be enough public support to legally prevent post-first trimester abortions happening, as well as maintain an informed consent process and parental consent for minors. These common ground views contrast to those held by abortion advocate groups and services which often have no limitation on the extent of how much they wish to liberalise abortion laws. It also suggests that Americans appear more pro-life in a number of regards than is often suggested.
You might recall that several weeks ago we broke the news about the discrimination that the pro-life students at Auckland University were being subjected to.
You might also remember that, the afternoon of the very same day that our blog post appeared online, the AUSA, after their management read our blog, quickly added a motion to the agenda for their coming AGM to allow a vote on whether the 2002 rule preventing pro-life students from applying for official club status at weekly Student Forums should be struck down or not.
Not long after that, the students at Auckland University managed to overcome their first major hurdle, by winning a vote which saw the abolition of an unjust eight year old rule hampering the establishment of pro-life clubs on campus.
Well the good news is that this afternoon they won the crucial second vote at the AUSA Student Forum meeting (89 votes to 33!), and there is now an official pro-life student club at Auckland University.
A big thank you to everyone who read our blog post about this issue and then took the time to voice their concerns to the AUSA and Auckland University over this issue.
I guess the pro-abortion lobby at Auckland University won’t be needing this anymore…
Jim Caviezel, the actor who took the film world by surprise with his moving depiction of Christ in 2004, said this week that abortion has nothing to do with helping women and that he is willing to risk his career to say so.
Caviezel gave an interview with the US magazine Catholic Digest, in which he spoke about the challenge he received from a colleague to adopt a disabled child as a demonstration of his well-publicized pro-life stand. Earlier this year Caviezel adopted his second child – a five-year-old girl with a brain tumour from the Guangzhou region of China.
Reflecting on the 51.5 million surgical abortions to date in the US since Roe v. Wade, Caviezel began by saying, “I was listening to Johnny Mathis the other day and I said, ‘What an amazing voice’. I have yet to hear another person sound like Johnny Mathis.
“Look, I am for helping women. I just don’t see abortion as helping women. And I don’t love my career that much to say, ‘I’m going to remain silent on this’. I’m defending every single baby who has never been born. And every voice that would have been unique like Johnny Mathis’s. How do we know that we didn’t kill the very child who could have created a particular type of medicine that saves other lives?”
Caviezel told interviewer Julie L. Rattey that the Christian is obliged to act in accordance with his faith, regardless of the risks. He compared the injustice of abortion to that of the mistreatment of women in some Arab countries.
Caviezel’s latest film, “The Stoning of Soraya M,” released in June this year, is based on a novel that purports to tell the true story of a woman stoned to death on a trumped up charge of adultery in modern Iran. The novel’s author, the late journalist Fereydoune Sahebjam, was dedicated to exposing injustices in Iran under the Islamic regime.
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