"Women deserve better choices." Sounds like a pro-choice slogan, right? Wrong. It's a campaign sponsored by Feminists for Life of America (FFL), a grassroots organization of feminists who oppose abortion. "Abortion is a reflection that our society has failed to meet the needs of women," reads the FFL Web site. "Women deserve better than abortion." The terms "pro-woman" and "pro-life" are rarely used in the same sentence because the terms of the abortion debate have been hijacked. Though pro-choices may argue otherwise, you can be both pro-life and pro-woman. Abortion advocates are still seething over last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned one type of partial-birth abortion. Because the ban doesn't include an exception for the mother's health - it contains an exception for the mother's life - pro-choices are saying it's "anti-women's health." Late-term abortion is never, as pro-choices claim, "the best and safest option" for some women. It is never necessary to end the life of the unborn baby in order to save the mother's life. It is never ethically permissible for a physician to purposefully end the life of one patient to save the life of another. The Ohio-based Association of Pro-Life Physicians Web site provides the following explanation: "When the life of the mother is truly threatened by her pregnancy, if both lives cannot simultaneously be saved, then saving the mother's life must be the primary aim. If through our careful treatment of the mother's illness the pre-born patient inadvertently dies or is injured, this is tragic … [but it] is not unethical and is consistent with the pro-life ethic. ... [T]he intentional killing of an innocent pre-born baby by abortion is never necessary. … We have the technology and expertise to provide quality healthcare to a pregnant woman without intentionally killing her unborn baby, regardless of the severity of her disease." Make no mistake - doctors who refuse to perform abortions are just as concerned about "doing no harm" to the woman as they are about doing no harm to the unborn child. They are pro-life and pro-woman. Pro-choices often criticize crisis pregnancy centers run by pro-life organizations, claiming that such facilities hinder women's "freedom to choose." Actually, the opposite is true. Pro-life organizations and crisis pregnancy centers offer women a choice that the pro-choice position often does not: the choice to, with the necessary support, carry their babies to term and, if they wish, offer them up for adoption. The great tragedy of abortion is that such necessary support - financial, medical or emotional - remains unavailable or inaccessible to many women who feel pressured to choose abortion. This great injustice calls for a paradigm shift: we must work as hard to help the woman considering abortion as we do to defend her unborn child's right to life. Any pro-life position that does not include a commitment to assist and support women who feel they "have no choice but abortion" is really not pro-life at all. To be truly pro-life, you must be pro-woman. The unborn child will always be more helpless and more vulnerable than its mother; but thousands of American women each year choose abortion because they feel they "have no choice," and we must rise to their defense as well. As FFL says, "no woman should be forced to choose between pursuing her education and career plans and sacrificing her child." Many people who are personally against abortion but still think it should be legal accuse pro-lifers of being concerned with saving babies but not with helping mothers considering abortion. Sometimes that's true, but it shouldn't be. If you're against abortion because you believe in the sacredness and the value of every human life, then you ought to have the same compassion for the woman considering abortion as you have for the baby in her womb. Because abortion harms women as well as the unborn, you must fight to help and support the woman considering abortion as zealously as you fight to protect the life of her baby. It's time for those of us who oppose abortion to take back the language that adequately describes our position: we are pro-life and pro-woman. We are committed to offering women a choice that many women feel they don't have, even though abortion is available. We look forward to the day when no woman will ever feel abortion is her only choice, when every woman, no matter what her circumstances, will be truly free to choose life.
----- Contact Emily Byers at ebyers@lsureveille.com
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