ProWomanProLife is taking a bit of a summer break. Your regularly scheduled blogging will return in September.

I have it on good authority (ok, so she told me herself) that our very own Véronique will be on Brian Lilley’s show tonight (starts at 9 pm). She is herself pregnant with twins, as readers of this blog will know, and will be discussing “selective reduction.”

Tune in!

Ain’t never been any logic I could see in the pro-choice world. And debates on the topic can get pretty annoying, pretty fast, for everyone. Pro-lifers expose the inconsistencies and pro-choicers  splutter some variation of “I’m entitled to my entitlements!” 

Anyhoo, great article here highlighting how people who are pro-choice should not be uncomfortable with “selective reduction.” It’s abortion, plain and simple, and if we’re AOK with that (and remember, we’re all supposed to be) then choosing which fetus of twins or triplets should live is really all the same.

This bifurcated mindset permeates pro-choice thinking. Embryos fertilized for procreation are embryos; embryos cloned for research are “activated eggs.” A fetus you want is a baby; a fetus you don’t want is a pregnancy. Under federal law, anyone who injures or kills a “child in utero” during a violent crime gets the same punishment as if he had injured or killed “the unborn child’s mother,” but no such penalty applies to “an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman . has been obtained.”

Reduction destroys this distinction. It combines, in a single pregnancy, a wanted and an unwanted fetus. In the case of identical twins, even their genomes are indistinguishable. You can’t pretend that one is precious and the other is just tissue. You’re killing the same creature to which you’re dedicating your life.

Poor women are delivered a message in this country, that rather than deliver their baby, their baby would be “better off” having never been born at all. A message we can see at work here.

Among poor women, the abortion rate increased 17.5 percent, rising from 44.4 to 52.2 per 1,000 women […]

… when confronted with an unintended pregnancy, poor women who might have felt equipped to support a child, or another child, when not in the midst of a recession may have decided that they were unable to do so during a time of economic turmoil.

The message that if you don’t have a house with a white picket fence, then you might not be able to support your baby the way we, the nation, deem fit, is sinister enough. But now in South Africa, poor immigrant women, rather than getting the help they need, are actually facing a battle for custody because they had their children and aren’t able to meet the states criteria for “good parenting”.

Simon Zwane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Development, confirms that women must have jobs and housing before they can recover their babies, to prove they are capable of caring for them.

“We have taken babies into places of safety until parents can prove they can look after their babies, they have fixed places of abode and they have partners or they have found employment and they will not be on the streets with babies,” he says.

Konjiwa, 26, spends her days remembering. Her 2-year-old son, Joe, is growing up fast without her in an institution far from the squalid building where she lives. She too carried her child across the Limpopo River.

“I can’t survive without my baby,” she croaks miserably. “I miss him more than anything.”

Zwane says some women use their babies to beg. But Konjiwa and Chibura say they cannot feed their children without begging, let along afford child care while they seek money.

As many as 2 million Zimbabweans have flooded into South Africa in recent years looking for work after fleeing their country’s economic collapse and political violence. They find they are not especially welcome, particularly in townships where xenophobic violence in 2008 saw machete-wielding mobs storm through, beating up Zimbabweans and other migrants, burning some to death.

…comes this.

Global population numbers having just passed the 7 billion mark (twice what it was when I opened a vasectomy clinic in Texas), it is overwhelming to contemplate the world struggling with this flood and its inevitable threats (including starvation, drought, pollution — and what leading scientists predicted long ago would be the main danger to civilization: war).

Unless we act (this legislation, along with China’s “one child” policy, is a start), the world is doomed to strangle among coils of pitiless exponential growth. 

Norman Fleishman / Yountville

Emphasis added.

As much as I dislike hearing that women ought to have children for the sake of their country, I also dislike hearing that women ought not have children for the sake of their country. Both statements treat women as commodities, and both are false claims.

For a start, Germany just announced that Europe still doesn’t have “enough children for the future”. So while Europe and the developed world don’t have enough children to support economic growth and therefor no one suggests that these countries and wealthier demographics are overpopulated, it seems that overpopulation is an issue for “those” countries and “those” classes.

To use overpopulation as a ridiculous claim that women shouldn’t be having that many children and it needs legislating, really seems to be saying that certain women shouldn’t be having children, women who might use resources, women who might already live in a populated country.

But if overpopulation isn’t a global issue, then is it really an issue at all?

I can’t be the only one who thinks of the song when you hear about Gloria Steinem’s new documentary.

I have not watched the documentary. I have, however, watched the 80s era music video. Well worth it. (I will watch the Gloria Steinem documentary at some point, so commentary will be forthcoming.)

An abortion doctor sets a woman’s labour in motion and then sends her packing so that she delivers a viable baby girl, who now has disabilities.

I’m not one who believes that dismembering that baby in the womb would have been a grand success. These cases do, however, act as reminders that abortion kills a person, women are complicit in their children’s death, and abortion clinics in the new millenium are a far cry from safe, even though they are legal.

If we judge success by what we achieve for our goal and our cause, then I think the most successful pro-life people have been “kinder, gentler”.  Gone are the days of soap box fire and brimstone, and if you’ve ever seen Andrea on the news you know how soft spoken and concise she is. This goes for Stephanie Gray, Serrin Foster, and many others as well.

I think when you’re delivering a message so steeped in tension and emotional dynamite, it’s important to keep your calm. That method has been paying off for many of us, including Charmaine Yoest.

With an easy laugh and ample charm, Charmaine Yoest doesn’t at all appear to be Public EnemyNo. 1 for the pro-abortion rights community. But the foundation of her rising influence – the accessibility of her approach – becomes clear when she settles in for an unexpectedly frank conversation about the stunning 2011 antiabortion legislative juggernaut that she has helped orchestrate.

Well done,  ladies.

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Andrea adds: That’s very kind, Jennifer, thanks. What I strive for is to always be reasonable. Which strictly speaking, given how reasonable it is to be pro-life, shouldn’t be all that hard.

But when what is legal is also disgusting and wrong, the proper response is criticism and stigma, especially effective when the prominent—like Boston’s mayor—publicly express it.

We need more people prepared to speak up.

I agree with this post about how if we want to impact the culture and change the way people think, we have to meet them where they are and force them to encounter pro-life views in the fullness of that vision. Rallies and websites(!) won’t do it. I’m big on community building, too, which, I think would by default decrease the desire for abortion (and euthanasia, while we’re at it).