“Pro-Choicers Are Doing Our Work for Us”

Ben Wetzel over at BreakPoint uses two articles published in the last few weeks to demonstrate how “pro-choicers are doing our work for us.” One article is the Janet Harris piece that I wrote about a few days ago. I’ll excerpt the following from Wetzel where he discusses a piece from Esquire (some of it is pretty gruesome):

Within the past several weeks, however, two pro-abortion articles have appeared that demand the attention of pro-lifers. The arguments of the two pieces actually contradict each other, revealing the stark divide present even within the circles of abortion rights activists. Pro-life people might seize on the paucity of both arguments to make even more compelling cases for life in general and adoption in particular.

The first piece, the one getting the most attention, appeared in the online edition of Esquire on July 30. The article profiles the “abortion ministry” of Dr. Willie Parker of Mississippi…

The author, John H. Richardson, first describes the abortion operation—what he calls in Orwellian language “remov[ing] her pregnancy.” But then he gets to the really gruesome aftermath, the part where fetal body parts are clearly identifiable: “There’s the skull,” Parker says as he gestures toward a Pyrex dish, “what’s going to be the fetal skull . . . that’s an eye . . . here’s the umbilical cord”—and so it goes on, with Richardson adding his own commentary: “Floating near the top of the dish are two tiny arms with two tiny hands.” […]

Harris’s cavalier treatment of abortion loses all credibility when juxtaposed with the palpable suffering and moral dilemmas encountered by real people in the Esquire piece. The untold numbers of women who have publicly mourned their own abortions—documented at sites like this—militates against the idea that abortion is just another surgical procedure. Moreover, few people undecided about abortion can read of Parker’s laboratory coldness to fetal body parts without feeling that something is dreadfully wrong here. In short, if these are the best arguments pro-choice advocates can come up with, they’re making it easy for the pro-life movement to respond. May we do so with grace and power.

Read the rest here.

by