7 Takes, 7 Choices

Today is "Blog for Choice" Day over at NARAL. Thanks to Jill Stanek for hosting and inviting pro-life bloggers to participate in "Ask Them What They Mean by Choice" Day. I am happy to oblige. Hopefully, today Twitter and Facebook and Blogger and WordPress will be inundated with the question: What exactly do you mean when you say "choice?" (click here to read more about Jill's fabulous project. ) I decided to use Jen's "7 Quick Takes" meme to ask these important questions:

--1--

Actual quote from a former abortion provider: "This patient was a little overweight and proved to be a little farther along than anticipatted. This was not an uncommon mistake before ultrasound was readily available to confirm the gestational age. Initially, the abortion proceeded normally. The water broke, but then nothing more would come out. When I withdrew the curette, I saw that it was plugged up with the leg of the baby which had been torn off. I then changed techniques and used ring forceps to dismember the 13 or 14 week size baby. Inside the remains of the rib cage I found a tiny, beating heart. I was finally able to remove the head and looked squarely into the face of a human being--a human being that I had just killed...." (source)

Is THIS what you mean by "choice?"

--2--

Just this past week, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was charged with murder after the death of a 41-year-old mother who came to him for an abortion. She died after she was given too much Demerol. Another mother died after he punctured her uterus, and then sewed it up without telling her what had happened. He's also charged with murdering seven babies who were born alive in his "clinic," by stabbing them in the neck with scissors and cutting their spinal cords. He kept little bodies and body parts in bags and bottles all over his killing center, and the place was filthy. This was no back-alley abortionist; this was worse.

Oh, and get this: " 'White women from the suburbs were ushered into a separate, slightly cleaner area because Gosnell believed they were more likely to file complaints, ' [District Attorney Seth] Williams said." Disgusting. (source)

(Click here and here to read more about this sickening story.)

I'm fairly certain that THIS isn't what you mean by "choice."

--3--

Women who have had abortions have a 30% greater risk for breast cancer than other women. That means, according to one expert, that 300,000 additional women have died from breast cancer since Roe v. Wade. If abortion was illegal, those 300,000 women might still be alive today. I'm pretty sure most people, prolife and prochoice would want to reduce the number of breast cancer deaths. Instead we ignore the statistics and continue to put women's health and lives at risk. (source)

Is THIS what you mean by "choice?"

--4--

Here's another quote from an abortion clinic worker: "Dr. Johnson handed the suction tube back to Leslie and once again used forceps to probe for the head. I saw the muscles of his right arm tighten and knew what that meant: He had located the head and was crushing it. Harvey used to joke about getting tennis elbow from this technique, and his right arm was actually slightly bigger than his left." (source)

Tennis elbow. From repeatedly crushing little babies' heads.

Is THIS what you mean by "choice?"

--5--

In Indiana, a young woman enters an abortion clinic, tells the worker she is 13 pregnant with the child of a 31-year-old man. Instead of reporting the situation to Child Protective Services, as she is required to do, she sends the girl to an out-of-state clinic for her abortion, coaching her not to tell anyone the age of the child's father.(This worker was fired, thank goodness.)

In another clinic in Tennessee, the same young woman tells the clinic worker a similar story. This employee tells her that even though she's supposed to report it, she won't; and in order to bypass the parental notification laws, she needs to have a consent form signed by a judge. She instructs the young woman to tell the judge that her boyfriend is 17 years old.

This is happening in abortion clinics all over the United States. Whether you are prolife or prochoice, if your teenage daughter were having sex with an older man, you would want that man thrown in jail. Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry doesn't care about that. They just want her money. And who knows? Maybe that same man will impregnate her again, and she'll come back for another abortion. More profit for the abortionists.

Is THIS what you mean by "choice?"

(The young woman in both of these scenarios is Lila Rose, and she and her colleagues at Live Action are working hard to expose the hypocrisy of the abortion industry. To see more stories like these, click here.)

--6--

Lila Rose conducted another investigation where she asked abortion clinic workers and doctors about her baby she was about to abort. They told her all kinds of things that just weren't true: that the thing growing inside her is not a baby, that her 10-week-old baby doesn't have a heartbeat, that having an abortion is safer than giving birth. (Click here to see a small sampling of the many women who have died from supposedly safe abortions.)

If we want women to make informed choices, then they deserve to know the truth about their babies, and about what abortion can do to them and what it does to the babies. Instead the abortion industry feeds them lies and covers up the truth. The less they know, the better the chances that they'll have the abortions.

Is THIS what you mean by "choice?"

--7--

As prolifers, we have a choice too. We can choose to quietly pray for an end to abortion without speaking out against this terrible evil. This is what I did for years. This was safe, and no one was angry with me. We can also choose to treat pro-choicers and abortion doctors as though they were our enemies, even the very scum of the earth. This is not an acceptable choice either. My pro-choice friends, who have at times been upset by my speaking out for life, are wonderfully compassionate and caring people. I heard Abby Johnson last week, right before the release of her book UnPlanned, say that we need to pray for the abortion doctors and the clinic workers, and speak kindly and lovingly with them. She should know; she was once a Planned Parenthood clinic director and Employee of the Year. It was a combination of knowing the truth about abortion and the persistent prayers of pro-lifers, that she was finally converted. (In fact, I saw one website--I wish I could remember where--that listed Abby as the Number One enemy of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. I've never heard one mean thing come out of Abby's mouth; only the truth spoken with love. Lila Rose and Jill Stanek were also on that list.)

When well-meaning people speak out for "choice," let's keep asking them, kindly and patiently, "What exactly do you mean?" We need to keep the dialogue alive if we ever want to see an end to abortion.

Be sure to visit Conversion Diary for more Quick Takes!