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The issue is who decides, the woman or the state. It’s about freedom of choice.

The abortion lobby has always realized that abortion itself is indefensible. This has forced them to argue that whether abortion is the deliberate killing of a living human being or not, is unrelated to the question of whether it should be legal. In short, they have to divert attention toward the philosophical concepts of “choice” and “who decides” because they can’t afford for the public to look at what’s being chosen and decided.

To imply that the issue is not abortion, but choice, is to say that what’s being chosen is irrelevant. That is clearly illogical given that all choices are not equal. Choosing whether to buy a new car is vastly different than choosing whether to produce child pornography, and the morality of those choices is not affected by the eventual decision. However, the pro-choice position is that abortion becomes acceptable simply by the act of choosing to do it.

Defenders of slavery also used this same strategy. During the 1858 Abraham Lincoln- Stephen Douglas debates, Douglas said he did not support outlawing slavery, saying, “I am now speaking of rights under the Constitution, and not of moral or religious rights. I do not discuss the morals of the people favoring slavery, but let them settle that matter for themselves. I hold that the people who favor slavery are civilized, that they bear consciences, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity and not to us. It is for them to decide therefore the moral and religious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits.”

Just substitute the word abortion every place the word slavery appears, and this statement perfectly defines the pro-choice position in America today. Lincoln’s response to Douglas’ pro-choice position on slavery was, “He cannot say that he would as soon see a wrong voted up as voted down. When Judge Douglas says whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do a wrong.”

Lincoln recognized that there is nothing intrinsically noble about the concept of choice, and that there are choices which a society cannot allow the individual to make.

The fact is, before one can rightly claim that the issue is “choice” or “who decides,” he or she must first examine what’s being chosen. If it’s what color shoes to wear, that’s one thing; if it’s whether to kill another human being, that’s another. Except in self-defense, the decision about whether one human being can kill another one cannot be left up to the individual who wants to do the killing.

Besides, this “who decides, the woman or the state” rhetoric is idiotic on its face. Laws against abortion would not let the state decide who gets abortions any more than laws against rape let the state decide who gets raped. Instead, they establish that certain behaviors are so unacceptable they must be illegal.

Finally, as used by abortion advocates, the term “pro-choice” is both inaccurate and dishonest. In an abortion, at least three people are directly impacted: the mother, the father, and the child. The pro-choice argument is that only one is entitled to a choice. Additionally, it has never been a part of their agenda to protect any choice other than abortion. They don’t lobby for women to have the legal right to be prostitutes or use crack cocaine. Yet these laws, and thousands of others, deny women “the right to choose” just as much as laws preventing abortion would.

Why don’t you help people who are already here, like the homeless?

First, unborn children are already here. If that were not the case, there would be nothing to kill. Second, there are about 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers in America, each funded and staffed by the pro-life movement and each providing its services free of charge. Third, when pro-life groups solicit money to finance these centers, our biggest problem is that almost every pro-lifer we approach is also contributing to other organizations whose sole purpose is to help people.

This claim that pro-lifers only care about abortion is an outright lie. However, let’s assume that no pro-lifer anywhere in the world is involved in even one effort to help other people. What does that have to do with our efforts to keep the pro-choice mob from killing every baby they can get their hands on? Where is it written that when someone tries to prevent innocent human beings from being butchered, they are responsible for solving all the world’s social problems? If a man tries to stop a poor child from being murdered in a drive-by shooting, do we say it’s none of his business unless he has a plan to end poverty?

There is a legal group called the Innocence Project which represents prisoners who claim they were falsely convicted. They have been successful in numerous instances where they were able to prove that a man was on death row for a murder he didn’t commit.

When they are trying to save the life of a condemned prisoner who may be innocent, should they be told to butt out unless they are doing something about homelessness, child abuse, hunger, and all of the world’s other social problems? As ridiculous as that sounds, that is precisely what the pro-choice crowd says about abortion. They say that unless the pro-life movement can solve all the problems an unborn girl might face in her life, then we have no right to keep them from killing her.

The reality is, when the choice is between helping people who have no place to live or helping people who are being butchered by the millions, we have to choose the latter.

However, if the pro-choice crowd is so concerned about homelessness, they have the power to end it anytime they want to. All they have to do is pick out one homeless person and take him home. Since there are more abortion advocates than homeless people, this would end the problem instantly, without controversy and without tax money. In fact, they could use this “adult adoption” plan to eliminate hunger, poverty, unemployment or any other social problem.

Of course, the pro-choice crowd is never going to go for this. Their only interest in the homeless, or the poor, or the unemployed, or the hungry, or any other disadvantaged group is to use them as a skirt to hide behind so they don’t have to defend abortion.

It’s the woman’s body. It’s her decision.

First, it is nonsense to suggest that the law never tells people what they can or cannot do with their bodies. In fact, there are many things which people are not legally allowed to do with their bodies. To name just a few, they cannot sell them for sex, or sell their organs to people who need transplants, or put certain drugs into their bodies.

Second, statements like this ignore the fact that, by any rational standard, the unborn child is a separate individual from its mother.

In fact, if an unborn child had the ability to commit a crime, it has everything necessary for a forensic expert to identify it in court. Long before the point at which most abortions are done, the unborn child has its own DNA code, its own fingerprints, and its own blood type – none of which match the mother.

The individuality of the unborn was evident in 1999 when a Tennessee surgeon had just completed an operation on an unborn baby and was about to close the incision in the mom’s abdomen. Before he could do so, the child punched his arm through the incision and grasped the doctor’s finger. A photo of this event ended up on magazine covers and television sets around the world. The question is, who grabbed the doctor’s finger?

The government has an obligation to fund abortions for poor women.

On one hand, the abortion lobby says that abortion is a private decision in which the government has no right to be involved. Then, they demand that the government pay for abortions and force even pro-life taxpayers to buy abortions for other people. They defend this obvious hypocrisy by pointing out that government often requires taxpayers to pay for things with which they disagree. For example, people opposed to war have to pay taxes which fund the military.

However, the abortion lobby’s position is that government has no right to even be involved in the abortion issue. So why should government pay for something which the recipients of those funds say is none of the government’s business? After all, if we concluded that national defense was none of the government’s business, we would not use tax money to buy jet fighters.

Also, just because someone has a right to do something doesn’t mean the government has to pay for it. Americans have the right to own guns, but the government doesn’t provide free pistols to poor people. We have a right to free speech, but the government doesn’t buy public address systems for poor people. We are also guaranteed freedom of religion, but the government has no obligation to purchase Bibles for poor churches.

Abortion is about empowering women.

If you want to see the weakest and most subservient women in America, just look at the faces of those entering an abortion clinic. What you will see is sadness, desperation, fear, and resignation. What you will not see is women who feel empowered or in control.

These faces make it clear that, like suicide, abortion is a choice made by tragic people who have been convinced they have no choice. Better than anyone else, women who submit to abortion understand why no woman was ever admired for having an abortion, and why no woman ever bragged about her abortion, and why no woman ever climbed off an abortionist’s table with a higher opinion of herself than she had when she climbed onto it.

This nonsense that women must have the right to kill their children in order to be equal to men is an invention of the abortion industry. With almost no exceptions, pioneers of the women’s movement like Susan B. Anthony, Mattie Brinkerhoff, Sarah Norton, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were outspoken opponents of legal abortion. Alice Paul, who wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment, called abortion the ultimate exploitation of women. Even suffragist newspapers such as Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, had editorial policies which openly attacked both abortion and abortionists.

These early feminists saw that abortion is patronizing and paternalistic and that a woman’s willingness to submit to it doesn’t free her, it devalues her. They understood that legalized abortion is nothing more than a safety net for sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible men. Today, after over 30 years of legalized abortion, that view has been so thoroughly proven true that some abortion advocates no longer even bother to deny it. In fact, some say it should be celebrated.

On May 11, 1990, the PBS radio program Spectrum featured the staunchly pro-choice Ann Taylor-Flemming saying, “I came of age with the women’s movement. It has given license to my ambitions and dreams, and filled me with the fervor for equality that permeates all that I do. But this time, I want to turn the tables a bit. Take an issue that always seems like a women’s issue and pitch it directly towards the men out there. And that issue is abortion... it’s time now to invite the men of America back in, to ask them to raise their voices for choice... I dare say that many of them have impregnated women along the way, and then let off the hook in a big, big way – emotionally, economically and every other way – when the women went ahead and had abortions... the sense of relief for themselves was mixed with sympathy for and gratitude towards those women whose ultimate responsibility it was to relieve them of responsibility by having abortions... it would sure be nice to hear from all those men out there whose lives have been changed, bettered, and substantially eased because they were not forced into unwanted fatherhood.”

It is hard to imagine that even the most bigoted male chauvinist would suggest that women have a responsibility to let men who impregnate them “off the hook” by submitting to abortion. Yet here is that very argument being espoused by someone who claims to be an advocate for women.

Today, abortion apologists continue to push the idea that having a clean place to kill their babies is the cornerstone of women’s equality. That lie is a self-serving perversion of the basic values of legitimate feminism. As pro-life feminist Melissa Simmons-Tulin once said, “Women will never climb to equality over the dead bodies of their children.”

Why should a woman who is acting responsibly be forced into motherhood just because her birth control failed?

The idea that when someone is “acting responsibly” they should be immune from consequences is nonsense. Even when people are driving their cars responsibly, they can still get into accidents and they are still responsible for the damage they do. In the case of sexual activity, acting responsibly goes beyond just taking steps to avoid pregnancy. It is also accepting – before having sex – that a child may be conceived. Abortion is about letting people avoid this part of their responsibility.

Also, if women should not be forced to take on the responsibilities of having a child simply because their birth control failed, do we extend this same option to men? If a man was “acting responsibly” by using a condom and his partner was “acting responsibly” by using birth control, if a pregnancy results and he offers to pay for an abortion, should we say that he has fulfilled his legal obligations? This is especially relevant given that if she decides to abort he is legally powerless to stop her, but if she doesn’t abort he can be forced to pay for a child whose intentional execution he could not legally prevent. If abortion is about equal rights – as the pro-choice gang claims – how can “forced fatherhood” be right if “forced motherhood” is wrong?

I am against abortion but I look at all the issues. Besides, most political offices have nothing to do with abortion.

For people who believe that abortion is murder, a candidate’s position on other issues is irrelevant. The slaughter of children cannot be equated to any other social, cultural or political issue. It is also irrelevant that most political offices have no impact on abortion. If a candidate is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, voters will not ignore that just because the office he is seeking has no impact on racial issues. That dynamic also applies in this case. People who support legalized abortion are not morally qualified to serve in any public office.

It is interesting to note that the number of people killed during the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center is virtually the same as the number of unborn children killed daily in America’s death camps. In other words, for the unborn every day is 9/11. If the rest of us were being hit like that, no one would be saying that there are other issues to consider.