Another Old Lie Comes to the Surface

Kathryn Jean Lopez spent some time observing the tone and temper of the latest pro-abortion rally:

Though the "pro-choice" caricature of a pro-lifer is of a hater — killers of abortionists, oppressors of women — that elitist conventional wisdom (which was very much part of the march on Sunday) ought to be reconsidered. One close look at what went on both on and around the Mall this weekend would be a healthy baby step in that direction.

To be sure, I frequent circles and sources of information that would highlight such things, but it has seemed that even the staunchly pro-life are a bit astonished at the rhetoric of the other side. The "March for Women's Lives" seems to have been only the latest example of what being on the unanticipatedly pressured side of a cultural turn can do to fundamentally untenable worldview. "Those !@#$ haters must die for their lack of compassion!" This must seep out into the culture and help to shape the views of those not devoted to either side.

Some of the statements are bizarre on their surface and increasingly disturbing with the unraveling of each layer of subtext. Do "Menapausal Women Nostalgic for Choice" lament that they can no longer become pregnant because it removes the privilege of killing the resulting children? Was it a condition of Maxine Waters's birth that she be condemned to walking the Earth preaching that others not make the Devil's deal of parenthood?

Patrick Sweeney has a picture of a sign — apparently not excessive by comparison — drawing on the jaw-droppingly unengageable fanaticism of the "anti-war" protests. "Mr. Bush Had Your Mother Chose Abortion More Than 800 American Soldiers And Over 10,000 Iraqi Civilians Would Be Alive Today! Abortion Saves Lives." Patrick makes an astute comment:

Now projecting the personhood of President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, Attorney General Ashcroft, etc. into the unborn child is a bizarre admission of the murderous intent that unites the culture of death with opposition to the Republican party. A celebration of their power to bring death to the unborn. A earnest desire to be free to kill whomever they wish.

Whatever initially drove the abortion movement, it has now become an assertion of power over life and death. And one can't help but believe the quivering fury and tone of political desperation to be the mark of the functional insanity of compounded sin and error. Michael Williams, investigating some of the names from the march, notes the predominance of older women. This is a gray crowd, and people for whom a change of heart would require admission to having killed children and/or helped to facilitate others' ability to do so. As Michael suggests, it is a movement for which defeat could mean retrospective alignment with the threads of evil throughout human history:

Future generations will look back on the 40 million babies killed over the past 30 years -- in America alone -- with disgust and revulsion. A quarter of my generation: dismembered and discarded. And people have the nerve to worry about spotted owls?

We must have compassion for these people, though, because the choice that they currently face is between wrenching contrition and spiraling hatred. Ms. Lopez writes:

One of the women gathered with Silent No More, Lynn Hurley, told me that she had had an abortion in 1971 when she was in college. She knows the pain of abortion and says, "I hurt for the [women marching] who hurt, who have been through abortions themselves. They're probably in denial." She said, "I'm hoping women might see our signs and be touched by them."

For those individual women, we should hope so. But in the long run, more objective good may be accomplished by the signs and slogans of the other side — as people see them and recoil, frightened.