Different Strategies
In the closing to my 2006 book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion, I
wrote:
"I am struck by how knee-jerk the liberal/progressive community is on the
necessity of legal abortions," writes Timothy Shipe of Westerville, Ohio, in
the June 2003 issue of The Progressive. "On every other issue, the
progressive community looks at the parties involved, assesses the humanity,
the vulnerability, the justice, the balance of power, and then weighs in on
the side of the underdog. Every issue, that is, except for abortion.
"The day I accept as 'progressive' the anti-human practice of willful
abortion is the day I say OK to unjust war, unfettered capitalist
exploitation of people and the environment, capital punishment, ethnic
cleansing, and so forth."
Opposition to abortion can be found across the political spectrum. A
national poll by Wirthlin Worldwide on the evening of the 1998 elections
found that 38 percent of all Democrats (and 40 percent of Democrat women)
oppose abortion. A national poll released by the Center for Gender
Equality (a women's think tank headed by former Planned Parenthood executive
director Faye Wattleton), in January 1999, found that a majority of American
women do not support legalized abortion on demand. 53 percent of
female respondents to the poll said abortion should be allowed only in cases
of rape, incest, to save a mother's life or not at all, up from 45 percent
in 1996.
A Zogby International poll in August 1999 found that the majority of
Americans recognize that abortion destroys a new individual human life (52
percent versus 36 percent), oppose partial-birth abortions (56.4 percent
versus 32 percent), are opposed to tax-funded partial-birth abortions (71
percent to 23 percent), and think parents should be notified if their minor
child seeks an abortion (78 percent).
The abortion controversy is analogous to the Vietnam War. By the late
1960s, both the right and the left came to agree that the war was wrong;
they merely advocated different strategies for ending it. The real
losers on this issue are the 1.5 million annual victims of prenatal
homicide, and the spineless politicians afraid to speak out against the
madness.
On secular, human rights grounds, the American Left should take a stand
against abortion.
****
The abortion controversy is analogous to the Vietnam War. By the late
1960s, both the right and the left came to agree that the war was wrong;
they merely advocated different strategies for ending it.
Abortion and war are the collective karma for killing animals. The
reincarnationist strategy for ending the abortion crisis is that we cease to
kill animals.
Pythagoras warned: "Those who kill animals for food will be more prone than
vegetarians to torture and kill their fellow men."
Thomas Tryon's lengthy The Way to Health, Wealth, and Happiness was
published in 1691. Tryon defended vegetarianism as a physically and
spiritually superior way of life. He came to this conclusion from his
interpretation of the Bible as well as his understanding of Christianity.
Tryon, a Christian mystic, wrote against "that depraved custom of eating
flesh and blood." The opening pages of his book begin with an eloquent plea
for mercy towards the animals:
"Refrain at all times such foods as cannot be procured without violence and
oppression, for know, that all the inferior creatures when hurt do cry and
fend forth their complaints to their Maker...
"Be not insensible that every creature doth bear the image of the great
Creator according to the nature of each, and that He is the vital power in
all things. Therefore, let none take pleasure to offer violence to that
life, lest he awaken the fierce wrath, and bring danger to his own soul.
"But let mercy and compassion dwell plentifully in your hearts, that you may
be comprehended in the friendly principle of God's love and holy light. Be a
friend to everything that's good, and then everything will be a friend to
thee, and co-operate for thy good and welfare."
In The Way, Tryon (1634-1703) also condemned "Hunting, hawking, shooting,
and all violent oppressive exercises..." On a separate occasion, he warned
the first Quaker settlers of Pennsylvania that their "holy experiment" in
peaceful living would fail unless they extended their Christian precepts of
nonviolence to the animal kingdom:
"Does not bounteous Mother Earth furnish us with all sorts of food necessary
for life?" he asked. "Though you will not fight with and kill those of your
own species, yet I must be bold to tell you, that these lesser violences (as
you call them) do proceed from the same root of wrath and bitterness as the
greater do."
George T. Angell, founder of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals, said, “I am sometimes asked, ‘Why do you spend time
and money talking about kindness to animals when there is cruelty to men?’ I
answer: ‘I am working at the roots.’”
"The vegetarian movement," wrote Count Leo Tolstoy, "ought to fill with
gladness the souls of all those who have at their heart the realization of
God's Kingdom on earth."
"When we turn to the protection of animals, we sometimes hear it said that
we ought to protect men first and animals afterwards... By condoning cruelty
to animals, we perpetuate the very spirit which condones cruelty to men."
---Henry Salt
"Although I may disagree with some of its underlying principles," writes
pro-life activist Karen Swallow Prior, "there is much for me, an
anti-abortion activist, to respect in the animal rights movement.
"Animal rights activists, like me, have risked personal safety and
reputation for the sake of other living beings. Animal rights
activists, like me, are viewed by many in the mainstream as
fanatical wackos, ironically exhorted by irritated passerby to 'Get a
Life!'
"Animal rights activists, like me, place a higher value on life than on
personal comfort and convenience, and in balancing the sometimes competing
interests of rights and responsibilities, choose to err on the side of
compassion and nonviolence."
The fate of the animals and the fate of man are interconnected.
(Ecclesiastes 3:19) A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada said in 1974:
"We simply request, 'Don't kill. Don't maintain slaughterhouses.' That
is very sinful. It brings a very awkward karmic reaction upon society.
Stop these slaughterhouses. We don't say, 'Stop eating meat.'
You can eat meat, but don't take it from the slaughterhouse, by killing.
Simply wait (until the animal dies of natural causes) and you'll get the
carcasses.
"You are killing innocent cows and other animals--nature will take revenge.
Just wait. As soon as the time is right, nature will gather all these
rascals and slaughter them. Finished. They'll fight among
themselves--Protestants and Catholics, Russia and America, this one and that
one. It is going on. Why? This is nature's law. Tit
for tat. 'You have killed. Now you kill yourselves.'
"They are sending animals to the slaughterhouse, and now they'll create
their own slaughterhouse. You see? Just take Belfast. The
Roman Catholics are killing the Protestants, and the Protestants are killing
the Catholics. This is nature's law. It is not necessary that
you be sent to the ordinary slaughterhouse. You'll make a
slaughterhouse at home. You'll kill your own child--abortion.
This is nature's law.
"Who are these children being killed? They are these meat-eaters.
They enjoyed themselves when so many animals were killed and now they're
being killed by their own mothers. People do not know how nature is
working. If you kill you must be killed. If you kill the cow, who is
your mother, then in some future lifetime your mother will kill you.
Yes. The mother becomes the child, and the child becomes the mother.
"We don't want to stop trade, or the production of grains and vegetables and
fruit. But we want to stop these killing houses. It is very,
very sinful. That is why all over the world they have so many wars.
Every ten or fifteen years there is a big war--a wholesale slaughterhouse
for humankind. But these rascals--they do not see it, that by the law
of karma, every action must have its reaction."
In a 1979 essay entitled "Abortion and the Language of Unconsciousness,"
contemporary Hindu spiritual master Ravindra-svarupa dasa (Dr. William
Deadwyler) explains Srila Prabhupada's words in terms of a secular slippery
slope argument, familiar to pro-lifers:
"A (spiritually) conscious person will not kill even animals (much less very
young humans) for his pleasure or convenience. Certainly the unconsciousness
and brutality that allows us to erect factories of death for animals lay the
groundwork for our treating humans in the same way."
In the March 1982 issue of Back to Godhead, another contemporary Hindu
spiritual master, Srila Hridayananda dasa Goswami (Dr. Howard Resnick),
comments on this shortcoming of the anti-abortion movement:
Insisting that human life begins at conception, the anti-abortion movement
seeks to shock us into the awareness that abortion means killing--killing a
human being rather than an animal, a bird, an insect, or a fish.
"Thus although the movement calls itself 'pro-life,' it is really
'pro-human-life.' Its fudging with the terms 'life' and 'human life' reveals
a disturbing assumption: that nonhuman life is somehow not actually life at
all, or, if it is, then it is somehow not as 'sacred' as human life and
therefore not worth protecting....
"If the pro-life movement can become part of a broader struggle to recognize
the sacredness of all life...then undoubtedly it will attain great success."
No lay practitioner of bhakti-yoga nor ordained (initiated) with lifelong
vows can take a stand against the killing of the unborn without
simultaneously taking a stand against the killing of animals for food,
clothing, sport, etc.
****
In his 1987 booklet, The New Abolitionists: Animal Rights and Human
Liberation, subtitled, "An introduction to the ascendant animal rights
movement, framed in the historical context of human emancipation and
explained in the terminology of progressive thought and politics," B.R. Boyd
similarly writes:
"With more and more people sensing connections between the looming global
violence of environmental collapse and thermonuclear war, on the one hand,
and our various 'localized' or specific violences of child abuse, sexual
assault, class exploitation, etc., on the other, the message of the animal
rights movement echoes an ancient Chinese Buddhist saying:
"If you wish to know "Why there are disasters "Of armies and weapons
in the world "Listen to the piteous cries "From the slaughterhouse at
midnight"
"Whether viewed spiritually as karma or in secular, psychological terms as
the natural result of our individual and collective psychic numbing to the
suffering we inflict, it does seem that our violence comes back to haunt us
-- as we have sown, so are we reaping -- and that the roots of our
ecological and nuclear dilemma reach deep into our history and our
psychology.
"It seems increasingly clear that a thoroughgoing solution to the big
problems we face will require a radical change in many of our ways of
thinking and feeling and being in the world. Radical ecofeminism and some
other wholistic perspectives are teaching us that an integral part of that
change lies in learning to balance our intellect -- including clear-headed
analysis, which is essential -- with our emotions, integrating head and
heart, and developing circular and complete relationships with the earth and
her creatures, as contrasted with the separated, linear patterns and the
absolute primacy of intellect over feeling and intuition that seem to typify
Western patriarchal thinking."
In the April 1995 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just Future, a peace and
justice periodic on the religious left, Catholic civil rights activist
Bernard Broussard similarly concludes:
"...our definition of war is much too limited and narrow. Wars and conflicts
in the human kingdom will never be abolished or diminished until, as a pure
matter of logic, it includes the cessation of war between the human
and animal kingdoms.
"For, if we be eaters of flesh, or wearers of fur, or participants in
hunting animals, or in any way use our might against weakness, we are
promoting, in no matter how seemingly insignificant a fashion, the spirit of
war.'"
The "might makes right" mentality that makes abortion possible begins with
what we humans do to other animals.
Animals are like children. If you can't see toddlers as persons, how will
you ever see zygotes and embryos as persons?
A quote attributed to Ingrid Newkirk, Executive Director of People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is: "I don't care about abortion. I only
care about sentient life."
The abortion controversy is analogous to the Vietnam War. By the late
1960s, both the right and the left came to agree that the war was wrong;
they merely advocated different strategies for ending it.
Unlike Republicans, pro-life liberals advocate real social support for
pregnant women and mothers. In Pro-Life Feminism: Different
Voices, editor Gail Grenier Sweet calls for:
...easy access to contraception, sufficient maternity and paternity leaves,
job protection, job-sharing and flex-time, aids to women who wish to stay
home to raise young children, tax breaks and subsidies for women caring for
elderly relatives at home, community based shelters for pregnant single
women to learn parenting skills and finish their education, upgraded pension
plans to alleviate the poverty faced by many elderly women, humane care of
the handicapped and elderly in nursing homes, hospices for the terminally
ill, medical care for infants born with handicaps, shelters for battered
women, childcare programs, etc...
Similarly, in the December 1993 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just
Future, in an article entitled "How Will we Revere Life?," editor Rose Evans
writes:
"This editor has long been aware of the relative success of the Dutch
support system for pregnant women, compared to that of the U.S. The
Dutch abortion rate is a minute fraction of the American. I believe
the rate for young women in their teens is about one-twentieth of the U.S.
rate. And this is done not so much by restrictive laws (although there
are some restrictions) as by real social support for pregnant women and
mothers.
"The situation for pregnant women in the U.S. who don't have assured income,
family support and medical insurance is abysmal and getting worse.
Choice is a joke. Women don't have money for decent food, decent
housing, or decent medical care, nor adequate support after the child is
born."
The abortion controversy is analogous to the Vietnam War. By the late
1960s, both the right and the left came to agree that the war was wrong;
they merely advocated different strategies for ending it.
My friend Chris Hull said that as a child of liberal parents living in
Berkeley, CA in the late '60s, his parents would play the soundtrack to the
rock musical Hair, and he overheard lyrics with references to fellatio,
masturbation, etc., but was too young to understand what they meant!
“Want to Stop Abortions?” asks the June 1995 newsletter for the Colorado
Peace Mission in Boulder, CO.
“Make them unnecessary. Provide everyone with: A choice of whether to have
sex... and with whom; Comprehensive sex education; Non-coercive family
planning; Safe, affordable birth control; Open, honest talk about sex;
Loving parents...”
To those of us liberal on social issues, this is just being realistic!
On September 2, 2007, I was matched online with Michelle Renee Bean, a
single mother in Vancouver, WA, with three beautiful daughters. We soon
found ourselves emailing and phoning each other every single day!
Michelle, who first became pregnant at age fifteen, was very sexually
expressive, casually admitting for example, that she masturbates.
She asked me: "Have you ever made out for hours on end till your lips
hurt?"
Michelle talked about "road-head" (giving a guy head while on the road, or
driving), a term I'd never heard before!
When making plans to visit me here in the SF Bay Area, she wrote on
September 15, 2007:
"Seriously I could probably talk about sex for days... Women in their
thirties... You might want to look that up before we meet, and I arrive with
a case of condoms!"
Michelle said since she became pregnant at such a young age, her daughters
were more like siblings to her. She told me casually that all the guys at
her oldest daughter's high school were saying to her about her oldest
daughter, Rachel, "Ms. Bean, your daughter's hot!"
Michelle told me when she found out Rachel (still in high school at the
time) was having sex with her boyfriend, she immediately put Rachel on birth
control.
When Rachel decided to move in with her boyfriend, a month before turning
eighteen, Michelle was in tears, but said:
"Hey Rachel does not have a three year old right now, I did something
right."
If I can borrow from Alanis Morrissette's 2002 song, "Hands Clean": "Well
fast forward to a few years later..."
...Recently on her FaceBook page, Michelle says she blames the Democrats for
abortion...
...even though as was pointed out by net user "jazzkonigen" on the
Alternative Lifers email list in 2007 that five of the seven justices who
voted in favor of Roe v. Wade were appointed by Republicans, the decision
came down during the Nixon administration, and legal scholars say it was
libertarian in scope.
Michelle was born on January 31, 1973... just days after Roe v. Wade came
down, and is too young to remember a time when pro-life Democrats had
greater visibility. With Democrats For Life, we're hoping to change all
that!
And as pro-life student John Morrow of Rutgers pointed out on USENET in the
late '80s, a different set of morals was in place when Roe v. Wade came
down: a society that would not accept single mothers, there were homes for
unwed mothers, shotgun weddings, etc.
Michelle's profile on FaceBook shows her surrounded by loving friends,
relatives and immediate family.
Michelle spoke kindly on FaceBook of one of her aunts, and her aunt was
genuinely touched by Michelle's kind words.
Everyone is in love with Michelle! Michelle's youngest daughter, Hayli, was
comparing herself to her mother, saying she has similar taste in music, and
that she was dancing to the Human League's "Don't You Want Me?" -- a song
from the early '80s -- over a decade before she was even born!
Like Michelle, Hayli became pregnant while in high school.
A recent photo of Michelle on FaceBook, having recently turned 40 as well,
showed her beaming proudly next to her newborn grandson -- the baby wearing
a t-shirt which read:
"I (heart) Grandma."
“Want to Stop Abortions?” asks the June 1995 newsletter for the Colorado
Peace Mission in Boulder, CO.
“Make them unnecessary. Provide everyone with: A choice of whether to have
sex... and with whom; Comprehensive sex education; Non-coercive family
planning; Safe, affordable birth control; Open, honest talk about sex;
Loving parents...”
The Colorado Peace Mission is correct!
Democrats For Life of America, 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, South Building,
Suite 900, Washington, DC 20004 (202) 220-3066
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