The so-called "March for Women's Lives" is disturbing for many reasons, the most obvious of which is the name itself. The main demand of the marchers "for women's lives" is taxpayer-funded abortion. But half of the 4 million American children killed by abortion in the past 31 years were female. Do the lives of these women not count?
Even if one refuses to acknowledge that abortion is murder, no serious pro-life person is opposed to abortion when giving birth would kill the mother. This is the principle of self-defense. Therefore, there is no reasonable link between "women's lives" and abortion.
The real reason that the organizers of the march have invoked the "women's lives" terminology is to deceive innocent young people into believing that their cause means merely equal rights under the law for women. This is the most troubling aspect of the whole march. The true aim of the organizers is to promote the sexual "liberation" of women by working to mitigate the ill consequences of promiscuity.
Just consider some of the positions taken by the march's sponsors. Planned Parenthood, in a recent white paper on adolescent sexuality, condoned sexual intercourse and sodomy among children between the ages of 13 and 17. Such behavior helps children "become sexually healthy and sexually responsible adults." Anyone who suggests that people this age are too young for sex is supposedly just "denying the realities of adolescent development."
The National Organization for Women considers it a travesty of justice that "emergency contraception" - i.e., the abortion pill - is not accessible to teenagers over the counter. Its Web site also repeatedly ridicules the idea that poor mothers on welfare should stop having children out of wedlock, and that a dedicated husband is superior to a cohabitating male. Then there is the ACLU, which opposes parental approval of contraceptive purchases by teenagers, calls abstinence a "sexist stereotype" and believes there is a constitutional right to sodomy.
This radical agenda will be foisted upon the march's participants, many of whom will think they are merely marching for equal rights. By cloaking the abortion issue in an "equal rights" argument, the organizers attempt to distract us from the real dilemma of abortion, which is the question of when life begins. If people considered that a person's unique genetic code - one that will never be replicated in any other human being - is present at conception, or that a fetus has a beating heart and recognizable human form just weeks into pregnancy, or that unborn children feel pain just as we do, or that we would not be alive today had our mothers aborted us at any time during their pregnancies, perhaps we would have a much different debate.
But the organizers of the march are too afraid of that debate. They would rather use empty rhetoric about women's legal equality and pretend that abortion is somehow related to it. Here are excerpts from the "Why Are We Marching?" section of the organizers' Web site. The quotes are from participants whose command of the English language is as suspect as their reasoning:
Debbie Goldman said: "I am marching because I am a single mother of two by choice. I march so my sons learn to respect a woman and her voice, and when they grow up to treat women as their equals." (An interesting strategy for teaching that lesson is to willfully deny her sons a male role model).
Jessica Adams said, "I am marching because I refuse to live in a country which was founded on the principle [of] separation of church and state, that makes laws based on Christian fundamentalism." (Unless all laws must be amoral, the consequence of this statement is that anyone who is the least bit religious will have to disqualify himself from voting, lest his religiously-based morality cloud his judgment).
Connie Stamm Charles said, "I am marching for my daughters so they may always have the right to choose, and for victims of rape and incest so they [will] not be victimized again." (Abortion prevents rape and incest?).
Jessica Freeberg said, "If I can't stand up for my rights, and the rights of all those that follow after me in the generations to come, then there is no point to living in this great country."
The common theme in all these quotes is that abortion is somehow a fundamental right without which women would be rendered second-class citizens. To the extent that men can get away with sexual promiscuity more easily than women, the participants are correct. But most reasonable people would condemn sexual immorality for causing this disparity. Not so for the radical feminists. They feel that women should be allowed to be just as licentious as men, and nothing - not even the lives of human children - should get in the way. I have a better title for this coming gathering: "The March for Women's Promiscuity"
