To refresh your memory, this was my original letter to The Call:
I am writing to The Call because I’m very concerned about the sociopolitical atmosphere at Clarion University. It seems as though the “pro-life” rhetoric has reached a fever-pitch recently. This is unsettling to me because I strongly believe that the pro-life/anti-choice worldview is based on contempt for women, especially young women of reproductive age.
When students walk past Gemmell, I wonder if they critically think about the faux-graveyard they’re seeing. It’s meant to be shocking. But if you actually take time to think about it, it’s in bad taste and it’s ludicrous. Why did Students for Life decide to use crosses to represent aborted embryos/fetuses? Not everybody is a Christian, and certainly not everyone is religious. I don’t see how they expect to draw anyone to their “cause” with such a display of hyper-religiousity. Furthermore, by creating the symbolic graveyard, it sends an illogical message — that many people have tragically died. An embryo/fetus is not a person and it cannot survive outside of the womb before 23 weeks gestation. Abortion is not a universal tragedy. I think time would be better spent addressing real tragedies…
On that note, I would like to ask several questions of the pro-life community:
1. Where are the symbolic graveyards for victims of war, genocide, and poverty? What about the missing and abused children in the United States? What about the doctors murdered by the “pro-life” movement (Have you forgotten Dr. Tiller already)? Actually, what about a symbolic graveyard for the thousands of desperate women who died from unsafe, unregulated abortion before it was legal?
2. Do you believe that people deserve the right to bodily autonomy? If so, how do you get around that basic right if you also believe that a woman must be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term?
3. What do you personally think should be done to women who choose abortion? If you think abortion is murder, then it logically follows that you would like abortion to be made illegal. About 800,000 abortions are performed in the U.S. every year. If you think women should be in prison for “murder,” then do you realize that you will be imprisoning 40 percent of the entire population of American women? If you don’t think they should be sent to prison, then you must not “really” think that abortion is murder, because in our country, people who are found guilty of murder are imprisoned. If you think that only the doctors performing abortions should be imprisoned, then you are saying that women do not actively make the choice to have an abortion on their own, and that idea basically negates all of your efforts as an activist to persuade women to choose an option aside from abortion. Furthermore, even if you only wanted to imprison the doctors who perform abortions, women would still use abortafacient herbs that are found naturally in the environment. How would you regulate something like that?
4. Have you considered the fact that your time might be better spent advocating on the behalf of the millions of war-ravaged/abused/orphaned children in the world, instead of trying to convince people what they should do with their pregnancy and the fetus growing inside their body?
5. Do you advocate for better, more comprehensive sexual education for young adults, knowing that teaching youth about condoms, birth control and any other form of contraception will prevent pregnancy, and therefore, prevent abortion?
6. Most fertilized eggs don’t even make it to the uterus, and many women have natural miscarriages. If you think abortion is murder, then would you want to investigate all miscarriages to make sure that they weren’t induced abortions? Would you go so far as to investigate all miscarriages as negligent homicides?
7. Suppose there was a fire in a fertility clinic and you could save either 100 embryos scheduled for implantation in 100 women – or a 2-year-old child. Which would you save and which would you let burn? If you believe that an embryo has the same right to life as any person, then by your logic, you would choose the 100 embryos, because this would be saving 99 more “lives” than the 2-year-old child’s life.
8. Thousands of women died before abortion was made legal. How do you come to terms with the fact that thousands more women will die if abortion is illegal and unregulated? Studies have shown that banning abortion does not make abortion less prevalent, it only makes it a lot more dangerous. How can you call yourself “pro-life” when you know that women die if they do not have safe and legal access to reproductive health care such as abortion?
9. Do you believe that abortion is acceptable in cases of rape? If not, how do you come to terms with the knowledge that many women feel that by being forced to give birth to a rapist’s baby, they are being raped and violated a second time? Some women feel that being forced to carry to term essentially “condones the act of rape as a legitimate sexual encounter.”
10. Do you support the current war in Iraq/Afghanistan and/or do you also support the use of United States military force in general? If so, how do you rationalize supporting a military campaign that has taken thousands of innocent lives, while also calling yourself “pro-life?”
I would actually like serious and thoughtful answers to these questions and I welcome responses from readers sent to e.l.young@eagle.clarion.edu.
Sincerely,
Emily Young
And here is their response:
Dear Editor-in-Chief,
This letter is in response to last week’s letter by Emily Young, “10 questions for Clarion pro-life supporters.” Last week, Students for Life held our annual “Pro-Life Week” where we focus on different events to educate students and the community about abortion. After reading Emily Young’s letter last week, we would like to respond to her questions posed to the pro-life community. However, two clarifying points about our Students for Life organization:
1. Our organization is not based on contempt for women. In fact, it has been women-led since its inception in 2004. Our advisor, Dr. Rourke, informs us that female membership has never been under 80 percent. In six years, there have been only two male officers, or around 7 percent overall male membership. Nationally, the pro-life movement is young and female. At the March for Life, young women in the tens of thousands attend. By way of contrast, the pro-choice movement looks to be dominated more by the older advocates of the feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
2. Concerning the display of crosses (what we call “The Cemetery of the Innocents”), it is neither illogical nor “hyper-religious.” The use of the symbol of the cross in the ground is to communicate a grave. A cross is a universally recognized symbol of a grave. No one, even those who disagree with us, seems to misunderstand that we are trying to underline one point – that abortion results in the death of a human being. As Dr. Jerome LeJeune, one of the world’s foremost authorities in the field of genetics and most notably the founder of the genetics of Down’s Syndrome states, “At no time is the human being a blob of protoplasm. As far as your nature is concerned, I see no difference between the early person that you were at conception and the late person which you are now. You were, and are, a human being.” Our organization does not take any religious stand and we have many members of diverse religious affiliations. Our members are only members because we all agree that abortion is wrong.
In response to Emily Young’s 10 questions:
1. SFL constructed a symbolic graveyard because the death of the unborn is a specific focus of our organization, and not other innocent victims of injustice – many though they are. We do not deny that there are many other victims of violence. In contrast to Emily Young’s opinion, we firmly believe that abortion is a universal tragedy as more than 46 million human lives have been lost in the United States alone since legalization in 1973.
2. Whether or not we believe in the right to bodily autonomy depends on what one means by it. If it means that one should not have to engage in sexual intercourse against one’s will, we hold the doctrine as strongly as anyone. However, an aborted child is a different human life from the mother, and that can be scientifically proven by DNA analysis. Since the unborn are separate, genetically unique individual lives, and abortion is the ending of a life, then the argument for the “right to control one’s body” has no validity in the abortion debate. We do not support the deliberate ending of another person’s life, and we not do believe a woman has a right to kill the child in her womb.
3. The argument about putting women in jail for choosing abortion is an old canard used to discredit pro-lifers. Even before Roe v. Wade, it was not the practice to jail women who had abortions, and no credible pro-life organization argues for such a bad policy. Alice Paul, an American women’s suffragist leader, is reported to have said abortion was the ultimate exploitation of women. We concur. Jailing women who have suffered through abortion is counterproductive in every conceivable way. We also fail to see how chasing down women picking herbs would be a good use of the resources of our criminal justice system.
4. In terms of how we spend our time aside from advocating against abortion, we reached out to pro-choice advocates (most notably FMLA and Dr. Burghardt of Women’s Studies) on campus and worked with them to have the first ever Pregnancy Forum here at Clarion in 2008. We were on the ground floor of the Parenting and Pregnancy Resources Initiative on campus. At least three members of our organization attend every meeting. We worked with others (most notably Dr. Girvan and Dr. Boyden) to try to save the Siler Center to assist parenting students. We have conducted clothing and baby-item drives for young mothers every year of our existence. We are painfully aware that the existing resources for parenting and pregnant students are inadequate, as they are in most places. Just this very day, our adviser, Dr. Rourke, with Dr. Girvan and Dr. Smrekar, met with Vice President for Student Affairs, Harry Tripp, to find the next best step to establish day care again at Clarion. Just like there are other tragedies and evils in the world, there are other organizations dedicated to ending them. We are committed to defending life as well as finding the resources and ongoing support that pregnant women need in order to continue their pregnancy.
5. The relationship between promoting contraception and having fewer abortions is not as simple as some suggest. If we examine the proliferation of contraceptives, most notably the pill, since 1960, they most surely did not decrease the number of abortions in the United States. Furthermore, the simplistic argument ignores the broader impact of the contraceptive mentality on morality in our culture. It undermines the moral connection between sex and marriage and encourages an explosion of sexual activity among the young and unmarried. This cultural change normalizes sexual activity for teens, which tends to increase unwanted pregnancies. Contraception facilitates the kinds of relationships and attitudes that are most likely to lead to these unwanted pregnancies, and therefore, abortions. No serious analyst contends that the introduction of the contraceptive pill led to fewer abortions in the United States from 1960-1990. Although pre-1973 numbers are debatable, we know that abortions almost tripled from 1973-1990 (600,000-1, 600,000 approx.) despite the widespread availability of contraceptives.
6. Just like tracking down women who pick herbs, it would also not be of beneficial use of our criminal justice system to investigate miscarriages as negligent homicides. Also, just like no credible pro-life organization advocates the jailing of women who have an abortion, no credible or serious pro-life organization advocates investigating miscarriages.
7. Due to reasons of space, we cannot address this purely speculative scenario in this letter.
8. Concerning the old argument that laws prohibiting abortion cause more deaths of women, The Center for Disease Control reported 37 deaths from illegal abortion in the year prior to Roe v. Wade. As a matter of public record, it is known that Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former director of the National Abortion Rights Action League and former abortionist, verifies deliberate fabrication of the figure 5,000-10,000 deaths per year prior to abortion legalization. He said, “In NARAL… when we spoke of [mass statistics] it was always 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year. I confess that I knew that the figures were totally false… [but] it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it?” The common belief that thousands of women died yearly from illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade is false. We are not denying that women did die then, but it is important to acknowledge that women continue to die from legal abortion today.
Additionally, there is no credible evidence from any nation that has legalized abortion to support the claim that the number of abortions remained the same as before legalization. In the U.S., we know that legalization caused a huge increase in the number of abortions. Since there are really no nations that legalized it and then banned it again, no one can honestly say they know what the numbers would be. Global studies by the Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) used to underline the dangers of illegal abortions (and no one denies the dangers!) are based on highly speculative numbers as to both the number of abortions and the number of deaths from illegal ones in nations that frequently have no reliable data. We do know that abortion advocates have inflated and invented numbers historically. Women in developing areas need health care, just as women here do.
9. Rape is a difficult case. Ninety-three percent of abortions do not involve rape, incest, or the life of the mother, and we believe the focus should be on these 93 percent of cases where we can get the consensus we need to limit abortion. Nonetheless, it is difficult to understand how a second act of violence against an innocent victim is the good solution. Does the unborn child deserve the death penalty for the biological father’s crime? Just as some women consider giving birth in these circumstances as “being raped and violated a second time,” just as many women have said that giving their child life aided in their healing process.
10. Concerning the important issue of war, many would argue that there are conditions under which war can be justly waged. There is, in principle, the moral right to self-defense, which makes the morality of war quite a bit different than terminating the life of an innocent child in which self-defense is hardly a legitimate dimension. Pro-lifers have varied opinions, but again – we have no organizational position about war. Our focus, in addition to trying to create a better environment for women to choose life, is our opposition to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. These keep us busy.
Sincerely,
Katy Nolan, President, Junior
Amy Denison, Vice President, Junior
Emily Mosher, Community Outreach, Sophomore
I find it very interesting that they did not send me an e-mail, and rather, decided to write directly to The Call. I am somewhat suspicious that they didn't want to engage me directly. If I didn't know better, I would say that Dr. Rourke actually wrote the letter. Or maybe they are simply cautious of debating with me directly because they know that I will poke holes in all of their arguments. Meh, but what do I know...
Of course, I couldn't let it go without addressing all the distortions and misconceptions in their letter. So, I e-mailed them with my response, and hopefully someone will be interested in continuing the conversation. Here's what I wrote:
Hi Students for Life,
Thank you for your excellent response to my letter. I am pleased to see that I have generated a discussion in the community. You bring up several interesting points that I would like to address. I hope we can continue this discussion in a manner that is forthright, respectful, and purposeful so that we may better understand each other.
Forgive the excessive length of my response; I did not want to leave anything out. I think I will break this up point-by-point so as to make it a bit more organized, if you don’t mind:
--- I realize that SFL is and has always been a woman-centric organization, but it is still possible for a predominantly female group to be anti-feminist and/or have contempt for other women. Certainly not all women are feminists. Women are just as capable as men when it comes to adopting misogynistic beliefs and holding contempt for other women.
One of the biggest tenets of feminist theory is the concept of reproductive freedom. When you take reproductive freedom out of the equation, then the concept of bodily autonomy does not exist. It is possible to be a feminist who is against abortion/contraception/etc in her own private circumstances, but it is not possible to be a feminist who would seek to outlaw abortion for all other women. That is why I believe that the pro-life/anti-choice worldview is based on contempt for women. Perhaps a better phrase would be "a distrust for women." If you can't trust another woman to make a choice about her pregnancy, then how can you trust her to be a parent?
****
--- I disagree that the cross is a universal symbol for a grave. The cross, first and foremost, is a religious icon in this day and age. In contrast, a universal grave marker would be either a rectangular tombstone or an obelisk. To deny that the cross carries a heavy religious connotation is a bit naive. I am curious as to why SFL decided to revert to the cross-as-grave marker as opposed to a simple rectangular tombstone.
You may claim that your organization does not take a religious position, but many of your sponsors and events have heavy religious themes. To name just a few: AAA (the crisis pregnancy center), Theo Purington, Georgette Forney (of the Catholic "Silent No More" campaign), and the Pro-Life Mobile Classroom.
I find it difficult to believe that your members come from diverse religious backgrounds, unless you mean different denominations of Christianity.
****
--- It is a bit perturbing that you don't think the right to bodily autonomy has any validity in the abortion debate. In your hypothetical world where the government should have the power to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or give birth, it logically follows that it equally has the power to force her to abort against her will. This is a vision of a world without the right to control one's own pregnancy and body, and it is one that I am sure we would both want to avoid. You accept one of the principles of bodily autonomy -- the right to refuse/accept sexual intercourse at one's own discretion. But the right to privately decide when (or whether) to become pregnant is the next step. In fact, if you do not include this right — that only the individual woman decides when/if she wants to have a child — then there is absolutely no reason to assume that one first has the right to accept/deny sexual intercourse of their own free will. You cannot have one without the other.
****
--- Nobody is denying that an embryo/fetus is human or that it is alive (in the same sense that any human tissue is alive). Nobody is denying that its DNA is separate from the woman's. But - scientifically speaking - it is not a person in the same sense that you and I are people. Science can tell us a lot about life but it has nothing to say about personhood. An embryo/fetus is only the POTENTIAL of a person. To claim that a full-grown born person is the same as a zygote or fetus is not only demeaning and disrespectful to the concept of human life but is also scientifically inaccurate. In fact, none of the cells in your body now are the same cells as they were 7-10 years ago.
Although fetal DNA is separate and unique from that of the woman, it is not bodily separate from a woman. It is still physically inside of the woman and relies on her body to continue growing. It cannot exist outside of that body as a separate physical entity until viability. To put it very bluntly, a woman is not an incubator/vessel, and the existence of a growing embryo in the uterus does not trump a woman's right to bodily autonomy or her right to psychological well-being.
I would also like to point out that a malignant tumor has its own unique DNA structure, is alive, human tissue, and is capable of growing hair and teeth. That does not make it sentient and it does not make it a person.
****
--- You attempt to dismiss my question about "putting women in jail" as merely a canard. But I find it interesting that you did not actually even answer my question. It is legitimate and in no way meant to be rhetorical.
You think that abortion is murder and that it should be illegal BUT you would not want to send women to prison for having an abortion? This does not make any sense. It implies that you do not actually think that abortion is murder. Remember, in our society, people are tried and sent to prison for committing murder. This suggests that there is another underlying reason for your aversion to abortion... such as contempt for women who exert control over their reproductive health and biological destiny.
Or perhaps you think that only the doctors are to blame as the "murderers" -- but if this is the case, then it implies that you do not think women are capable of choosing abortion, all women are coerced into having an abortion, or that all women are naive victims. This is simply not true. It is incredibly demeaning to suggest that such women are not the agents of their own fate and that only the doctor is responsible. Not all women "suffer" through abortion. The experience of abortion is not a universal constant – some stories are positive, some are negative, but all are valid experiences. We cannot outlaw abortion because a few women have negative experiences.
And, as I said, if you do not consider the woman as free agent, it undermines ALL of your past work as pro-life activists to try to "convince" women to carry to term.
So, let me ask again, what do you think should happen to women who have abortions?
****
--- You mentioned that, "before Roe v. Wade, it was not the practice to jail women who had abortions." This is simply not true. You are correct in that it was not terribly common, but it happened to women if they were discovered at an illegal clinic during a raid and sometimes to women who tried to operate on themselves. When they weren't sent to jail, society saw fit to "punish" women in a way much worse than the legal system. See "slut shaming" - http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/what-is-slut-shaming/
****
--- Where are you getting your information about the pill and other contraception? It appears as though you receive all of your information from heavily biased websites. I have never read any article that claims the invention of the pill did not lower instances of abortion. Furthermore, it would be difficult to determine this, considering the fact that the pill was developed in 1960, and instances of abortion were not formally recorded/tracked until its regulation and legalization in 1973.
Your argument that contraception and morality go hand-in-hand is simplistic. It implies that a person who has sex for reasons other than to procreate is an immoral individual. Sex is not an abstract moral problem to be imposed upon by religious or government institutions; it is a normal biological occurrence and a human necessity.
What exactly is wrong with pre-marital sex? What is wrong with young people having sex, as long as they are responsible? Are you capable of answering these questions without resorting to religious or moralistic answers? Only in the narrowest confines of religious belief is pre-marital sex considered a societal problem. Furthermore, there has not been a "cultural change," as you say, toward the normalization of sexual activity among teens. It has been normal for thousands of years.
The existence of contraception does NOT lead to promiscuity or to more abortions. The claim you are making has already been debunked many times in medical and sociological journals. See:
“Condom Availability in New York City Public High Schools: Relationships to Condom Use and Sexual Behavior,” American Journal of Public Health 87 (September 1997): 1427-143
“Condom Availability Programs in Massachusetts High Schools: Relationships with Condom Use and Sexual Behavior,” American Journal of Public Health 93.6 (June 2003): 955-961.
"Promiscuity and oral contraception: The relationship examined," Social Science & Medicine
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/fact-v-fiction/fiction-comprehensive-sexuality-education-causes-irresponsbile-behaviors
****
--- Think about why it might be that the rate of abortions seems to increase from 1973 onward. It is because that was when it was legalized and regulated, and official medical data was collected. The numbers you cite do not necessarily reflect an increase in abortions, they reflect an increase in the AVAILABLE DATA of abortion.
Again, you cite the CDC's report that there were 37 reported deaths from illegal abortion in the year prior to Roe v. Wade. The key word here is REPORTED. This is only official data and is most likely very limited. Just how many deaths from illegal abortions went unreported? How many hospitals and doctors were willing to report deaths from illegal abortion?
[Let me draw a quick parallel -- This phenomenon is similar to data-collection on sexual assaults in the US. The number of sexual assaults is only representative of reported sexual assaults, and not the actual number (which, in actuality, is much higher because not all sexual assaults are recognized or reported).]
"The common belief that thousands of women died yearly from illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade is false." This is simply not true. Yes, the figure of "10,000" deaths is an exaggeration. In actuality, the figure hovered around 6,800 estimated deaths per year. In 1940, there were 1,682 REPORTED deaths from illegal abortion and the reports decreased each year. I urge you to read "When Abortion Was A Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973" by Leslie J. Reagan. And if you are interested in accounts specifically of doctors' experiences with the number of botched abortions: "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars" by Cynthia Gorney, 1998.
The hard truth is, abortion rates do not decrease if the procedure is illegal, it only makes it much more dangerous. See: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8966852.html
Also, I suggest you watch the documentary film entitled, "Motherhood by Choice, Not Chance" which is readily available on youtube.
****
--- Concerning pregnancy as a result of rape — Your rhetorical question, "Does the unborn child deserve the death penalty for the biological father’s crime?" only works if you think a zygote/embryo/fetus is a child, a sentient person. And ask yourself, who suffers more? Obviously, if the woman is forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term after being raped, she will suffer for the rest of her life, whereas any supposed "suffering" experienced on the behalf of a non-sentient embryo is not measurable and does not last for any amount of time.
You concede that "...just as some women consider giving birth in these circumstances as 'being raped and violated a second time,' just as many women have said that giving their child life aided in their healing process." So, since both of these attitudes exist, then why can't you accept that both are based on equally valid moral choices?
****
--- You didn’t adequately address my question about war. Do you think that war is justly waged even if it results in the deaths of innocent people? I am not talking about war waged in the act of defense. I am speaking specifically of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. These are certainly not wars of defense. You say that "self-defense is hardly a legitimate dimension" in the act of abortion. It is not any more legitimate in the act of waging war.
****
--- Since we can communicate by e-mail, I would like you to consider the thought problem I proposed about the fire in the fertility clinic. There is no issue of space here. It is not purely speculative because one’s answer can illustrate a great deal of the philosophy and logic behind the pro-life viewpoint.
Best,
Emily Young
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