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Pro-lifers can't have it both ways
by Amberdawn Collier, staff columnist for The News Record |
The little pure white crosses, all in perfect rows that covered a section of the engineering quad lawn Monday were supposed to fill the viewer with a sense of anger and injustice.
They were meant to move the viewer to act.
Well, it certainly worked in my case, but not in the way that the peple who put them there intended.
Indeed, the first word that popped into my mind upon seeing them was "hypocrites."
Indeed, that is what most of the people who want so diligently to take away a woman's right to choose are.
Maybe it fills these people with a sense of righteousness, but it only fills me with contempt.
These anti-choice protesters are obviously blinded.
They can't see a number of simple truths.
I'll be magnanimous and point them out.
First of all, abortion is legal.
It's going to stay that way. No matter how hard you protest, how many doctors you kill, how many clinics you bomb or people you injure, the level-headed people of this country will always see that you cannot take away control of what happens to a woman's onw body from her.
This is America.
Freedom means freedom to choose to have a child or not. We as a nation are appalled by forced abortions in China. Why shouldn't we be equally appalled by forced births?
The second truth is where the hypocrisy lies.
Anti-choice people are always saying that a woman, once pregnant, should carry the child to term.
If she doesn't want it, then she should give it up for adoption so that others can love it.
That seems simple enough, until you start to ask questions.
A good number of women who have abortions are very young and have little money.
Who's going to pay for her prenatal care?
Her hospital bills?
Certainly not the militant right, who continue to try to cut benefits to young unwed mothers and mothers-to-be.
Once the child is here, who's going to take care of him/her if the woman doesn't want to?
Will the child become one of the thousands of children who sits, day after lonely day, in an orphanage?
What about the children who aren't as cute or smart?
Who's goin to adopt them?
And when these children grow up, unwanted and emotionally scarred, when they turn on society and become detriments?
Then who's going to take the blame? And if the mother decides to keep the child, who will pay for her food stamps and all the other support that she'll need?
Well, if certain people have their way, those women will be on their own.
And those precious children who deserved so rightly to come into the world, well, they will probably be malnourished and in poverty.
Suddenly it doesn't sound so simple does it?
When you look at the whole truth, it starts to get messy.
How many of those people who pounded crossed into the ground are willing to accept the financial and emotional repsonsibility for all the babies that those crosses represent?
Not many, I'd wager.
Everyone wants to be in the delivery room, but no one wants the bill or the baby. So that makes it pretty clear. Keep your hands out of my body.
I'll decide when and if I have children. No one else. Ever.
This article was taken from The Unviversity of Cincinnati Student Newspaper, The News Record September 30, 1997.
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