Hope versus Fear

I’ve had a hard time this week dealing with our new president’s first actions in office. With the stroke of his pen, President Obama ushered in the use of federal funds for abortions in other countries. So now our tax money, like it or not, goes toward women across the world killing the life that is within them.

For a long time I grappled with what science and faith topic I could elaborate on that might explain why abortion really is murder. In my previous blogs, I’ve talked about the fact that a person has all the DNA they’ll need to become a unique individual from the time of conception. This is a scientific fact. It has absolutely nothing to do with religion. I even used the Scientific Method to discuss whether the preborn child is human. See: http://lorettaoakes.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html

In today’s society, there is no excuse for ignorance on this subject. The plethora of information on the formation of the fetus from conception to birth is all over the internet, churches, and science books. So what’s the real problem?

Fear.

The Webster Dictionary describes fear as:
To feel a painful apprehension of; to be afraid of; to consider or expect with emotion of alarm or solicitude.
http://www.webster-dictionary.net/definition/fear

So why do I say the real problem with abortion is fear?

The hard-core feminists who push abortion as a right are truly fearful. They fear that if the abortion debate is removed, they will have no platform on which to exist. There will be no reason for feminists to exist if the topic of abortion is obsolete. It isn’t that they don’t understand that the fetus growing inside a mother’s womb isn’t human. They do! It’s that if they admit that abortion is wrong, no other feminist arguments exist. They are afraid that their reason to exist will cease to exist.

Let’s look at something feminist Camille Paglia recently stated in Salon.

“But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index3.html

Here is a grown educated feminist actually stating that abortion is murder.
So what are we supposed to take away from this? Two things: People know abortion is wrong, and people believe they are in control.

Even though people know abortion is wrong, they are fearful of losing what they perceive to be a freedom: the freedom to do what they want with their bodies. Ms. Paglia loses rational thought when she says that a baby is the mother’s biological process. The developing child has its own biological processes. Even from conception, that child sends its own personal messages to the mother’s body in the form of lymphocytes and later stem cells. Literally the two are mingled. For more info see:
http://lorettaoakes.blogspot.com/2008/04/inheriting-traits-from-our-children.html

If two humans are mingled together, where does one leave off and the other begin? An abortionist may scrape the developing child from a mother’s womb, but does he go in remove all the stem cells that baby has given her mother? No, and what Ms. Paglia has failed to comprehend is how that mother has and will continue to grieve that loss emotionally, spiritually and physically. That child is forever a part of her—literally! No amount of scraping will take that away.

The feminist argument is based on a false hope: the hope that a woman maintains her own life—that she’s in control. No one is control of his or her life, we all live on borrowed time.

Fear drives control. Yet control is a façade. It doesn’t matter if you are an atheist as Ms. Paglia, or a devout Christian, we all have to admit that sooner or later we are not in control—even of our own lives. Yet that is what drives feminism. Control. Therefore, to admit a lack of control would mean they would have to change their mantra. It would leave them with nothing left to grasp, but the unimaginable. God.

Letting go is feminism’s Achilles heel.

That’s what makes this last week so sad. Signing the agreement to allow money to flow to other countries for abortion only fuels the façade of control. While President Barack Obama’s campaign ran on tag line, “Hope”, really all he fueled this week was the continuation of fear. And when we live in fear, we have lost hope.

(Thank you to my dear friend, Jane, who guided my thoughts for this post.)

Below is a link to an interesting way to talk to people about abortion. I hope you will follow up on it.


http://listen.family.org/miscdaily/A000001766.cfm