In the 1960s, the pro-abortion movement needed a rhetorical edge in their battle against common sense. To make an unspeakable act legal, they needed a label that was respectable; thus, the campaign for abortion became the campaign for “choice.”It was an ingenious maneuver: they no longer had to promote abortion itself, but merely had to characterize it as an unattractive, but necessary, option. Even today, effective pro-abortion rhetoric must embrace people’s natural aversion to abortion. One could cite, as an example, Bill Clinton’s famous formula – that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”
But underlying the concept of “choice” lies an interesting assumption: if choice itself is important, what is chosen must be a matter of indifference. In other words, to truly protect the choice a pregnant woman makes, pro-abortion advocates must convince us that this choice doesn’t matter. To be pregnant or not to be pregnant – that cannot be an important question, if a “right to choose” truly exists.
But there is a critical difference here, a difference that proponents of “choice” can never admit. For choosing to end a pregnancy can never have as much meaning as choosing to bring a child to term; and this is precisely why the phrase “choose life” is an effective rejoinder to the rhetoric of choice.
And to admit the obvious difference between a pregnancy that ends in an abortuary, rather than in a delivery room, is to severely undermine this pro-”choice” presumption. Indeed, the only “choice” the “pro-choice” moment celebrates is the decision to have an abortion.
To protect the “right” to choose, abortion advocates are forced to deny the obvious importance of this choice. Thus, when a common sense law that seeks to punish violent crime committed against pregnant women and their unborn children is introduced in the Canadian Parliament, the pro-abortion movement has to oppose it; they cannot admit the existence of “unborn victims of crime” and cannot let society recognize that the murderer of a pregnant woman is accountable for two deaths, not just one.
It is an indefensible opposition, a true reductio ad absurdum. The soi-disant champions of women’s rights can now be seen in the pages of national newspapers, arguing against a law that protects women. They are, in effect, defending the most horrific form of abuse against women. And they do all this under the ridiculous banner of “choice.”
Simply because the implications of this good law jeopardize their flimsy fiction – that there is nothing special about pregnancy – abortion advocates would deny pregnant women who choose life the necessary legal protection to bring their unborn children to birth.
We are confident that Canadians will recognize the sinister and heinous motivations of those who would harm pregnant women, even if those who pretend to be the defenders of women’s rights do not.
Although we are troubled by any opposition to the protection of unborn victims of violence, the opposition of pro-abortion advocates has revealed a vital truth: that the defence of choice always involves the devaluing of life.
