A Matter of Choice?

         The following letter to the editor was published in our local newspaper during a petition drive to redefine birth. Heartbeat is a well-known local pro-life crisis pregnancy center.
         Basically, the petition sought to define birth as the moment any part of a living child emerges from the mother (rather than legislate against a particular abortion method), thus giving legal protection to that newly-born citizen. This was for the purpose of stopping partial birth abortion (where the living child is partially delivered, then gets their brains sucked out of them), a procedure overwhelmingly condemned by Michigan voters & legislators in previous legislation, but then vetoed by our radically pro-abortion governor.
         This initiative cannot be vetoed, and it is hoped that it will also withstand the legal challenges that inevitably get filed by the radical abortion lobby.
Postscript- Hundreds of thousands more signatures were gotten on the petition than were needed to enact this act. We did it!!!Partial birth abortion is officially illegal in Michigan, at least until the courts get hold of the legislation!
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         This letter is addressed to all of you who have decided NOT to sign the petition supporting the “legal birth definition act”, a people’s initiative to try to enact veto-proof legislation to stop the form of infanticide called partial birth abortion.

         I suspect most of you will not sign it because you feel women should have the right to choose whether or not to carry a baby to term and are afraid this is the first step to taking away that right. In other words, your concern is for the woman herself. While I find arguments supporting a child’s inalienable right to life personally more compelling, I would like to discuss this issue from the perspective of concern for the pregnant woman alone.

         As a crisis pregnancy counselor, I talked to hundreds of women who were considering the abortion choice, or had already made that choice in the past. I noticed an odd thing, though. Out of those hundreds, only one woman claimed to be choosing abortion. All the rest said they had no choice. This was not a matter of freedom to choose, but a matter of women feeling forced to have an abortion.

         Force comes in many forms- some direct, like the local teen forcefully taken to get her partial birth abortion by her mother, just hours before the scheduled judicial hearing to protect the girl’s legal right to refuse the abortion. It is force when a young teen is told she will be kicked out of her home if she doesn’t get an abortion. It is force when a husband threatens to abandon the family if an abortion isn’t gotten. Girls are told daily that it is impossible to graduate, or that their boyfriend will dump them, or that they will be on welfare for the rest of their life, if they don’t get an abortion.

         These are not hypothetical situations. These are your sisters, best friends, cousins, neighbors, teachers, mothers, co-workers, and classmates who are being forced to “choose” an abortion they do not want. How do you think they will feel when they meet someone who proves an abortion wasn’t REALLY the only choice under their specific circumstances?

         The ready availability of this destructive choice makes it easy for "loved ones" to force these women to do what every instinct within them cries against- to kill their baby. What every one of them really wants is their boyfriend or parents or husband to say, “We’ll work through this!” When offered real choice, through emotional support & concrete help from community resources like Heartbeat, most women don’t choose abortion. . If you are truly concerned about “choice”, help offer other choices instead of making this one choice so easy.

         In the very least, stop the late-term infanticide of partial birth abortion. The American Medical Association says there are NO situations that require partial birth abortion for the health of the mother. No one needs that choice.

Sign the petition.