Hayward: Pro-Lifers and the Triumph of Reason

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - NOVEMBER 30: The Phillips 3D ultrasound showing an unborn child at
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John Hayward

Monday’s Supreme Court decision in favor of Kentucky’s ultrasound law was correctly seen by pro-lifers as a huge victory, and by the abortion industry as a major defeat.

It was not a new victory for the pro-life cause, but rather another step down the path of truth and reason, opposed by abortionists who openly admit their cause is lost if women are not kept in the dark about the true nature of pregnancy.

Although the pro-life movement has long been associated with religious faith, its slow but steady progress is a triumph of pure reason delivered by advanced technology. Meanwhile, the people who love to portray themselves as the party of science and champions of enlightenment are desperately trying to suppress valid information to keep their belief system alive.

Compare the response to the Supreme Court ruling from Live Action President Lila Rose to the response from Planned Parenthood:

Rose noted that women turn against abortion when they “have the chance to see the humanity of their child and hear their heartbeat,” while Planned Parenthood complained the Kentucky law prevents pregnant women from “turning away or covering their ears” when ultrasounds of the children in their wombs are prepared. One of those responses is an expression of blind zealotry and a fanatical desire to suppress inconvenient scientific fact, and it’s not the one from the pro-life leader.

The abortion industry is a rich and powerful special interest with many allies in the quest to suppress inconvenient truth. Social media platforms have censored pro-lifers by classifying brutally honest information about abortion as “pornography” and treating key pro-life terms as if they were obscenities.

If pro-lifers argue their case with anything approaching the wit and passion applauded when they come from the pro-abortion side, they might find themselves banned under “hate speech” protocols, as Babylon Bee founder Adam Ford discovered in April.

Ford drew a comic strip that was banned from Instagram because it compared the rationalizations given for slavery before the Civil War with the rationalizations employed by abortion defenders today. The key point in the analogy drawn to such devastating effect by Ford was that slavery defenders questioned the humanity of slaves and denied they had the same citizenship rights as slave owners.

The abortion issue likewise revolves around the humanity of unborn children, and that is why ultrasound technology had such a profound effect on public opinion. The abortion lobby wants to frame the issue as purely a matter of “choice” for a single person, the pregnant woman. For all but the most committed abortion zealots, the moral equation changes profoundly when a second human life is at stake. (Never mind the third human being who should be deeply involved in childbearing decisions and responsible for their outcome, the father, but that is an argument for another day.)

The womb is no longer a fathomless void in which shapeless clumps of parasitic cells can be dispassionately terminated until they are eventually dragged into an operating room and commence screaming. For most people – men and women, religious or not – it matters a great deal whether a human life is taken during an abortion. Many of those who feel queasy about telling women “what they can do with their bodies” feel even more uneasy about killing children. 

The highly profitable culture of abortion on demand was built entirely by convincing Americans that pregnant women have “nonviable tissue masses” in their bellies and nobody – certainly no man – has anything to say about how a woman chooses to process that clump of cells.

Vicious political battles are in progress over the reasons for America’s steadily declining abortion rate, which hit a string of all-time lows in 2019. The ultrasound revolution is one of many factors. Analysts cite lower pregnancy rates and increased use of contraceptives as others. 

Some of the abortion industry’s arguments for the declining number of abortions ring of whistling past the graveyards they will no longer be able to fill. If they didn’t know how dangerous the facts of pregnancy are to their industry and its political wing, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress those facts. 

No matter what they say to dismiss the latest reports of abortion in decline, absolutely no one in the abortion lobby acts as though ultrasounds of the womb are trivial distractions. Nothing they do, or direct their media and corporate allies to do, suggests they truly believe pro-lifers are treading water or losing ground in the public mind. They wouldn’t be trying to silence pro-lifers if they didn’t believe the information they seek to suppress is both true and powerful.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures of babies in the womb have been worth thousands of human lives. People who are not deeply committed to one side of a painfully difficult issue tend to recoil from unreasoning zealotry. For decades, the pro-life cause was made to seem unappealing in American popular culture by portraying it as an obsession of religious fanatics, moralistic bullies, and misogynist tyrants. 

The core mythology of secular culture speaks of church inquisitors throwing scientists in dungeons to suppress their heretical discoveries. Today the abortion inquisitors are trying to punish pro-lifers for brandishing heretical ultrasounds while instructing their followers to avoid contemplating sinful truths. It didn’t work in the Dark Ages, and it won’t work now.

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