The Problem with Pro-Lifers

A guest post by my friend Joshua Edmonds with emphases my own.

I’ve thinking lately about the Pro-Life movement lately as it pertains to our effectiveness and determination to end abortion. It started back at the March For Life in D.C. in January.

There were around 400,000 people flooding the streets of the nation’s capitol, most of them young people, and to a large degree you wouldn’t have known that this wasn’t a music festival. Now, anyone who knows me know that I like to have fun, so don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with having fun and enjoying the company of your friends and fellow laborers. However, there was little distinction between our mass of marchers and a U2 concert.

I later saw it among the students at some of the conferences I’ve run and spoken at since then in the way that responsibility, planning, and execution of events and work goes. There tended to be a lot of complaining and backbiting surrounding mundane tasks and petty disagreements. Again, anyone who knows me knows that I understand conflict and manage it very well. So, no big surprises in that department.

But it finally drove home this morning during Abby Johnson’s talk at the National Right To Life Convention in Jacksonville, Florida. Abby essentially said that, in our movement, fear/unwillingness/immaturity equals a missed opportunity to give hope to someone who needs it.

More importantly, it means that babies die.

The cold hard truth is that, for the large part, the Pro-Life movement does not understand what is truly at stake. We know that abortion is wrong, that it is immoral, that it hurts women physically and psychologically, that Planned Parenthood is corrupt, that our tax dollars fund it, and that we don’t want it in America. But how many of us actually have stopped and thought that every time that one of those poor girls goes into that terrible abortion mill, a human child that looks just like your little brother/little sister/daughter/son/niece/nephew/grandson/granddaughter/neighbor/daycare student is being murdered in cold blood?

• How many of us have stopped every time we look into the precious eyes of an infant and thought that for every one little angel like this one, more than 3,000 are murdered every day?
• How many of us, when we hear of a death on the news, stop and think that more than 3,000 babies also died that day?
• How many of us look at an empty room full of chairs and think that the room could be filled millions of times over with the lives taken in our nation alone since 1973?
• How many of us stop and think that when we file our taxes that there is money being taken out that will contribute to all of those deaths every single day?

I think that the Pro-Life movement has turned “abortion” into an abstract term like “liberty” or “freedom.” We know that we want the “freedoms” that “liberty” offers, but we never name what they are. They’re “liberty” – duh. But the components of “liberty” are what matter, not the term. That’s why the founding fathers wrote constitution to detail the liberties they were referring to when they said we have a right to “liberty.” The same goes for “abortion.” We want “abortion” to end, but it’s not about the word, it’s about what the word represents. The problem is that I don’t think the Pro-Life community has clearly defined exactly what “life” we’re standing for and what “abortion” that we’re fighting.

Let me try to lay it out for us:

We want baby murdering to end.

We want to stop “doctors” and “governments” from slaughtering thousands of innocent BABIES in the name of “choice” and “progressivism.”

When the Pro-Life movement realizes what it is they’re actually standing against, I think that there will be more people praying outside of abortion mills every week. I think there will be more outcry against the government for allowing federal funds to Planned Parenthood. I think there will be more people showing up at the polls to throw politicians who support baby murdering to the curb and fill our government with righteous men and women who will defend the sanctity of life.

I think that the Pro-Life movement needs to realize that every time they don’t stand for life and every minute there isn’t someone in front of an abortion clinic to talk to women who are confused and misinformed about what is happening inside of the womb, that people die. Human, preborn, people die. Real people. Just like you and me.

For now, we will use philosophical jargon and political platforms to argue our case and get together at nice conventions in beautiful cities. But it won’t do anything.

Once this movement comes to terms with the reality of what is happening, abortion will end.

This is the reality of what is happening in every single state across this nation, every single day, to thousands of babies, with your tax dollars: