Defending My Support of an Abortion
"Compassion is the basis of
morality."
- Schopenhauer
This week, I received two hate mail
letters from people who assumed that they knew me. Why, they demanded to
know, do I believe in animal rights while ignoring the rights of unborn
children? In their arguments, both correctly guessed by my last name that I
am Jewish, and based upon my geographical location, lived in the
ultra-liberal New York metropolitan area, and based upon the admission
that I voted for Obama for President, came to the conclusion that I must
support abortion.
Perhaps the letters came to me as the result of a
question that will appear on the ballot of Mississippi's general election
tomorrow, November 8th. The proposed "Personhood Amendment" defines an
individual's life as beginning at the moment of fertilization. Colorado
voters have defeated similar votes in the past, but support has been growing
by anti-abortionists in Florida, Ohio, and South Dakota where the
controversy will continue on ballots in 2012.
The animal rights
movement supports the murder of unborn children. Most of its members are
liberal feminists who demand a woman's right to make that painful life or
death decision about a future being.
Having three daughters, I freely
admit that I am more of a feminist than most feminists, but I digress...
The animal rights movement also promotes compassionate slaughter of
animals, and, in doing so, insures that more animals are to be slaughtered
and eaten.
When the goal of a movement changes to contradict its
founding principles, we reach that point in time when that mission should be
aborted. It is in that spirit that I believe in abortions. In its current
state, the animal rights movement is dead and must be ripped from the body
of injustices which men and women of conscience continue to protest. In its
place, we must pray for the birth of a new movement that supports the rights
of all living creatures, even humans.
Animal rights activists protest
pain to laboratory rats, but support a woman's right to an abortion. Some
demand that meat eaters acknowledge the horrors of slaughterhouse films, or
vivisection, or bullfighting. Yet, they turn a deaf ear and firmly shut a
blind eye to the conscious being who grows within the human mother.
Each year, one thousand or more animal rights supporters gather near
Washington, D.C. for their annual convention. The majority of these
activists are women. As a matter of fact, there would be no animal rights
movement without the gentler sex, who seem to possess a spirituality and
wisdom that their male counterparts lack.
Most of these passionate
women also support the rights of women. That's a natural. More than one
female author has paralleled the abuse and struggles of animals to the
sexual politics and multiple indignities suffered by women at the
hands
of a male-oriented society.
Is abortion murder? Of course it is. It
is more than just murder. It is death without compassion, for the living
creature, not yet named, possesses pain receptors and is aware of his or her
own suffering.
In defense of their ignorance, some animal rights
activists argue that the fetus feels no pain, much the same way that animal
abusers use the very same argument to defend vivisection, sport, or the
consumption of sentient farm
animals.
As an animal rights
activist, I am faced with an enormous dilemma. Do I call abortion anything
else than murder? I cannot rationalize murder, for that is exactly what it
is. Murder, without regard for the human who will die in great
pain.
Abortion is murder.
I cry for the cow and the calf, and the bull in
the bullring, and the dog who is euthanized, and the rat who is burned in
the name of science, and the squirrel
shot by the young boy in the name
of sport, and the coyote who is anally electrocuted so that her fur can
adorn a parka.
Many people do not recognize the unborn child as
possessing the same rights as the rest of us, yet, a study published in the
May, 2003 issue of Psychological Science (2003;14:220-224) reveals that a
fetal infant is able to recognize the voice of her own mother.
Scientific studies have demonstrated that the growing human fetus feels pain
and learns about the external environment while within. The fetus recognizes
songs and voices. The brain works, the heart beats, pain receptors feel. How
much compassion do animal rights activists emote for sentient human infants,
not yet born?
Supporting animal research is a transgression of the
laws of nature and an insult to the respect of life. This is why Animal
Rights activists are so right in the things they protest. Supporting
abortion for just one of the 4,700 species of mammals is a contradiction in
terms against all of the good. In 1866, one of America's first great
intellectual feminists, Ellen G. White, wrote in book 3 of How to Live:
"Against every transgression of the laws of life, nature will utter her
protest. She bears abuse as long as she can; but finally the retribution
comes, and it falls upon the mental as well as the physical powers."
Robert Cohen
http://www.notmilk.com
http://www.Twitter.com/TheRealNotmilk
