It's time to take back "pro-life" and put it where it belongs.
http://capmag.com/...
http://aynrandlexicon.com/...
The question of abortion involves much more than the termination of a pregnancy: it is a question of the entire life of the parents. As I have said before, parenthood is an enormous responsibility; it is an impossible responsibility for young people who are ambitious and struggling, but poor. For such young people, pregnancy is a death sentence: parenthood would force them to give up their future, and condemn them to a life of hopeless drudgery, of slavery to a child’s physical and financial needs. The situation of an unwed mother, abandoned by her lover, is even worse.
I cannot quite imagine the state of mind of a person who would wish to condemn a fellow human being to such a horror. I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object. Judging by the degree of those women’s intensity, I would say that it is an issue of self-esteem and that their fear is metaphysical. Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life.
Abortions are private affairs and often involve painfully difficult decisions with life-long consequences. But, tragically, the lives of the parents are completely ignored by the anti-abortionists. Yet that is the essential issue. In any conflict it's the actual, living persons who count, not the mere potential of the embryo.
Being a parent is a profound responsibility -- financial, psychological, moral -- across decades. Raising a child demands time, effort, thought and money. It's a full-time job for the first three years, consuming thousands of hours after that -- as caretaker, supervisor, educator and mentor. To a woman who does not want it, this is a death sentence.
The anti-abortionists' attitude, however, is: "The actual life of the parents be damned! Give up your life, liberty, property and the pursuit of your own happiness."
Sentencing a woman to sacrifice her life to an embryo is not upholding the "right-to-life."
The anti-abortionists' claim to being "pro-life" is a classic Big Lie. You cannot be in favor of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue.
Anti-abortionists are not lovers of life -- lovers of tissue, maybe. But their stand marks them as haters of real human beings.
All we have to do is look at the wreck -- the virtual destruction -- that can be made of the life of a living woman if she is forced to carry a child to term -- to see that this position is actually the anti-life position.
A proper appellation for this group's desire and action would be that those who would force a living person to carry a fetus to term is that they are essentially advocating the perpetration of a hate crime; and then carrying it out.
They in fact are the anti-life. Which must stem from a deep-seated hatred. Hatred, or at least criminal indifference, towards the only real victim -- a living, breathing human being.
UPDATE: I have to go offline for a while; thanks for a lot of great comments!