Community Voice: Straddling a line so fine it’s nonexistent – The Bakersfield Californian

Subscribers dont usually get the last word when it comes to the Opinion page, but after Danny Morrison called me out in his most recent column for schooling him on his you-can-be-both-pro-choice-and-pro-life stance, I requested and received equal time to rebut his rebuttal of my rebuttal.

As with his first column, Mr. Morrisons more recent commentary on abortion and how he does/doesnt support it was a dizzying discourse that addressed everything from voter suppression and wage gap myths to how men are basically a big tribe of troglodytes. Everything except the question I actually put before him.

The question he so vigorously ignored centered on his contradictory belief that, though he is personally opposed to abortion, an act he considers shameful, the practice still deserves his enthusiastic support. So I asked him what it is he personally finds abhorrent about abortion. No comment.

Instead, he went with the assumption I must be a Christian conservative who is patently ignorant of American history, the law, womens rights, and the uterus-challenged, a dopey phrase that supports another of his arguments that men shouldnt be chiming in about abortion and other women-related subjects they apparently find incomprehensible.

His reference to some people interjecting religion into the abortion debate was curious as it was not I but he who made a faith-based argument. While I share with people of many faiths the belief that human beings are created in Gods image, and therefore are of inestimable worth, I rarely make faith-based arguments because they carry little weight with abortion supporters, who tend to dismiss them out of hand.

I prefer instead to appeal to the god they do revere the god of science, who routinely demonstrates through the miracle of ultrasound that from the moment of conception the unborn are wholly human. Its a reality that even the most ardent abortion supporters no longer deny because to do so is to deny science.

To establish his creds as an informed supporter of womens rights, Mr. Morrison lauded womens multigenerational fight for equality dating back to the days when suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for equal economic and political opportunities. You know what these early champions didnt support? Abortion.

The weekly newspaper Anthony founded and ran with Stanton, The Revolution, refused to carry ads for abortifacients and published articles from feminist leaders denouncing abortion as evil. Another feminist pioneer, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to become a medical doctor in the United States, was passionate in her opposition to the cruelty of abortion, of which she once wrote, the gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation.

Thankfully, the early pioneers of womens rights believed equal rights extended to all women even those not yet born.

Finally, why any advocate for choice would bring up slavery and the Holocaust in a debate about abortion is beyond me, but Mr. Morrison did so, ostensibly to make some point about the legalities of those reprehensible practices. Still, placing those human rights violations on the same shelf as abortion is appropriate. Like abortion, each was legal in its day and each succeeded for a time because in the eyes of the courts Jews and slaves were not recognized as persons. Even so, can any of us imagine being personally opposed to slavery, but unwilling to impose that view on someone else? Cant you just hear the pro-slavery slogan of the day? Dont believe in slavery? Dont own one.

Sorry, Mr. Morrison. Your pro-life-is-pro-choice mantra may be convenient, but for the unborn lives you say you value, that line youre trying to straddle is so fine as not to exist at all.

Marylee Shrider is executive director of Right to Life of Kern County.

Originally posted here:

Community Voice: Straddling a line so fine it's nonexistent - The Bakersfield Californian