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Observing pro-choicers reaction to the Texas abortion law has been interesting and instructive. This is a great chance to show the reactions to your kids and walk them through the responses, to show them how the game is played. Most likely they get stuff like this all the time, so if they are not tutored on how to think and respond, it will intimidate and manipulate them. If they haven’t yet been at the receiving end of it, they will. It is only a matter of time. It is up to us parents and church leaders to explicitly, directly, and intentionally prepare them for the challenges that await. We cannot leave this up to chance.
There are, indeed, a few thoughtful takes on the details of the law and what it will and won't likely accomplish. Those are nuanced arguments and deserve to be taken seriously. But many of the responses from the pro-choice crowd are typical fare.
Here are a few common threads:
First, trying to argue that it does great harm. This is the most straightforward tactic, because pro-lifers can easily counter it by showing that the opposite--keeping abortion legal and/or restrictions low--harms, because it allows the intentional killing of a defenseless and innocent human being.
This one is also easy to counter because the pro-choice attempt leans on a definition of harm that is, well, revealing:
The proper response to this is to simply “get out of the way.” That is, point out what, exactly, it is folks like this are saying--that they actually believe killing Down Syndrome children before they are born is an acceptable solution to the existence of Down Syndrome, that, as Robert George pointed out, they think we need "permissive abortion laws so we can 'screen' for people with Down's and kill them in utero." If Hanania wasn't implying or assuming that, he wouldn't have felt the need to point out the law could lead to more children with Down Syndrome.
Scrub off the fine sounding rhetoric and reveal their view to be what it is. Remove the obfuscation and bring what they really believe into the light.
Next: backtracking:
Response: “nice try.” Remain firm. This person was, indeed, implying exactly what several pro-lifers pointed out, and then tried to weasel out of it. Pro-lifers were not reading into the tweet, and the above is a passive aggressive attempt at cover. Don’t let this kind of response throw you and don’t let anyone get away with it.
They will also use impressive linguistic gymnastics to avoid acknowledging the obvious. As Alexandra DeSanctis Marr points out, here are some phrases actual news outlets have used to avoid the phrase “fetal heartbeat:”
*Cardiac rhythm
*A group of cells with electrical activity
*A cluster of pulsing cells
*Fetal pole cardiac activity
*The pulsing of what will later become the fetus’s heart
Straightforward euphemism. As George Orwell states in "Politics and the English Language," "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
After this, they turn to insults, character attacks, and distractions. Turn the focus towards anything but where the focus should be--the humanity of the unborn.
Before I get to the main response I want to point out that this is revealing on a number of levels. Notice the gender ideology that they stump so hard for in other contexts suddenly evaporates here like it never existed. For all their talk of “birthing people” and “men can get pregnant too,” Psaki aggressively attacks the reporter’s gender, as if he cannot get pregnant. Yes, men in fact cannot get pregnant, but this runs counter to everything progressives have told us the past few years when it comes to sex and gender. “Women” as a distinct biological category suddenly exists, contrary to much progressive rhetoric. This happens for one reason: it is politically convenient for them to do so.
When you witness a pivot like this, ask something along the lines of “how do you know I can’t get pregnant?” then “how do you know I’m a man?” Wait for the answer, then point out they are relying on either biology or stereotyping to categorize you as a man and therefore, by their very own worldview, they are engaging in bigotry.
Force them to live by their own rules and do not let them move the goalposts.
The main response is to not take the bait. Keep the focus where it should be, on the unborn and on what, specifically, abortion does to the unborn. Afterall, Joe Biden is a man, yet his view on abortion is not discounted due to his genitalia: “name calling and attacking my gender is not an argument. It is a distraction. Can you please answer the question?”
I also like Frank Beckwith’s go-to: “arguments don’t have penises. If you want to be taken seriously, you will need to respond to my actual question/argument, not dismiss it because I supposedly have the ‘wrong’ gender.”
Countless women make the same points and ask the same questions in defense of the unborn, so the arguments and questions cannot be waved off by a red herring or genetic fallacy.
Finally, when none of their previous tactics work, they may feint to a shrug:
What they are trying to do here is anything but be upfront about their apathy. Most likely, they do care--they are just now trying to get everyone else to turn their attention elsewhere and stop engaging. In reality, they care A TON about sexual autonomy, so much so that they are willing to allow human beings to be intentionally killed in order to preserve its hegemony.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Over the next several days and weeks, expect the primal scream of the sexual revolution to get much louder and more intense, as their god continues to be threatened. The manipulative distractions will be more numerous. Don’t blink. As one of my former wrestling coaches used to say, “keep the eye.” That is, stay the course.
Abortion is the ultimate act of the powerful exploiting the powerless. *If* someone wants to talk about power dynamics, abortion is the most asymmetrical power move of them all.
"A civilized society protects those who are weaker and vulnerable...it does not authorize their killing."-Leila Miller