This is the Inconvenient Truth That Drives Abortion Supporters Crazy

Opinion   |   Dave Andrusko   |   Aug 2, 2016   |   4:51PM   |   Washington, DC

Because a lot of people are not happy with the presidential nominee of either party, we keep being told that they must “rethink” this or that. Any rethinking that increases, however slightly, the chances that Planned Parenthood’s dream candidate, Hillary Clinton, becomes president must itself be rethought and rejected.

With just 97days to go before the election, there will be one “given” for the pro-abortion crowd that will not need to be reconsidered: the importance, at just the right time, of bashing the Catholic Church, specifically for its historic resistance to abortion.

This brought to mind a column written in the last election cycle by the New York Times’s Frank Bruni. I recall like it was yesterday how one of the readers who’d gone gaga over Bruni’s—“Rethinking His Religion”–said the headline reminded her of “the great challenge” of poet e.e. Cummings–to “think twice before you think.”

She took that to mean look before you leap, when a closer reading is that Cummings was celebrating feelings and intuition over thinking.

Bruni knew that many readers of the Times will without a moment’s reflection uncritically celebrate anything that mocks and ridicules and demeans the Catholic Church, with the added bonus of supposedly exposing the hypocrisy of pro-lifers! (See nytimes.com.)

But if you aren’t already predisposed to reflexively believe this, wouldn’t it give you pause that Bruni built his column around the single most convenient former Catholic of all-time, a college roommate who had lost his faith? Wouldn’t you think the operative maxim here is a variation of look before you leap–“think before you believe this”?

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Bruni tells us he had not been in contact with him since college, but out of nowhere suddenly, the guy finds him. To his delight Bruni learns that his former college roommate has “strayed from his onetime script.” Conveniently for Bruni’s column, the guy had “grown” out of his faith (it was just a hand-me-down from his parents anyway), having convinced himself that the Catholic Church in particular, religion in general, isn’t worthy of him.

But he still wants his kids to be filled with “community-minded values and altruism.” In lieu of taking his kids to church, he rounds up quotations, put each on a strip of paper, and fills “a salad bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they can discuss it.”

And, no, I am not making this up.

The point of the entire column is that the man has “strayed” in every way—which is to Bruni a sign of maturity—but best of all he’s gone off-script “as a doctor”: “he has spent a part of his time providing abortions.” Former Catholic, now abortionist. Bruni was no doubt rubbing his hands in glee. But, from Bruni’s perspective, it gets even better.

Preaching to his secular choir, Bruni’s text is taken from the pro-abortion gospel: that people of faith who oppose abortion are not the consistent defenders of life (as Bruni and his former roommate define it), which is what you’d expect since religious adherents are both one-dimensional and dummies.

“Religion,” the former roommate tells Bruni, “too often demands belief in physical absurdities and anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress.”

Of course to people like this duo, the cardinal sin—the only sin—is hypocrisy. And guess what? ANOTHER convenient prop–a pro-lifer who tirelessly protests outside an abortion clinic year in and year out who suddenly disappears. The abortionist/former roommate tells Bruni he thought, “I hope she’s O.K.”

You’ll never guess where she is. (Actually, yes, you will.) Inside getting an abortion (bad timing, relationship up for grabs, etc.), only to return a week later to her post as “one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered.”

I cannot say this could NEVER happen (although this scene seems an awfully convenient staple for abortionists). What I can say is that unlike pro-abortionists, pro-lifers understand that people can fail to live up to the values they profess, indeed the values that undergird their lives.

Which is why our Movement is filled with women who have had abortions. However they do not (like the protestor in the former roommate’s increasingly bizarre account) stand “on a ladder, so that her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted ‘murderer’ at him and other doctors and ‘whore’ at every woman who walked into the clinic”).

Rather they share the knowledge they have sadly learned to try to help women avoid the mistake they’ve made. And should they fail, they are there to offer a shoulder to cry on.

And that is the inconvenient truth that drives pro-abortionist crazy.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.

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