As we continue to reflect back on the remarkable NRL 2017 convention, one refrain will be how many speakers drummed home the same ironic point: there is nothing we can write or say or describe that better discredits the anti-life forces than their own words.
I like to say (way too often) that “you can’t make this stuff up.” And if we were talking about the 99.9% of the population that finds what PPFA officials say when they think they are exclusively among friends to be disgusting, that would be true.
Speaking of which, David Daleiden, who heads the Center for Medical Progress, is of course the guiding force behind the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood Big Shots that to this day put PPFA on the defensive. He was the speaker at the second General Session on the opening day.
He was preceded by Ben Shapiro who in his remarks debunking the most “popular” pro-abortion arguments began with Leyla Josephine.
Who, who might ask, is Leyla Josephine? She is a “spoken word and performance artist” best known to pro-lifers for a remarkable performance in cognitive dissonance known as the poem “I think She was a She.”
Her “slam poem” (as it is called) carries the logic of “I am not ashamed of my abortion” to its logical endpoint. Consider its predecessors.
NRL News Today has covered a plethora of stratagems, including killing your kid and uploading the video of his/her final minutes to the Internet. More than one reader wrote back that this is so obscene it can aptly be described as pornographic.
What else? Entire movies joking about offing your kid—“Obvious Child”—indeed turning the child’s death into a rite of passage in which the “obvious child” (the “too-young-to-be-a-mother” mother) becomes a more caring, adult-like figure by dispatching the bothersome product of conception to the great waste pile in the sky.
Not being ashamed of your abortion is at its root an evasion of adult responsibility. Thus, the child-like woman of” Obvious Child” cannot be held responsible for her behavior. (Not, as the director and lead actress of this “romantic comedy” would hasten to add, that there is anything to be “responsible” for in an abortion.)
There are many others but (thanks to Alanna Vagianos of the Huffington Post) we were alerted that the not being ashamed mantra may have reached reductio ad absurdum status.
If you wish to, you can listen and watch Josephine. Be forewarned there are a couple of obligatory cuss words.
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What can we say?
Her performance is not just the same tedious self-congratulatory, I-sure-am-proud anthem that we read or, in this case, hear—although it certainly is that. In “I think She was a She, “Josephine “recounts the abortion she had as a teenager and the cultural shame she’s been constantly confronted with ever since,” according to Vagianos.
Josephine rhythms about all the wonderful things her kid—whom she in convinced in the first verse is a girl only to take it back later—would have become. Everything Josephine was and much more, including being tougher. And, Josephine tells us, she would have been the kind of mother who “protect[ed] her from the dark.”
And “She could have been born.” Pause. “I would have made sure that there was space on the walls to measure her height as she grew.”
Problem is she came “at the wrong time.”
Just after she tells us the first of multiple times that “I am not ashamed,” Josephine makes one of the most remarkable pro-abortion statements in the long, self-exculpatory history of justifications for violence. Read carefully:
“But I would have supported her right to choose, to choose a life for herself, a path for herself; I would have died for that right like she died for mine.”
Pardon?
As a “spoken word and performance artist,” Josephine spins off metaphors that liken her post-abortive self to steel and the act of tearing her child apart to chopping down a cherry tree. How poetic. How wonderfully it distances herself from her own actions.
As so often is the case, this pro-abortionist is oblivious to the irony of what she says.
We are told over and over that it is her body (that is, Josephine’s body. Her baby’s body evidently didn’t really exist). Aborting a helpless baby relieves her of the burden of caring for a child and pulls double duty as a defiant political statement.
Ben Johnson asks
“What kind of parent asks his son or daughter to die for the “right” to abortion? Parents are supposed to be the one who sacrificially care for their children, who forsake their own comfort, who do whatever is necessary – even die – to keep their children safe, healthy, and well. Josephine’s blithe, ‘Sorry, but you came at the wrong time’ sounds as hollow as a gangland assassin’s apology to the family caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. Abortion severs the love that God, or Mother Nature, or evolution, or whatever you choose to believe in placed within every pregnant woman to link the mother to her child.”
As the poem unfurls, so, too, does the banner of Josephine’s considerable resentment and defiance.
“I am so sick of keeping these words contained; I am women now; I will not be tamed,” she tells us, her anger mounting. In the world she envisions, stories like hers will be everywhere, including “next to the flyer for yoga for babies.”
Josephine’s “I am woman, hear me roar” is even more lame today than it was 40 years ago. But then there is this
I have determination that this termination will still have a form of creation.
It will not be wasted.
this is my body. this is my body. this is my body.
I don’t care about your ignorant views
when I become a mother, it will be when i choose.
Death is Life, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, where is George Orwell when you need him?
Of course, Josephine was a mother, which she fully knows, just like she is ashamed, not matter how many times she says otherwise.
Why else bother to talk (had the baby been allowed to be born, that is) about how Josephine would have taught her all the things Josephine’s mother taught her, taken her to museums, told her stories about her grandfather, been a good mother?
The stories of how women are “not ashamed” of their abortions not only grow more and more ludicrous, they become sadder and sadder and sadder.
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.
