Deadly Paradox: Children Killed In Iraq War Considered Collateral Damage By Pro-Lifers

This is not the post I had planned.  It changed because of the spider web of social media which so easily leads from one link to another and the other night I was in this information induced state of having to have one more link and I landed on a blog post written by a very strong pro-lifer (that’s probably being redundant). I’m pro-choice.

Minor Digression

I hate that the anti-choicers confiscated the term pro-life because first, I’m also in favor of life and second, it’s a powerful visceral expression which erroneously suggests they are in favor of keeping things alive despite the fact that many support the death penalty and going to war, including a pre-emptive one which even the Pope was against (although he’s lost credibility recently), where we know men, women (including pregnant ones), children and babies die. (They never adequately reconcile the contradiction of their positions.)

Back To The Point

The post that I landed on was written by a woman giving her position on abortion, well not so much giving her position as telling me mine. I was initially indignant that she so misrepresented what it means to me to be pro-choice. But I read on because I became awestruck that she presented a stereotype of pro-choicers as closed-minded, radical, not willing to engage in dialogue, one that I might have said about anti-choicers. (Good lesson) Her final sentence was to die for (pun intended) or to at least use in my next blog post, so I bookmarked the page. Unfortunately, I discovered today that I had not bookmarked the post after all. So I went on my personal Easter egg hunt to see if I could find that particular black & white hand-painted blog and found instead a blog telling me, essentially, that saying Easter and abortion in the same context would “guarantee my path to eternal damnation by God.”

Another Minor Digression

I thought as long as a person accepted Jesus Christ as his/her savior there was no damnation by a Christian God and the man writing the post that promised my eternal damnation was Christian. I googled my question and a ton of sites said I’m right. Always nice to hear.

Back To The Point Again

While hunting for the other post, I came across Jill Stanek’s 100 Days of Death, a post on Obama’s first 100 days in office. She opens with ” On Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama began his death march as the most anti-life president in U.S. history. Today marks Obama’s 100th day in office. This list substantiates Obama’s personnel and policies to that end.” She then listed the names of 18 appointees who apparently are leaving deaths in their wake because they have a pro-choice position (which, of course, is legal and does not compromise their qualifications and job skills). Eighteen appointees out of hundreds  of appointees. Does that mean the other hundreds of appointees represent 100 days of life? She didn’t say.  Apparently in her mind the only qualification for a government position is being anti-choice.

Readers/Commenters

Stanek lost more credibility when I read her reader’s comments. To be fair, there was a balance of answers (and she doesn’t control what they write) but some comments reminded me of this children’s rhyme:

There was a little girl, who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead and when she was good she was very very good and when she was bad she was horrid.

And some answers were horrid:

“Obama’s father and step-father were Muslim which is why he wants to kill American babies”  That comment doesn’t deserve a response and I wouldn’t know what to say to something as off-the-wall as that anyway.

“It’s true what Father Pavone says ‘America will not reject abortion until America sees [pictures of] abortion!’ “

OK. Are they also going to  show pictures of pregnant women, children and babies being killed in Iraq? Where is their outrage when it comes to the deaths of civilians and soldiers in a pre-emptive, no weapons-of-mass-destruction war? According to my rough calculations, based on data from The Brookings Institute, deaths caused by the Iraq war (not including “enemy” deaths) but counting all soldiers fighting on the same side as the USA, Iraqi police and soldiers and including an informed estimate of civilian deaths, if the bodies were stacked erect one on top of each other (using average height of 6′ which is a bit high but makes easy a rough calculation) it would be the equivalent of 491 Empire State Buildings

1 Empire State Building

stacked on top of each other.

Birth control option

In all my hunting, anti-choice sites frequently referred to a pro-choice position as pro-abortion. Not accurate. As with all pro-choice people I know, we believe that it would be better if people practiced birth control (although, obviously, people can practice birth control and pregnancy still happens.) But often times anti-choice people are also against birth control as evidenced by an anti-choice site I found spewing vitriol against the use of birth control. Part of its argument was to present “the real truth” about Margaret Sanger (birth control activist in first half of 1900′s) – the following paragraph is the only information they provided on Sanger:

I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

Great example of how taking something out of context distorts the whole picture.

Hypocrisy of the American Pro-life Movement

I also found Jack Hunter in my search. He’s the author of the story and link The Hypocrisy of the American Pro-life Movement. He tells the story of interviewing 3 abortion protesters. All 3  justified the U.S. involvement in Iraq in part by saying the country needed to keep the oil flowing so we would remain strong and could then help save even more lives around the world. (What irony) One said, “If innocent lives were lost in the process, that was an unfortunate necessity.”

Hunter continued his article by saying “The pro-lifers I met that day all agreed that when it comes to supporting the Iraq war, the ends justify the deadly means, and yet they dedicate their lives to convincing pregnant women that no matter how desperate their situation, deadly solutions are never acceptable. According to some pro-lifers, political objectives can be worth thousands of deaths, while individual objectives are never worth one. ‘It’s a Child Not a Choice’? How about ‘It’s a Kid Not Collateral Damage’?”

And at that point, although I agreed with Hunter, I just didn’t have it in me to search this issue any longer.