Does sympathy for abortive women weaken the pro-life cause?

It’s a subject rife with debate in the pro-life community: how do we approach abortion-minded and post-abortive women? For some, the belief is that we should welcome these women, treat them with compassion, and help them to find healing.

Others, however, believe that women who have abortions are murderers who are evil, beyond redemption, and undeserving of our love and compassion. One such person espousing that attitude is a blogger for Doug Giles’ website, Clash Daily, who argues that women who have abortions are heartless, and sympathizing with them weakens the pro-life cause.

Owing to sympathy for the woman who so heartlessly chooses to murder her child who treats it as a parasite fit only for the incinerator, the pro-life movement has failed to stand against what abortion truly is – child murder. As a result, it has failed to attack the pervasive abortion ideology that abortion is wrong only because it harms the woman, despite recognising that abortion is killing of a person.

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Abortion is not merely a physical act; it is an ideology of its own that is the twin sister of the “god” of sexual liberalism. The act of abortion itself is despicable, and the cries of sympathy for women who seek abortions are naive and misguided. People call a person who molests a molester, a person who rapes a rapist, a people who steals a thief, a person who tortures a torturer. However, people do not call a woman who aborts her unborn baby a murderer. Why does society, including the pro-life community, not call women who have abortions murderers? Fear. This fear is one that cares for one’s own reputation, while at the same time trying to fight abortion and wondering why women still love to seek abortions.

One may argue that the sympathy for women who seek abortions is needed for one is to reach out to these women. How misguided! The one who seeks an abortion feels that she is entitled to sympathy from others, because she is evil, wicked and perverse. She is the harlot who seduces men to serve her own sexual interests. These women plan their abortion. It could not be any clearer that abortion is a pre-mediated murder. Anyone who denies this is either deluded or depraved of all integrity.

… It is the very sympathy that people show to women who abort their babies that not only weakens the pro-life stance, thus defeating its real purposing, but ridicules and blinds the people of the pro-life movement. Such blindness has taken away discernment of the true Church: the only one that is able to discern spiritual and moral issues.

The ideology of abortion is a beast that has successfully blinded the church into fighting abortion to protect the murderers of children, like the siren who lulls the unknowing man who sympathises with her apparent loneliness, into the depths of Hell. By supporting such women, one is supporting the devil from whom murder comes.

If this is how the pro-life movement has to move forward in order to succeed, then we might as well just pack it up and go home, and let the abortion industry declare victory. Such open contempt towards women who have had an abortion, or are considering having one, does nothing but severely hurt our cause.

If absolutely for no other reason, we should avoid such hateful language towards women who have had abortions because it plays right into pro-abortion rhetoric. Abortion activists constantly accuse pro-lifers of caring only for the baby, and not at all for the woman, that we want to save the baby during pregnancy and then abandon both mother and baby as soon as the baby is born. In what world would it ever be a good tactic to be the very people abortion activists accuse of us being?

According to the CDC, most women who have abortions are in their early twenties. They are almost all unmarried. She is not likely to be a cheerleader for abortion, enthusiastically signing up to murder her unborn child because she is a heartless witch. She is someone who almost surely feels that she has no choice, that it’s either her life or her baby’s. She goes to an abortion clinic, probably Planned Parenthood, where she’s given false information and manipulated into have the abortion.

If she isn’t being outright coerced by her partner or her family, then there’s a very good chance she’s under an extraordinary amount of pressure to have the abortion done. And the abortion clinic isn’t going to tell her about all of the organizations that exist that will gladly help her with keeping her baby, or that will facilitate an adoption, even an adoption that will allow her to still be in her baby’s life.

As pro-lifers, we should be there to welcome her. But if we’re snarling at her that she’s a murderer, or a potential murderer, then why on earth would she trust us to help her? To find healing? Many women who have abortions suffer from guilt and regret. They’re more likely to be depressed and suicidal after an abortion. The last thing they need is to come to so-called pro-lifers seeking help, only to find judgment and shame.

Far from weakening the pro-life cause, compassion and sympathy for post-abortive women strengthens us all. This kind of thinking is something that should never be associated with the pro-life movement. We become caricatures of evil, hateful lunatics who embody every negative stereotype that abortion activists paint of us.

No matter what reasons a woman has for having an abortion, she still deserves our mercy and our love. We will never be able to change anyone’s hearts and minds if our own hearts and minds are filled with hate. All that will do is drive the women we claim to want to help right back into the poisonous arms of the abortion industry.

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