Pro-Woman, Pro-life

For part of the lives of my grandmother, Mildred, and my great-grandmother, Pearl, in our great and glorious country of America women did not have equal rights with men. A time existed in America when women could not inherit family property, pursue schooling, get a divorce or vote. They were generally paid far less than men to do the same job and were severely restricted in the types of jobs and businesses they could have. Proper female professions were typically limited to teacher, nurse, farm help, factory worker, mill girl or maid.

Yet in spite of all these impediments, inequalities and injustices, contrary to some of today's feminists, the women's movement started out pro-woman, pro-life. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, passionately-in-love wife married 47 years, mother of seven, women's-rights activist and abolitionist, was both pro-woman and pro-life. In a 1873 letter to Julia Ward Howe, the originator of Mother's Day, Stanton writes, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."

Six of Stanton's children were planned; the seventh was not. She supported birth control, but not abortion linking abortion to infanticide. The seventh child was born to Henry Brewster Stanton and Elizabeth Cady Stanton later in life when Elizabeth was 44. She could have gotten rid of the "mistake," but instead of abortion, she chose life for their child.

Abortion and infanticide have an historical and present-day link. Jill Stanek was a registered nurse in the Labor & Delivery Department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. She discovered not only were abortions being committed there, but babies were being aborted alive to die without medical care.

When hospital leaders said that they would not stop, Stanek went public, eventually got fired for her outspokenness and has become a national figure in the effort to protect both born and pre-born infants. Her written testimony was included in U.S. Congressional debates on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act which became law on August 5, 2002. The Born Alive Infants Protection Act protects live aborted children from infanticide.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton authored the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments which sought equality for women. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments reads in part, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . . The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyrant over her . . . In view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half of the people of this country . . . because women do feel themselves aggrieved, . . . we insist that they have immediate admission to all rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

Stanton joined with Susan B. Anthony to author the three-volume History of Woman Suffrage. Together these friends of 50 years were not just motivators they were movers. They fought for women's rights with many other women like Sojourner Truth. Although it was illegal for women to vote in America in the 1800s, Anthony cast her vote for president on November 5, 1872. She got arrested for it on November 18, 1872. Anthony says, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." The Bible agrees. Acts 5:29 New Living Translation Bible says, "But Peter and the apostles replied, “We must obey God rather than any human authority." God does not favor men over women. Galatians 3:28 Amplified Bible says, "There is [now no distinction] neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

God also says through Solomon in Proverbs 22:6 English Standard Bible, "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." While Anthony did not marry or have children, Stanton married and had seven children, but both died before women had the right to vote in America. Harriot Stanton Blatch, Stanton's daughter, and Nora Blatch, Stanton's granddaughter, continued to fight for women's right to vote. Despite beatings, imprisonments and other persecutions, women obtained the right to vote in America through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Thoughts About Abortion

It boggles the mind that some in the women's movement and pro-choice movement are against abortion clinics being required to meet hospital standards. Most abortions are surgeries. Don't we women deserve sound and safe healthcare?

Of course abortion isn't healthcare. It's the killing of a human being. With neonatal technology and other science it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that from the time egg and sperm unite and beyond human life exists. Also babies who have survived abortion are now testifying as adults about appreciation of God's gift of life. Forty-seven years ago the mother of Gospel singer Fred Hammond went to an abortion clinic and had a dilatation and curettage abortion. D&C abortion entails having the cervix dilated or stretched to permit the insertion of a loop shaped steel knife. The body of the baby is cut into pieces and removed and the placenta is scraped off the uterine wall. Hammond's mom left the abortion clinic being informed that she would have a miscarriage at home and should return to the clinic with the contents in a bag. While she had bleeding, she didn't have a miscarriage. So she went back to the abortion clinic. As she was in the clinic preparing to have the abortion, God moved on her spirit, and she left. Her son, Fred Hammond, told The Donnie McClurkin Show, "Here's why I don't have time to play church. At the end of the day when I was supposed to be discarded, and the tools came in to kill me, and the tools came in to crush my head . . . The Lord took His hand, pushed in there, and pushed me back out of the way, and they thought they got me. But at the end of the day God had a plan for a broken situation . . . God hid me."

The tools of abortionist Abu Hayat sliced off the arm of baby Ana Rosa Rodriquez, but Ana and her mom, Rosa, who was in her third-trimester of pregnancy, managed to survive the abortion. Hayat, whose medical license was revoked in 1991, also refused to complete an abortion on Marie Moise when Moise was unable to come up with more money for the abortion.

Sadly, more than one million babies are not hidden and loose their lives to abortion annually in the United States. Fewer than one percent of these abortions are done following rape, incest or to protect the physical health of the mother.

Abortion is dangerous and harmful to both mother and child. Tonya Reaves, a 24-year-old African-American woman, died July 20, 2012, on the operating table of a Chicago, Illinois, Planned Parenthood as a result of an abortion-induced hemorrhage reported a local CBS television station.

African-American women have three and a half times more abortions than white women. Not heart disease, not cancer, not diabetes, but abortion is the number one killer of black Americans.What are the abortion statistics for Latino Americans and Asian Americans?

Having a child is a chance for immortality since we humans reproduce generation after generation. Yet abortion is common. One in three American women of all races will have an abortion by the age of 45.

Many women are asking abortionists to kill their babies for temporary reasons. Many women say they are having abortions because they currently cannot afford children, and/or they currently have a male partner who does not support bringing their child to birth.

Prenatal ultrasound allows us to see the fetus inside the womb, and see they are human and shaped like humans with arms, legs, heads, etc at eight weeks (2 months) of life. 90 percent of abortions occur in the first three months of pregnancy.

Science has forced some pro-choice people to now admit that abortion ends human life. Frances Kissling, a long-time pro-choice advocate and former president of Catholics for Choice, told Time Magazine in the January 14, 2013, article "What Choice? Abortion-rights activists won an epic victory in Roe v. Wade. They've been losing ever since," "When people hear us say abortion is just another medical procedure, they react with shock . . . Abortion is not like having your tooth pulled or having your appendix out. It involves the termination of an early form of human life. That deserves some gravitas."

Thank you Kissling for your honesty. It's about time the women's movement and the pro-choice movement clearly articulated that abortion ends human life and should not be confused with true contraception which prevents human life from starting.

God is the author of life. David says about God in Psalm 139:13 Amplified Bible, "For You did form my inward parts; You did knit me together in my mother’s womb."

American culture having exposure to the Bible and science shouldn't be clinging to the pro-choice position. This resistance to the truth is reminiscent of 1 Timothy 4:1 Amplified Bible which says, "But the [Holy] Spirit distinctly and expressly declares that in latter times some will turn away from the faith, giving attention to deluding and seducing spirits and doctrines that demons teach."

One of the things demons teach is deception. The deception of abortion is global. While it is illegal to have a sex-selection abortion in India, it is also easy to obtain one and a widespread practice of the poor class, middle class and upper class. Today the number of girls to boys is at the most lopsided it's ever been in 50 years with only 914 girls being born for every 1,000 boys being born, and sex-selection abortion plays a huge part in these figures. Naomi Zacharias, director of Wellspring International, says in the Wellspring International blog entry titled, "What Is Beautiful?" on 4/17/2012, "A tragic issue that has significantly impacted several countries in East Asia and is growing in North America, sex-selective abortion is chosen by parents with a preference for a son, who choose to abort their baby when a sonogram reveals the mother to be carrying a daughter. India alone is said to have 20-30 million “missing women,” and predictions estimate that by the year 2020, China will have 40 million unmarried men, a number equal to the entire population of young men in America. As direct result, crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, and even female suicide rates are all rising."

Abortions are forced on women in China. Since 1979, Chinese couples have been limited to one child by law in order to control the country's population. In October 2011, Feng Jianmei, a 22-year-old woman from the small village of Yuping in Zeng Jia Township, Shaanxi province, became pregnant with her second child. On June 2, 2012, while Feng was seven months pregnant with her second child, she was forced to have an abortion. On June 11, Feng's family posted graphic pictures of her aborted child on the Internet. The images soon became a viral phenomenon, sparking controversy within China and drawing international attention to the issue of forced abortions. 

Jazz, R&B and Gospel singer Lizz Wright sings "(I've Got to Use My) Imagination," a remake of a Gladys Knight and the Pips' song, on her Fellowship album. It's a song about being creative in overcoming challenging situations. Why aren't the pro-choice movement and the women's movement expanding beyond birth control and abortion to teach women to use their imagination to find solutions to unintended pregnancies that respect and celebrate both the life of the mother and her child?

Please leave an on-line comment sharing your abortion-survival story and/or ways you avoided abortion. Even in the hard cases abortion can be avoided. Rapists can be male or female. Ryan Bomberger, was conceived as one of the consequences of rape. Today he writes and speaks extensively for the pro-life position and along with his wife, Bethany Bomberger, founded and heads the Radiance Foundation which is an educational organization that uses various forms of media, speaking engagements, multi-media presentations and community outreach efforts to illuminate the intrinsic value each person possesses and to educate audiences about pressing societal issues and how they impact the understanding of God-given Purpose. Evangelist and author Joyce Meyer suffered incest through her childhood and adolescence. She bolted from her parents house at 18 years of age believing that would free her from the incest, but found that God had to take her through more than 15 years of spiritual and mental healing that she periodically shares about with her broadcast audience of more than 4.5 billion people reaching two-thirds of the world. Jayne Jones could have had a life-of-the-mother abortion since, her son, Billy, was growing outside her uterus threatening both his and her lives, but she choose to continue her pregnancy. At this time science is not usually sophisticated enough to preserve both the life of the mother and child when an ectopic pregnancy occurs. Most ectopic pregnancies occur when new human life grows in mom's too-small fallopian tubes instead of her uterus/womb creating a life-threatening situation for mom and child. Two percent of ectopic pregnancies occur outside the fallopian tubes. The U.S. National Institutes of Health estimate an ectopic pregnancy can occur in 1 in every 40 to 1 in every 100 pregnancies. Usually, the child is miscarried naturally. However, cases like Jayne and Billy's exist. Jayne and Billy's story has a happy outcome. Billy was born through a special surgery called a laparotomy on April 19, 2008, weighing 2lb 2oz and breathing on his own at 28 weeks gestation. Perhaps we are at the point where there is no such thing as life-of-the-mother abortions, i.e., artificially-induced surgical or chemical abortions to protect the physical health of the mother. In most ectopic pregnancies when the baby dies, a naturally-occurring miscarriage has taken place. Sometimes fertility treatments result in more human lives than a couple desires. Gladys Flores and Jose Abel del Cid went through fertility treatment expecting one or two children. Instead five were conceived. Some people will abort some of the multiple babies. But this couple did not even though the Salvadoran quintuplets were given little chance of survival when they were born prematurely on January 19, 1995, at San Salvador’s Maternity Hospital after a 32-week pregnancy. Today Thelma Estefanie, Irvin Norberto, Cristian Israel, Edwin Oswaldo and Milton Oliver del Cid Flores are healthy 18-year-olds contemplating futures in college.