Hooray for Obama!
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006This week’s Time Magazine features an excerpt from Barack Obama’s memoir, The Audacity of Hope, in which he discusses his faith, and describes an encounter he once had with a pro-lifer:
“You folks want to come inside?” I asked.
“No, thank you,” the man said. He handed me a pamphlet. “Mr. Obama, I want you to know that I agree with a lot of what you have to say.”
“I appreciate that.”
“And I know you’re a Christian, with a family of your own.”
“That’s true.”
“So how can you support murdering babies?”
I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any pregnant woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and wrestled with her conscience when making that decision; that I feared a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe abortions, as they had once done in this country. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.
THANK YOU!! You have no idea how sick and tired I am of pro-lifers who keep trying to spread the idea that any and all women who have abortions are bloodthirsty sociopaths who would have their fetus “poisoned and chopped up” and never give the matter a second thought.
The fact of the matter is, terminating a pregnancy is always a difficult and heartbreaking decision to have to make. I hope I never have to make it, and when I have children I intend to do everything in my power to ensure that they never get into that situation either. My concern is that, if the right wing gets its way, I won’t be able to get emergency contraception (or maybe even any contraception at all) if I need it, or, god forbid, I or someone I love may need an abortion for medical reasons and not be able to get one because the government has decided that a fetus (even a dead or dying one) is more important than its mother.
I wish I could have some confidence that the government wouldn’t do anything that could end up killing me, but it seems that George W. Bush doesn’t really care about human life as much as he says he does.
