Pornography and Abortion

Recently I went to the mall -- for the first time in a while. I was absolutely appalled at the pornography plastered on the windows of Victoria's Secret. Every 11-year-old boy in our society is learning to treat women as objects. Every 11-year-old girl is learning that if she wants to be valued, she has to take off her clothes. Advertisements constantly reduce women to objects of gratification. The message to their audience is simple: this is what a woman is for.

With such a message so shamelessly proclaimed, are we surprised that sex has become completely divorced from the life-long commitment it requires (marriage) and openness to life? We are told that sex has nothing to do with marriage or bringing new life into this world -- unless you want it to. By removing these intrinsic meanings from sex, we reduce it to mere physical recreation. If it's only physical, why treat that person with dignity? If sex doesn't require a life-long commitment, or openness to life, it is just fertile ground for use and abuse. Are we surprised that divorce, rape, abortion, and contraception parallel the extensive pornography across our country and globe?

These selfish substitutions for true love reduce something beautiful to something cheap. Love becomes lust. Lust tells us that a person is to be used like a machine and can thus be disposed of afterward. And what if a new human is created by this sexual union? Well that one must be disposed of too. Abortion follows unbridled lust -- the lust that companies like Victoria's Secret tell us is normal, the lustful gratification they insist we deserve, the lust at the eye-level of a 6-year-old at every grocery store.

In this way, men are told women are sex objects. And this is one man that is very angry about it. Women are reduced to animals and men are reduced with them. We are told, as one "expert" said on the Today Show, "Men are hard wired to have lots of sex with multiple partners." Self-control! What's that? Fortitude? Temperance? "Do whatever feels good" is society's mantra: starting with lust and leading to abortion, leaving women, men, and children broken in its wake.

Is there an alternative to this lust-laden way of life where self-satisfaction only leads to destruction and misery? Yes!

A chaste woman who values modesty -- now there's something attractive. Anyone can take her clothes off, and reduce herself to an object. But a woman who respects her body, that's hot. A courageous man with fortitude who doesn't want to be sold sex -- there's the moral fiber that will bring an end to abortion.

That man and that woman are the kind who will seek to do the right thing, even when its difficult. Abortion and its precursor, lust, are about convenience. Child-rearing and its precursor, virtue, are about sacrifice. And that's true love.

"Have you read your sign?"

"Have you read your sign?"

It was an extraordinary sort of question, which perhaps excuses our slowness to respond. Finally someone replied: "I beg your pardon?"

The woman repeated her question and, when we assured her that we had certainly read our own sign (which begs readers not to believe the lies, and declares forthrightly that abortion kills babies), she continued: "Of course abortion kills babies. That's why people have abortions. Everyone knows that. Do you think people are stupid?"

The conversation did not become less bizarre as the minutes passed. When asked whether she was comfortable with the brutal dismemberment of babies, the woman discarded the term which she herself had used. They were no longer "babies" -- they were "fetuses". A few minutes later, they were "babies" again, and in a flash they were reduced to "parasites". She denounced unwanted infants in the womb as "inconvenient", then proudly noted that she had four children. She objected to our protesting of Planned Parenthood because of "all the good things they do" (which, from what she said, consists of providing contraceptives and having vaguely positive notions as to women). She almost angrily dismissed points made by Chris Gilbert saying: "You don't have uterus, so you can't have an opinion." She laughed when we likened accepting abortion to tacit acceptance of slavery, awkwardly waved off any references to the racist agenda inherent in abortion and particularly in the history of Planned Parenthood, and generally changed the subject every time she became uncomfortable (which was approximately every twenty seconds). She demanded to know if we had seen an abortion and when we all said that we had insisted that videos were not accurate; we could only understand abortion if we had had one or if we had stood beside someone as her baby was dismembered. Finally she shrugged us off, made a vague reference to war and to Iraq, and walked to her car, only to be confronted by two remarkably unfriendly Planned Parenthood employees who pointed out that she was trespassing on private property and must remove her car and herself immediately.

The entire conversation lasted five or ten minutes. It left us a bit stunned -- if not incredulous -- and rather thoughtful. There is so much ignorance, so much confusion, and so much pain. There are many who would not even have had the conflicted courage (or the longing) to stop and speak with us.

God bless her, whoever she is.

Have you read our sign today? Abortion kills babies.

Yes. It does.