2/11/09

Stephanie Gray Responds - Pro-Life 'Branding'


Stephanie Gray responds to Barbara Kay's article criticizing the Genocide Awareness Project and suggesting that prolife 'branding' should focus on women rather than babies...

NP:
...In her Feb. 4. column, "Women deserve better than abortion," Barbara Kay offers flawed suggestions to the pro-life movement. She calls the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), which compares abortion to the Holocaust, the "worst" use of the movement's time and resources.

Since the pro-life movement's goals are to change minds and save lives, the documented cases of GAP accomplishing just that (see unmaskingchoice.caand abortionNO.org)make it one of the best activities for pro-lifers to get involved with. Ms. Kay says GAP "brands" pro-lifers as "people ... who do not think clearly." GAP volunteers are trained, intelligent, articulate people who defend the pro-life view scientifically and philosophically, and who engage in Socratic dialogue. Furthermore, its creators have studied historical genocides as well as researched and modelled successful social reform movements.

It's worth considering that Martin Luther King Jr.'s protests were also wrongly "branded" as not only "unwise and untimely" but "extreme." So much for branding being a concern -- today, streets are named after him.

As suffragette (and pro-lifer) Susan B. Anthony once said, "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates and bear the consequences."

Indeed, hostility is directed toward pro-lifers who say abortion is comparable to the Holocaust. If the unborn aren't human, the comparison is flawed. But if the unborn are human, it is accurate....

....Brooklyn, N. Y.-based Rabbi Yehuda Levin echoes this sentiment. He argues, "Each form of genocide, whether Holocaust, lynching, abortion, etc., differs from all the others in the motives and methods of its perpetrators. But each form of genocide is identical to all the others in that it involves the systematic slaughter, as state-sanctioned 'choice,' of innocent, defenceless victims -- while denying their 'personhood.'"....

....If abortion advocates object more when the subject is fetuses and less when it's women, that's a good indicator pro-lifers should stick to their message. Furthermore, abortion is not wrong because it hurts women. Abortion is wrong because it intentionally kills an innocent human being. That's why it hurts women psychologically and physically. Testimonies and personal appeal are powerful -- and important -- but they shouldn't replace the foundational message about what abortion does to the unborn....


Stephanie Gray is co-founder (with Jojo Ruba) of the Canadian Center for Bio-ethical Reform.


Why should the prolife movement be taking advise from Barbara Kay when she states..."I am not opposed in principle to legal abortion."
She 's hardly going to be helpful with 'strategy'!

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