Dominik’s Blog

These are my notes from Ashley Horne’s speech at the ACL Conference. Parts are paraphrased or directly quoted from her words.

Every 24 seconds, an abortion happens.

There have been 1.3 million abortions in the United States; 50% of those are repeat abortions and 18% are third-time abortion. Planned Parenthood will undertake 180 abortions for every single adoption referral. One out of three women will have an abortion by the time they are 45.

Most of her talk concentrated on the efforts of the SBA List, both in identifying pro-life candidates and funding female pro-life candidates. Ms. Horne also covered current legislative issues in the 109^th Congress.

These are my notes from Frederica Matthewes-Green’s speech at the ACL Conference. Parts are paraphrased or directly quoted from her words.

Back in the early 1970s, I wasn’t a pro-life feminist, I was a women’s liberation abortion rights advocate. I believed that that pregnancy was imprisonment; women cannot compete on equal footing with men unless they can become unpregnant at will.

You might be wondering how I came around to become pro-life. It started when I came home from college and read an article by Dr. Richard Selzer in Esquire magazine about “What Happens in Abortion.” Dr. Richard Selzer was pro-abortion but had never seen or performed an abortion and thus attended one to see what happened. He watched as the abortionist injected a needle into the pregnant woman’s belly, watched the needle oscillate back and forth, jerking wildly, and then slowly go still. When I finished reading the article, I realized that abortion was violence. Back then I was a full-fledged hippie, anti-war, pro-environment, anti-violence. Reading that essay demonstrated a contradiction within my beliefs. Abortion is violence.

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The following are my notes from Dr. Nigel Cameron’s speech; parts are paraphrased or direct quotes from his words.

Here at the ACL Conference, abortion is the issue which brings us together; yet there are other issues that also fall under the domain of pro-life. For example, euthanasia takes out abortion out of the womb and threatens every human life. Beyond euthanasia, which can be seen as the cognate of abortion, there are other threats such as embryonic stem-cell research.

We most develop strategies to win the war; battles are in some sense irrelevant except in as much they affect the outcome of the war. The opposition is in many-cases better funded and is also intelligent and strategic. We too must be intelligent and strategic and focus on winning the war.

Abortion, euthanasia, etc. are ancient questions; we merely face their modern interpretations. They are ancient questions, based on how we should regard the choice to end live. And now we are also considering questions of not just taking life, but also of making life: designer babies, human cloning, etc. There may be no taking life involved in “designing better babies:” a veritable revival of eugenics, in short. Hitler finally discredited eugenics, but the idea has returned: that people’s value is based on their genetic material.

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