Category: Prolife Issues

Abortion

“I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone through an extensive training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn’t get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the money.”
~Nina Whitten, chief secretary at a Dallas abortion clinic under Dr. Curtis Boyd


Abortion is any act or procedure performed with the willful intent to cause the death of an unborn child from conception to birth. As such, abortion is a grave act of injustice toward the child and a clear violation of the child’s natural, unalienable right to life and his/her legal right not to be deprived of life without due cause. Right to Life of Michigan, therefore, is unalterably opposed to abortion.

This position does not oppose medical treatment to save the life of the mother. Treatments which may, in rare circumstances, result in the unintended death of her child. The unintended death of the child is not to be construed as abortion. When the life of the mother is judged by competent medical personnel to be in danger, a doctor can and should treat both the mother and her unborn child, striving to save the lives of both. Because of medical advances, it is rare that the child’s life cannot also be saved. Before the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decisions legalizing all abortions, the Michigan statutes governing abortion provided an exception for the life of the mother. Right to Life of Michigan accepts the intent of those statutes.

Right to Life of Michigan is opposed to aborting unborn human individuals conceived through acts of rape and incest. Right to Life of Michigan abhors the violence and violation of rape and incest. Our organization encourages public and private support for the victims of sexual assault as well as prosecution of the perpetrators of the crime. No matter how a child is conceived, abortion remains an act of injustice toward that child, a human being truly present and living within the womb. The injustice done to the woman cannot be undone and is compounded by an injustice toward her innocent child who is conceived from the assault. The advocates of abortion in cases of sexual assault imply that pregnancies resulting from such acts are common. In fact, conception from rape is known to be very rare.

Right to Life of Michigan’s primary opposition to abortion is grounded in reasoned reflection on the scientific facts about the being who is present in the womb or the petri dish: that being is, from the moment of conception, an indisputably living, human individual. There is no point during the continuum of fetal development, from conception to birth, where one could, without arbitrariness, identify a break in that continuum, a point before which that living human individual could be said to be nonliving, nonhuman, not an individual being. We further observe that any criterion that could be applied to question or deny the full humanity of the unborn child could also be applied, with equal arbitrariness, to many other living human individuals who all people understand to be fully human; i.e., the comatose, the physically disabled, the mentally impaired, the infant.

What advocates of abortion seem unable to grasp or unwilling to concede are the obvious: that the unborn, particularly in the early states of development, look like what living human individuals look like at that point in their lives.

Right to Life of Michigan rejects as specious and arbitrary the assertion that, while the unborn child may be a living human individual, it is not a person and, therefore, need not be accorded legal rights, such as the right not to be killed without due process. Before it is a legal right, the right not to be killed without justification is a natural, unalienable human right possessed by all living human individuals. To say that it is unalienable means that it is not a right that is granted or bestowed by society or by the state. It is a right possessed by nature, by what a human being is. The right to life became a legal right because it was recognized to be a basic natural right that the state was obligated to protect. That right to life may be acknowledged by the state. It may be ignored by the state. But it is not dependent for its existence on the state.

For that reason, Right to Life of Michigan rejects the assertion that the unborn child may be aborted because it is unwanted. Being wanted tells us about the attitude of the outsider toward the unborn child; it does not tell us anything about the nature of the child. The natural right to life of any living human individual is not dependent upon and, therefore, cannot be negated by the desires or attitudes of others. No living human individual can be someone else’s property or an object of property rights or claims of disposition, as the “unwantedness” argument implies. Moreover, we know from the long lists of people waiting to adopt that, in fact, there is no unborn child who is not wanted by someone.

(April 10, 1996)

Adoption

“Adoption is when a child grew in its mommy’s heart instead of her tummy.”
~Author Unknown


In the interest of protecting human life and offering women in crisis pregnancy situations viable alternatives to abortion, Right to Life of Michigan fully supports the option of adoption. In supporting this, we realize that adoption will not be the choice of every woman facing a crisis pregnancy, but it is a choice that should be available in her decision making.

While there is a surplus of families waiting several years to adopt a child into their home, there are women today being convinced that abortion or child rearing are their only choices. It is important that women in this crisis situation be presented with the life giving choice of adoption and to be informed of the resources available to them.

In every adoption situation there are three primary parties involved: the child, birth parents and adoptive parents. We recognize and wish to emphasize that the needs and special interests of each of these parties should be given utmost consideration. We also wish to reaffirm and support the secondary parties to adoption: adoption agencies, government institutions, abortion alternative centers, and other supportive organizations.

Our efforts to promote adoption will be directed in three major areas: education, procedural and legal improvements, and enhancing maternal and adoption support services.

Education

Protection of adoption as a positive alternative through the mass media, social institutions, and grassroots organizations.

Improvements

Enhance the efficiency of the adoption process by:

  1. researching and identifying the best adoption methods,
  2. developing uniformity in procedural requirements,
  3. placing more emphasis on special-needs adoptions,
  4. increasing coordination of adoption efforts.

Support Services

Draw attention to the additional resources, both human and financial, needed by organizations which provide pregnancy counseling, material support, residential placement, and alternative educational opportunities.

(February 13, 1991)

Child Abuse

“There is no such thing as an unwanted child, just unwanting parents.”
~Casey v. Planned Parenthood


Through the ages, the history of adult treatment of children is far from inspiring. In order to trim the Jewish population, Pharaoh ordered that Moses, along with his Hebrew brothers, be killed at birth. Herod sought the life of the newborn Christ Child and killed uncounted boy babies in his quest. The nineteenth century Industrial Revolution saw masses of young children bound over to factories for labor by their parents who needed the wages to survive.

The late twentieth century maltreatment of children is a different phenomenon. We are told by Philip New, M.D., (Head, Dept. of Psychiatry, Royal Jubilee Hospital of British Colombia, 1980) that “the most common cause of death in American children between six and twelve months of age is being killed by their own parents.” This ugly picture is unrelated to the motivations described above. Child labor laws have removed the young from factories; monarchies, along with Pharaoh and Herod, have almost disappeared. Another syndrome is emerging. It encompasses physical abuse, steady and extreme neglect, emotional abuse in which the child is consistently made to feel unworthy, and sexual abuse, and is increasingly referred to as “family violence.”

The experts differ on its causes; some see battering parents as economically deprived, while others insist that educated, upper-middle class parents are the offenders. In her book, Sins of the Father (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) Ruth Ingalis says, however, that child abuse is not traced to a single origin but rather is a complex problem related to mental and emotional ills.

In recent years it has been argued, especially by Planned Parenthood, that unwanted children were the abused ones. “Every child a wanted child,” their slogan reads. Yet, Edward Lenoski, M.D. of the University of California, in his article, “Plight of the Children” reports that in his studies which have extended over many years, 91% of abused children were very much wanted. Lenoski’s findings are reinforced by social service experts in Michigan who also agree that child abusers are found in every stratum of society, regardless of economics or education. The interesting fact is that no matter how experts differ on the subject, there is general agreement that loneliness and isolation from family, friends, and society are the common denominators for child abusers.

It is heartening to see intelligent efforts made in our own state by local councils on child abuse which encourage “Parents Anonymous” to heal themselves through group therapy, which also offer Parent Education Classes, and in a pilot project in Lansing, have established a Family Growth Center offering free drop-in child care and limited crisis prevention. We are also encouraged by the recent passage in Michigan of Children’s Trust Fund Legislation which establishes a Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to be funded by a check-off on state income tax forms.

Yet, we sadly fear that the dark specter of cruelty to children will haunt our nation until a true reverence for life is rooted in every community – large and small. Before this can happen, we must rise as one person to refute the spurious logic of “Every child a wanted child” and lay to rest forever the sick notion that human life has value only when it is wanted and useful.

Right to Life finds it highly relevant that child abuse has risen dramatically since permissive abortion became legal and it has done so not only in America but in Canada and England as well. We continue to insist that abortion is the ultimate child abuse that debases all life, and especially the lives of children in the eyes of society. We suggest a worthy goal would be “Every child a protected child,” and we rededicate ourselves to that purpose.