#278: Diversity, Poverty, Women
Pro-Life Diversity, Breaking Stereotypes
The University of Texas Students for Life on September 2 hosted an event featuring representatives from Consistent Life, Pro-Life Pagans, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, and Feminists for Nonviolent Choices.
CL Board member Thad Crouch represented us on the panel and reports: “They really wanted to show the a diversity of perspectives and in the Pro-Life movement and actually specifically chose panelists who would speak from other-than Christian backgrounds, so while I'm Catholic, I spoke from a secular perspective. It seemed to me that most everyone left with a sense that we were part of a large Pro-Life movement that we had discovered was much larger than we had known before we walked into door.
"I was previously told that I was there to primary talk about abortion and perhaps euthanasia and should restrict the CLE to my own introduction. I held to that agreement until the other panelists were talking about CLE, and then once that started, I spoke about it also. Even though we primarily discussed abortion, great CLE points were raised by all of us.”
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Planned Parenthood and the Poor
Here’s another video documenting Planned Parenthood staff making money from baby body parts, knowing that fetuses do in fact have body parts (thus emphasizing their humanity), and knowing that this would be a public relations nightmare if covered by newspapers.
“Respect for women” is not the first thought that pops to mind when watching these videos.
While the debate rages on about taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood, we ask these questions:
Why are women living in poverty not given better options than going to facilities like this?
Why is the money which could be going to the more wide-spread and more respectful community health centers being diverted instead to Planned Parenthood?
Community health centers don’t limit the options of poor women who don’t want a doctor who commits feticide, or who don’t want people inclined to try to talk them into the idea that they’re better off with their children dead, and maybe sold for parts in addition. Women in poverty deserve better choices than that.
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Latest CL Blog
CL member group Sojourners granted us permission to publish an excerpt from Karen Swallow Prior's article in their September issue, “Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons.”
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Quotation of the Week
Declaration for the Dignity and Human Rights of Women
(to be held October 15-19 in Salt Lake City)
The struggle for the dignity and equal rights of women is the global human and civil rights struggle of our time. War and violence, economic disparity and impoverishment, environmental damage and its devastating consequences fall disproportionately upon women and girls who also suffer the most prevalent injustices in our world today. Violence, child marriage, slavery and forced prostitution, rape and sexual assault, domestic brutality and abuse, “honor killings” and immolation, bodily and genital mutilation, gendercide of girls and selective abortion of female fetuses, and legitimized murder of women are pandemic. . . .
The principle of treating others the same way one wishes to be treated is stated, in one form or another, throughout the religions of the world. We are all interconnected and interdependent and when half the human race suffers, we all suffer. We must all be treated with justice, respect, kindness, and love.