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New York Times obituary downplays that Norma McCorvey was pro-Life

February 18, 2017 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Norma McCorveyIf you haven’t yet heard, Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” in Roe v. Wade, died today. She came to fame as a rape victim who, claimed abortion proponents, should have been allowed an abortion. After the Supreme Court decision, McCorvey became an abortion rights activist.

McCorvey also made her life story public and a terrible life it was, one of poverty, abuse (including being raped as a child), broken marriages, sexual confusion, drugs, and alcohol. Faith finally saved her and, with that faith, she came to realize that human life has value.

Norma McCorvey spent the last two decades of her life campaigning for the pro-Life movement. That is, with age, wisdom, peace, and chemical detox, she abandoned the belief system she’d developed during a twisted, impoverished, chemically-altered, depressed, deeply abused youth.

The above is a very short precis of a complicated and consequential life. I may be wrong, but I think the trajectory that took her to the place at which she ended is just as important as the point from which she started. The New York Times does not agree with me.

If you’re wondering why I turned to the Times obituary for Norma McCorvey, I did it both because the Times often does obituaries very well and because I was curious about how the Times would cover McCorvey’s inconvenient ideological conversion. Perhaps if Margalit Fox had written the obituary, it might have been different, because she’s a genuine talent. The assignment, however, ended in a lesser writer’s hands.

The obituary is 41 paragraphs long, so you can assume that most readers will give up about 10 to 20 paragraphs in. Keep that in mind as you read the following, which briefly summarizes each paragraph’s contents. Also, to give you a visual sense about the Times’ heroic effort to downplay the fact that Norma McCorvey eventually found emotional peace in the pro-Life movement, I’ll highlight in red all of the references to the last twenty years of her life’s work. I’ve also included my own commentaries in square brackets.

Para. 1 — Identifies who Norma McCorvey was — a central figure in the divisive abortion debate — and announces her death at 69.

Para. 2 — Cause and location of death.

Para. 3 — 50 million legal abortions performed since 1973, although “although later court decisions and new state and federal laws have imposed restrictions.” [Bookworm here: This sentence implies that the pro-Life movement has significantly moved the dial at a judicial and legislative level. The reality is that Roe v. Wade itself imposed significant restrictions on abortion relating to the development of the fetus: in the first trimester, the woman controls completely; in the second, there’s a balancing act; and in the third, the state has the greatest interest. Later decisions did away with that. No statute has successfully returned abortion to the original Roe v. Wade limitations.] In the same paragraph, the author states “abortions have declined with the wide use of contraceptives.

Para. 4 — McCovey an almost mythological figure who never wanted the spotlight. “[p]ulled by the forces of politics to one side of the abortion conflict, then by religion to the other.” [Bookworm here: This is the first mention of the last 20 years of her life and it is so opaque only the knowing reader would understand that McCorvey spent the last 20 years of her life as a principled pro-Life activist.]

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Abortion Tagged With: Abortion, Media Bias, New York Times, Norma McCorvey, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Life, Roe v. Wade

The politically correct way to be pro-Life

November 9, 2015 by Bookworm 3 Comments

The vast majority of my Facebook friends are Progressives, ranging from hard Left to really hard Left. Despite their political orientation, I’ve discovered that some of them are still pro-Life — pro-puppy and pro-kitten life, that is. Opposing animal shelters that kill strays is the only politically correct pro-Life stance the Left will countenance.

With just a little tweaking, though, one of the pro-Animal life posters really makes a very good anti-Abortion poster. What do you think?

The politically correct way to be pro-Life

Filed Under: Abortion Tagged With: Animal Shelters, Euthanizing Animals, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life

Found it on Facebook — What passes for insightful commentary on the Left (part 3, the abortion edition)

October 10, 2015 by Bookworm 16 Comments

Dunce capFinally, here’s the third and last part of a three-part series in which I attempt to deconstruct the lies, misstatements, and illogical conclusions of posters popular amongst the Progressives on my real-me Facebook feed. Part 1 has a longer introduction about my goals, and analyzes a painfully misleading and quite vicious post about Paul Ryan. Part 2 tackles stupid gun control posters

And now it’s time for part three, the abortion edition. As always, I put the poster up first and then add my commentary:

Demand to defund churches

Excuse me Ms. Leftie, but do you understand that the government does not fund churches?  Yes, it’s true that churches don’t pay taxes.  This comes about because the power to tax is the power to destroy,n or at least to discriminate against something.  The First Amendment prevents our government from doing that.

Do you also understand that churches don’t have a political say over your body? That is, unlike a theocracy (say, Iran), the church does not run the government. Instead, it’s the parishioners who, applying religious doctrine as they understand it, use their rights as citizens of a representative government to vote for representatives whose views align well with theirs? No?  I didn’t think you knew that.

Having exposed your ignorance about religion and government in America, perhaps you can explain to me why we fund Planned Parenthood in the first place?  If Planned Parenthood really is just about women’s health,why do we fight over it with every budget rather than paying the same money to other neighborhood clinics that provide only women’s health care without also providing abortions?

Could it be because the real nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on is that everyone knows that those federal funds aren’t really for generic women’s health care but, in fact, meant to subsidize abortions? Keep in mind, little lady, that money is fungible. (Fungible is a fancy word meaning that one dollar can readily be substituted for another.) The fact that Planned Parenthood ostensibly applies its federal funds to manual breast exams — since the clinics don’t offer mammograms — and other basic health care means that the money saved on those breast exam appointments can be applied to other services . . . such as abortions.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Abortion, Hollywood Tagged With: Abortion, Anti-Abortion, Jim Carrey, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Life

To the Left all human lives are equal but some lives are less equal than others

October 8, 2015 by Bookworm 5 Comments

Premature baby feetThe anti-Second Amendment Left was feeling very smug the other day (as my Facebook feed attested) because they think that The Daily Show’s new hack, Trevor Noah, hit one out of the park in attacking the sheer inhumanity of the crazed pro-Life gun holders on the Right:

The point is, if pro-lifers would just redirect their powers toward gun violence, the amount of lives they could save would reach superhero levels. They just need to have a superhero’s total dedication to life. Because right now they’re more like comic book collectors. Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package, and then it’s worth nothing.

There’s your logic for you:  All those people who claim to be pro-Life but support the Second Amendment are gross hypocrites; while the pro-Abortion crowd that wants to use government force to disarm the American public is all about “life”!

I have just a couple of numbers to share with you, both from 2011, because I found reports for that year that I could easily compare.  I doubt the numbers have changed significantly since then:

Number of abortions performed in 2011 in the United States:  1,100,000

Number of homicides using guns in 2011 in the United States:  8,583

The only way for the Leftists to think they win when comparing pro-Lifers who support gun rights to pro-Abortion types who want to ban guns is if the Leftists do not believe that a fetus is human.  Of course, every woman who’s carried a baby to term knows, if only in her heart of hearts, that this is a lie.

To hold that those fetuses are not human, so that their deaths cannot be counted when compared to crime victims’ deaths, is possible only when a belief system has turned into a death cult.  The Nazis did this when they convinced themselves that Jewish lives weren’t human lives; and the Left has done it when it comes to fetal lives.

The problem, always, is that once a culture starts deciding which groups among it, no matter how human they appear, aren’t really, truly human, then that culture inevitably slides into mass genocide.  This is especially so when resources become scarce, whether through natural causes (droughts, floods, volcanoes), or through unnatural science that declares, all evidence to the contrary, that humans are so destructive to Gaia that they must begin to erase their presence from Planet Earth.

First they came for the fetuses, and I said nothing because I was no longer a fetus….

Filed Under: Abortion, Second Amendment Tagged With: Pro-Abortion, Pro-Life, Second Amendment, The Daily Show, Trevor Noah

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