“Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.” –President Barack Obama
That was the closing line of the full statement that President Obama put out regarding the forty-first annivesary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that made void the laws against abortion. Indeed, the full statement reads:
[quote]
Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health.
We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom.
And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children. Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.
[/quote]
I cannot help but notice the words choices, protecting, freedom, support . . . child health, and safe and healthy communities for all our children. Admittedly, I am struggling, and have for years, with the profound ironies and intellectual dishonesty of these sorts of statements. The big hairy issue relates to the choices, protection, freedom, support, health, and safety of the little one in the mother’s womb. What am I missing here? What am I not understanding about the rhetoric that allows people, in this case our president, to use these descriptive and uplifting words in the very same messaging that, according to USA Today, “praises” a law that allows for the ending of the life of the unborn child? Where is that little boy or little girl’s freedom, protection, health, or choice?
The irony is evidently completely and totally lost on those who are celebrating this anniversary. Will this lost irony ever—ever—be found?
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Jane . . . . thanks for passing this along. What a powerful moment that must have been for her . . . perhaps life-changing!
I don’t know if we as a society will ever exchange the lie for the truth. I think it happens one by one. I still vividly recall one of my medical school classmates being moved/changed/affected by seeing a 14week old unborn baby who had died (been miscarried). I vividly recall her facial expression as she viewed the perfect little hands and feet and the tiny face and body…all just so much smaller than a born and term baby.