A Pro-Lifer walks into a room of pro-choice high schoolers...

That’s the underlying tone of this diary.  On Tuesday of this week, a woman from the New York City Pro-Life committee came to talk at a school event known as the gender studies round table. My school is exceedingly liberal and even more pro-choice. You can see the dilemma. The idea was to bring in new voices to the debate, which I strongly favor and I don’t think I get enough of at my school but that’s another diary all together. On with the story and the underlying implications.

I should disclose that I’m not reflexively pro-choice. My initial moral reaction to Abortion is very mixed, but I understand that it is not my choice and will never be my choice, and therefore I believe that a woman should be allowed to have an abortion.

A Normal Gender Studies round table will have 20-30 students show up, mostly for the free pizza. This time some 70 students came, which is remarkable, considering the capacity for the room was around 40. I walk in about two or three minutes into this woman’s presentation. This woman begins to explain her position, that her morals find that conception is the beginning of life, because there is a unique person growing and there will never be that again. With abortion she says, you are destroying something before you even know what.

She says basically the same thing with different variations for another five or so minutes before she opens the floor to questions. This is where things get interesting. Some context, during an assembly last year, the school booed off the anti-immigration side (represented by the repressed conservatives at the school) during a debate on illegal immigration, so we aren’t exactly receptive to opposing arguments. Things during the Q&A are surprisingly civil.

A peer of mine asks a fairly basic question relating to a claim that the woman made that many laws that they passed for protecting the woman’s health were blocked. My friend asked specifically what legislation was blocked or overturned. I believe she pulled out an example from Ohio saying that the elevator in a two floor abortion clinic has to be large enough to accommodate a stretcher should things go wrong.

A couple of google searches on the subject yield nothing useful or topical so I’m not sure what to make of this. It seems like a fairly obscure reference to claim that you’re trying to protect the woman’s health.

She answers a couple questions on the development of a child and how this has affected her and her morals. Then she gets to me

"Uh hello, I have a question on your organization’s stance on contraceptives. My belief is that if I were even to begin to consider more restrictions on abortion, we would need much better sex education in schools. If contraceptives like condoms or the pill aren’t given to the kids, or at least explained I don’t know how one can continue to oppose abortion."

Her response stated that her organization doesn’t take a stance on the use of contraceptives.

"So you advocate abstinence only programs?"

She says no but she works with people in the abstinence only movement.

"But abstinence only doesn’t work, period"

She said there was a study from Queens College saying otherwise. Please Show it to me I’ve been looking for two days and haven’t found any study. However this congressional study says otherwise.

"OK so you have no position on contraceptives, and no position on sex education"

She says that’s correct

"What about the morning-after pill"

She is opposed to that, because it can act as an abortion, and she thinks that the large amount of hormones aren’t safe for a woman. (Side note Plan B is FDA approved, there’s your seal of approval right there)

"That’s my issue with many in the pro-life movement, your objective is to reduce abortions, but you don’t advocate a means to reduce them. Outlawing abortions won’t stop abortions, they will make them even less safe since you believe that abortion is unsafe. Those are my two main issues with this particular line of reasoning."

She goes on for another 15 minutes answering more questions. For every other question that she gets asked her answer is a variation of "Abortion is immoral nothing else matters." I didn’t really care at that point because I got my point in and voiced my concerns with the anti-abortion forces. I think I learned some very important things from this little exercise.

First I learned that the abortion debate is an inherently academic dishonest debate. The Pro-Life forces immediately think that those who are in favor of abortion are immoral, and therefore their opinions are immoral ones. You aren’t getting treated as an equal. You are inferior to them.

Secondly I realized the anti-abortion groups obfuscate the facts quite often. They take an extreme position, or use an obscure reference to make their point, such as the Ohio clinic law or the Queens College study. I respect somebody if they truly have a moral objection to abortion, but my respect is gone if you lie to convince me.

Lastly, I will conclude by saying that this forum really solidified my belief that no matter how uncomfortable with abortion I might be, it is not my choice it never will be my choice and therefore I should never have the right to deny that choice. If you have the time I would talk with a pro-life group, to see where they are coming from. At a human level she was a very lovely women, and she did the best she could from a hostile audience.

As I walked out I thanked her for her time, and she respectfully thanked me for mine.
Thanks for reading.