“Trust Women?” Or avoid discussing the real matter at hand?

Back in January, for Blog for Choice Day, Birth Pangs—a wonderful and friendly pro-choice blog—decided to focus on Dr. George Tiller’s slogan: “Trust Women.”

If you trust in someone or something, you believe strongly in them, and do not doubt their powers or their good intentions

Good intentions do not always mean good actions. If the unborn is a human person, abortion is a terrible violation of human rights, nevermind its negative effects on women, no matter what the intentions are.

Also, respecting the dignity of another does not mean that you never doubt them. People are capable of hurting themselves and others, even when they are well-intentioned. When you see someone doing something dangerous, the compassionate response is not always to simply trust in their power and good intentions.

Tiller trusted that a woman could make a decision to save her life, that she could make a decision to spare her child from a short painful life, and that she could make a decision not to have her young child’s body ripped apart by a forced pregnancy.

I had to read the end of that sentence again. I think the author is referring to young girls who seek abortions after being raped. The more immediate connection to a “young child’s body ripped apart” when talking about unwanted pregnancy is… well, abortion.

When a government controls prices, wages, or the activity of a particular group, it uses its power to restrict them.

Does killing people count as controlling them?

They continue by telling us how evil the Catholic Church is in appealing to the hard cases, and by citing an (actually) terrible attempt at enacting a pro-life law in Oklahoma (terrible, for example, because the legislators don’t understand that there’s no such thing as an anonymous dataset).

Trust that I was born with a uterus and I’ll know what to do if a pregnancy starts to grow inside it.

If “a pregnancy” starts to grow inside it? Seriously? The author is bending the dictionary and the rules of grammar to avoid saying anything that might recognize the humanity of the unborn. What do humans become pregnant with? Pregnancies, apparently. Pregnant with pregnancies…

Trust that I’m a grown-ass woman able to make the big decisions.

Yeah, why should the government stop people from killing, or from committing fraud, or evading taxes, or choosing where and when they want to drive a motor vehicle. People should be able to make their own decisions. Stop controlling us!

(i.e. Way to avoid discussing the nature of the decision in question. It’s a pretty meaningless comment to make. I’m starting to see a pattern…)

Trust that life’s complicated and there’s lots of gray areas that an outside onlooker (or protester or Bill O’Reilly) may not fully see or even attempt to see.

Finally, some semblance of a valid argument. But… though abortion may be incredibly psychologically, emotionally, socially or practically complex, it is not morally complex. The complexity has a major effect on how we as a society must respond to crisis pregnancy situations, but no amount of complexity justifies the intentional killing of an innocent human person. If the unborn isn’t a human person, no justification of abortion is necessary, but if we’re talking about human beings, no justification is adequate.

“Trust women”… to do what? The phrase is an attempt to avoid addressing the central concern—what is the unborn? (“A pregnancy,” apparently.)