by Kristen Walker Hatten
I get this a lot, in e-mails and comments:
“Hey ‘Kristen,’ if that’s your REAL name. I read your dumb article because I have nothing better to do than read stuff I hate on the Internet. You’re always talking about how you used to be this big pro-choice liberal because you were uninformed and lost in the darkness or whatever. Well, how do we know you’re not uninformed NOW? How do we know you’re not just brainwashed and in two years you’ll be writing for Jezebel and condemning your dumb pro-life self? Will the real Kristen please stand up?”
I’ve never addressed these comments because I have a life. But I have a less of a life now that I am a lowly, insignificant housewife, so I’m going to address these comments.
I am pro-life because of information. I was pro-choice because of lack of information.
That’s really the simplest answer. I could stop typing now, but then you all would weep and gnash your teeth because you want more paragraphs of my wisdom over which to rejoice or send me hate mail. So let me go into a little more detail.
Not everyone is pro-life because of information. Some people are pro-life because they grew up that way, and they have given as little thought to abortion as I had when I was pro-choice. I call this a “default” position. I was pro-choice by default, for the same reason I was politically liberal. It was the easy position, the one I absorbed from the media, pop culture, and other kids. Unless they receive a lot of correcting influence, most kids are gonna lean this way.
There’s a saying: “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re still a liberal at 40, you have no brain.” I get it. Liberalism is obvious to children, because the most obvious way to help people is to give them stuff and be “nice” to them. It takes a lifetime of learning – and, in my opinion, usually the influence of religion, which helps one understand that man can’t fix all of Earth’s problems – to realize that giving people “free” stuff is impossible, because nothing is free. And because giving people stuff and being “nice” to them is not nice, or helpful; it leads to dependency and corruption and general crappiness. (See Africa, ruined by aid. See also certain parts of Chicago, ruined by leniency.)
I read this book. It’s a great book to read if you want to understand why people are conservatives. It was written by David Mamet, the playwright, and it’s called The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. He says something in that book that made me stop in my tracks, and it was this: “Kindness to the wicked is cruelty to the righteous.”
The Dalai Lama said, “My religion is kindness.” Doesn’t that sound like a beautiful thing? Liberals love it. You can buy a calendar festooned with quotes like that, and pictures of the Dalai Lama looking at flowers, in every bookstore in San Francisco.
The problem is that kindness doesn’t work in every situation. To use a pretty worn out example because it’s a good one, if we were kind to the Germans and Japanese in World War II, the good guys would have perished from the earth. We’d all be speaking German and heiling Hitler right now, or we’d be dead. We wouldn’t be America, that’s for sure. Kindness to Hitler would have been cruelty to the Jews and other enemies of the state he was busy slaughtering. In order to be kind to the Jews and the gypsies and the gays and the priests and the Americans, etc., we had to be cruel to the Nazis. We had to make a choice.
When it comes to abortion, ‘kindness’ to the mother is cruelty to the child.
And in this case, as in many, kindness isn’t particularly kind. How is it kind to teach someone nothing, to offer her no instruction because it is “mean,” to watch her walk away to make the same mistakes again that caused her grief and desperation and pain and confusion and sorrow – and led to the death of her child? Is that kindness? Giving her some condoms and a phone number for Medicaid?
To me, kindness is telling people the truth: this will kill your child. You are a mother now. It is your responsibility to protect this child. You have other options, and we will help you every step of the way, but if you decide to let a doctor kill your baby, you will regret it for the rest of your life.
That is real kindness. Not the lie that a handful of cash will make it all go away.
But see, the other side has the easy sell. The lie is always easier: “Republicans are mean; here’s some free stuff.” The “default” position is the easy one you glean from movies and cool grownups. At 26, I had absolutely no idea what abortion really was. I literally, truly thought it was a “clump of cells.” It was information, it was truth, that changed my mind.
This is not to say everyone who is pro-choice lacks information. There are people right now working in clinics whose job it is to count the body parts and make sure there are no arms or fingers or heads left inside women to cause infection. Gotta make sure they got it all! These people certainly do not labor under any illusions about the baby being a “clump of cells.”
So how do they do it? Sister, you got me. I do not know. I know that even pro-choice Kristen would have run from that room screaming and puking. Listen: I know very good people who used to do this job and are now pro-life. Being Catholic, I think there are probably demons involved, and I am not even remotely joking. I think it is possible to delude yourself that you are doing “good” even while sifting through your bloody fingers tangible evidence of unspeakable evil. Humans are clever like that. We can do all sorts of mental acrobatics to make ourselves the good guys.
I spent the first few weeks of being pro-life trying desperately to stuff the genie back in the bottle – to reverse the spell, if you will. I wanted the internet to make me pro-choice again soooo bad. I knew what I was in for: I was going to be one of the dumb, backwards, mean, lady-hating pro-life wackos. But it couldn’t be done. And that is your answer, e-mail-haters and internet-commenters. That is how you know I will not be backpedaling and becoming liberal, pro-choice Kristen again: because once things are learned, they can’t be unlearned. And in the past six years – almost exactly – of reading and talking and arguing and writing, I have learned nothing new that would un-convince me of the humanity of the unborn, or the evil of abortion.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-choice-why-im-never-going-back#
See Also:
“This horrifying truth led me to question abortion and fully examine my position, ask myself the hard questions, and ultimately assume responsibility for my own abortion and my role in the abortion industry.”
http://feministsforlife.org/news/jewelsgreen.htm
“Don’t get me wrong – I’d seen those images before, but I’d never really seen them. I did not see the humanity of the children shown in those images until my heart was opened to the fact that I was looking at a human being. As a pro-choice woman, when I was shown graphic images of aborted fetuses – held up in front of clinics, at protests, or seen accidentally while surfing the Web – I did not see murdered human beings. I saw my own opinion, assaulted. I saw crazy people holding gross signs, and my mind glossed over the rest. … But when I was ready, and asked to see them, graphic images of intact and aborted unborn children were the final nail in the coffin of my pro-abortion beliefs.
I kept saying to Sadie, ‘Oh, my God. You just made me pro-life.’
I spent the next week on the Internet trying to “un-convince” myself of the truth of abortion, hoping that something would make me pro-choice again. But you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned.”
http://www.feministsforlife.org/news/kristenhatten.htm
“I became pro-life because I opened my eyes. It’s not very dramatic or poetic, but I’d based my previous beliefs on practicality and principles, not on facts.
I am astounded that I was over 30 before I noticed I hadn’t asked any questions about the legitimacy of elective abortion. I grew up in the 1960s with parents who believed legalization of abortion was a rational, welcome relief. Safe, elective abortions allowed women to make their own choices. What else was there to know?”
http://feministsforlife.org/news/ellenreich.htm
“The womb is the center of a woman’s sexual identity, and abortion is, in short, a denial of womanhood. I eventually came to see that being pro-life was more deeply feminist than being pro-choice, because the pro-life position was woman-centered.
So ultimately (and amazingly, given the conflict with which I began), I found that the seeds of my pro-life, refuse-to-choose belief lie as much in my feminism as in my faith.”
http://www.feministsforlife.org/news/aramintobarlow.htm
“I was adamantly pro-choice when I became pregnant, as in card-carrying, bumper-sticker on the car pro-choice, because I drank the Kool-Aid and that’s what real feminists believed, or so I thought at that time. And I have to tell you that the decision I made, the choice I made, was embarrassingly flippant.
I didn’t weigh the morality of the issue; I wasn’t in that place in my life. I didn’t think about slogans or political stances; there was no bumper sticker that could make this decision for me. I did what most anyone in my position would do: I looked at my own survival. I took a mental inventory of what kind of financial resources and emotional support I had. I felt as though all of my plans for the future were derailed with that little pink plus sign on the pregnancy test.
I transferred to a smaller campus to be closer to family. We moved into an apartment large enough for a child. I did a little digging and found out I could be covered under family health insurance. Essentially, I found that I didn’t have a compelling reason to terminate the pregnancy.
Well, that “lack of a compelling reason” has a name, and it is Emily. She’s 19 and just finished her first year at college.”
http://www.feministsforlife.org/news/sallywinn.htm
“All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a certain thought occurred to me. From that moment on I was officially, unapologetically pro-life.
I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly accept something like that. Then, a chill tore through my body as I thought:
I know how they did it.
I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people — people like me — can support gravely evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: The very real pressures of life — “we can’t afford another baby,” “there’s no dowry for another girl,” “this disability would overwhelm us” — left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: To dehumanize other human beings.”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/why-my-support-for-abortion-was-based-on-loveand-lies
