The urban legend is that Prolifers are anti
women or anti-women‘s rights.
And I would suggest to you that that is not
the case at all.
For starters, I work for an organisation based
in Christchurch that provides support for
women in crisis pregnancies- very difficult
pregnancy situations.
And that support---some of the that women
we work with have been literally have been
pushed from pillar to post by the official
organisations, that the government organisations,
have designed to care for them.
And we’re sort of the last resort who’ll
take on the cases that often no one else will
touch.
And often they’ve been left to it.
So…and some of these women we work with,
we really do put our money where our mouth
is, we provide the practical support, the
assistance, the emotional support that they
need and we offer alternatives to abortion
and we do that right…and our support doesn’t
end at birth.
That support carries…we’ve got clients
who we’ve been working with for almost four
years now.
They came to us when they were pregnant and
we’re still working with those people.
Some of them we just---we had a case recently
of one young woman who has after three and
a half year has got on her feet finally and
is able to understand the basics of budgeting
and really doing things for herself and being
empowered to do that and that’s awesome
but.
So it’s not like we just go ,”alright
baby’s born now.
See you later.”
It goes right beyond that.
I think that’s just one example of million.
There are a lot of centres like that that
operate around this country and around the
world.
So I don’t think it’s fair to say that
to be prolife is to be anti woman.
The reason I mention this is because all too
often in this I think vitally important discourse
Prolifers are accused of being unsympathetic
or uncaring to women in these situations simply
because they refuse to give their assent or
their support to the act of abortion and it‘s
wrong to correlate the two: refusal to say
“yeah abortion is something ethical” with
this idea that prolifers don’t like women
. And I think it’s a very unfair and a very
hollow thing to level at prolifers as well.
To be prolife is not to be antiwomen and instead
I would suggest to you that the prolife position
is that we are pro the life and the rights
of all human beings involved in a pregnancy
no matter how difficult and complex that pregnancy
might be.
And I also want to take this opportunity right
at the start to clarify that the abortion
issue is not a religious issue.
Instead it’s an ethical human right’s
issue.
I think this is very important because often
I’ve had this in discussion with people
you only say that because you’re Christian
you only think that because you’re so and
so.
The reason that I am prolife I speak for myself
here personally is not because of some religious
article of faith or some blind dogma or because
some priest walked up and said, You must be
prolife.
That is not why I’m prolife.
Instead it’s because I’ve scrutinised
this issue, I’ve applied the light of human
reason to it and I‘ve come to the conclusion
that the prolife position is the logically
sound position and it represents an authentic
humanism that is built on the best traditions
of well reasoned human ethics.
