While lecturing at a state university recently, I was escorted to and from the airport by a “counselor.” He was a university employee in his 30s whose job is to counsel students on career, psychological, and emotional problems.
I asked him what he advises students about abortion. He said he is not permitted to advise a pregnant young woman on the decision of whether or not to have one; he simply lays out the alternatives, and then refers her to an abortion clinic if she wants it.
Then he added, “After these young women have the abortion, that’s when they really need counseling. They are emotionally devastated by the abortion.”
In the topsy-turvy modern lexicon, the premier definition of “women’s rights” by those who use that term starts with the right of a woman to kill her own preborn baby. The truth, however, is that abortion is not a liberator but an exploiter of women.
This was made clear in the recent scandal involving British Cabinet Minister Cecil Parkinson. An obviously able man credited with designing the political strategy which produced Prime Minister Thatcher’s smashing reelection, he originally tried to weather out the storm of the expose of his secret love affair. But then the London Daily Telegraph published an editorial saying that the mistress should have had a quiet abortion in order to save Parkinson’s career and the Thatcher government’s reputation.
That’s when she struck back with a press release so embarrassing that Mrs. Thatcher had to summon Parkinson and demand his resignation. “I was not aware,” the other woman declared, “that political expediency was sufficient grounds for an abortion.”
The Parkinson case shows in human terms how abortion, which has been so loudly proclaimed as the premier “woman’s right,” is now considered by men to be a woman’s duty to enable the man to escape the embarrassment and cost of an immoral relationship. Abortion was supposed to eliminate the double standard by which women pay the price of pregnancy for an illicit affair, but now abortion is the price that men demand that women pay.
A brave young woman named Nancy Jo Mann in Des Moines, Iowa, has started an [source document incomplete]
