Everything I believe in a paragraph

I've been blogging for about four months. In that time, as y.m.f.r (you, my faithful reader) know, I've come to the conclusion that our government and society, cowed into silence as they are by the pro-choice movement, have once again turned women into victims.

My reasons? Many important facts about the potential short- and long-term effects of abortion are simply covered up, dismissed, or otherwise downplayed in favour of an ideology of (so-called) unrestricted choice. But no effort is made to ensure that the choice is a fully informed one, or that alternatives to abortion are similarly championed.

There are many polls and studies that establish my convictions, but sometimes a little bit of real life speaks louder than a hundred sets of statistics. My anecdote comes from the BackPorch Bulletin, the newsletter of an outreach to women directly across the street from Edmonton's Morgentaler abortion clinic. Apparently many women heading into Henry's place end up "on the BackPorch" and subsequently change their minds about what they were told was the best choice. This is one of them:

“A young lady came in today, she had an appointment with the clinic for an abortion. She said she was having second thoughts and asked one of the nurses there to show her what the ‘fetus’ would look like. When she saw the baby had toes and fingers, she said she could not go through with it. She said the father of the baby…didn’t want the baby. Her mother…didn’t want her to keep the baby……One of her girlfriends showed up…she offered to drive her to the counseling center…We received a call from the Pregnancy Care Center to say that this girl had decided to keep her baby and to take parenting classes with the center. Because this house is here, because someone was available to take the time to listen and educate this girl, her baby’s life, as well as her own physical and emotional life, were saved.

Classic. Another young woman, kept in ignorance about fetal development by her doctor and bullied by her boyfriend and her mother, heads for the abortuary under the assumption that this is the only alternative.

Choice?