“I’m Personally Pro-Life”

Says the person with a conflicted conscience.

The society that we live in today has a problem.  It is at the same time very opinionated as well as believing that the moral high ground rests in not telling others their opinion, all the while telling you their opinion.

Karen sent me this article that discussed a woman working at a Crisis Pregnancy Center that was not pro-life.  Well, she said that she was personally pro-life, but that she believed that women should have a choice, and should be educated about the choice.

Personally, when I hear something from this point of view, my first thought is that this woman is a plant and didn’t work for a crisis pregnancy center at all.  If you read her post on the topic, you begin to wonder why she was there in the first place.

My Experience with CPC

Back in the late 1900s I was counseling some people online in terms of abortion, pro-life, etc. and felt the desire to get involved.  I sought out my local Crisis Pregnancy Center and contacted them for training.  We had to go through multi-week training (I believe 10 weeks) which we paid for, and it included everything from what you could and could not say to how to counsel people in need.  Reminded me a lot of counseling classes in college.

At the end of that time we gave testimonies and then were told what we could do to help out.  Of course, being a guy, I couldn’t counsel women in crisis pregnancies, but I could help with classroom settings and the like.

However, I didn’t get to be a regular presenter.

I went with a couple of young ladies to a presentation done in a school.  I thought I was part of the group, and tried to help, though I guess I was only supposed to be observing.

During a lunch that followed, I expressed my opinion to the two ladies, and I must have sent off red flags as being too religious or something, because I was told that I was not going to be allowed to go into the classroom.

So, then I was taken to a church setting, and I watched the church presentation that differed only slightly from the classroom.  On my way out I expressed even more reservations.

It was ok, I thought, to stress the disease and pregnancy issue in the public school classroom, but the emphasis in a church should be (I thought) on what God expects of me.  I cringed when the young ladies doing the presentation said their number one reason for not wanting to have sex was to keep themselves pure for their husband, when in private they said it was because God told them not to.  I cringed when I had to hear talks about the “disease that keeps on giving” with like 5 minutes about the Bible in the church.

I’m not trying to treat them badly.

I had a talk with the head of the local center at the end of the two presentations.  She told me that they would not permit me to go to either of these places to present.  I had no problems with them.  They and I had two different worldviews.  I wrote them a letter to express my position.

I say all this not to try to treat them badly or exact revenge but to illustrate a point.

A lot of what I read from this post is exactly the opposite of my experience with the Crisis Pregnancy Center.  Now, every place is different, and every person that counsels is different, but when I start reading about a center talking about “facts that aren’t facts” or taking advantage of people in need, I start to think that this is more just a bunch of talking points than it is a real experience.

The center that I was affiliated with didn’t want a passionate speaker on the topic to be in a classroom because he might “say the wrong thing” or “make the teacher uncomfortable” or “have them asked to not return.”  She didn’t want me in a church setting because I believed too much about God’s commands and thought I’d get too preachy—imagine that.

When a person that claims that their pro-life starts using the term “fetuses” instead of babies, when they say that the reason that they quit was there was too much of an emphasis on life in the womb it tells me that either they didn’t know what they were getting into in the first place, or they knew all too well and wanted to be credible.

And that brings us back to the title.  You can’t be “personally pro-life” as well as “pro-choice” or pro-abortion.  Their political and moral positions about what you believe that life is in the womb.  It’s morally inconsistent, it’s a way to compartmentalize your beliefs, and it’s irrational.