For those of you that meet me and get to know me, you know that I have had the benefit of coming from a healthy intact nuclear family. To me, any time that I’ve had an advantage in life in some way, I trace it back to the privileges I’ve attained from coming from an intact family structure.
Some of you look at my life, and the benefits I’ve had from coming from that intact family structure, and you say, “Ryan, you come from such a great family! It must be nice having been born into the Wiseman family.” But that’s where you’re wrong.
You see, I wasn’t born into the Wiseman family; I was adopted into it. My biological mother was 16 years old when she gave birth to me. She was either a sophomore or junior in high school. I can imagine most high school girls who get pregnant freaking out and saying to themselves, “I can’t be pregnant! It’s just not the right time in my life to be pregnant! I need to terminate this pregnancy right away!” And off they run to the nearest abortion clinic to terminate that pregnancy and move on with their lives.
But for whatever reason, my biological mother decided not to abort me. She, instead, decided to let me live, carry me to term, give birth to me, and promptly give me up for adoption into a loving home with loving parents who had the financial resources to properly take care of me. And then she moved on with her life. That is why I come from the Wiseman family. And for my biological mother not terminating her pregnancy with me, but letting me live, and then letting me be adopted into the family that I became a part of – for all of that, I am eternally grateful to her.
What That All Means
Now I want you to think about what I just said. I want you to think about the implications of what it all means.
When my biological mother gave birth to me, I was no longer in her body, so she got her body back.
When she gave me up for adoption, she was freed from the responsibility of having to take care of me, so she got her life and her freedom back.
Many pro-abortion advocates support legalized abortion because to them it represents a woman’s right to her body, her life, and her freedom. They see legalized abortion as the tool, the mechanism, the apparatus by which a woman achieves and practices those rights. But what my story suggests is that there is an alternative – that you can support a woman’s right to her body, her life, and her freedom, without abortion even needing to enter the equation to support those rights.
For those of you who think that legalized abortion represents the end-all-be-all epitome of women’s rights, my story suggests that it doesn’t even need to enter the equation to support women’s rights.
Philosophical Underpinnings
Now with all that being said, let’s move on to the moral philosophy that underpins being anti-abortion. For those of you who are pro-abortion, I want you to understand the step-by-step thought process that goes through the minds of us anti-abortion people. It really boils down to three steps. Seriously, try to understand our mindset here.
It goes something like this:
1. Unborn human beings are in fact human beings.
To many of us, this statement is so inherently obvious that it makes us chuckle. Unborn human beings are not turtles, are not bananas, are not elephants, or fish. They are in fact members of our species, homo sapiens, not any other species; thus they are human beings.
2. The more innocent and defenseless a human being is, the more of a moral imperative, a moral duty, or obligation, we have to protect them from harm.
How many times have we heard of some young children getting harmed, or killed, such as Casey Anthony’s story from some years back, and we were outraged by that event? You think, “How could anyone harm these little children? We’re supposed to be protecting them!”
Unborn human beings are, to us, even more innocent and defenseless than small children. They are quite literally the most innocent and defenseless of all members of our species. They haven’t hurt anyone, committed any crimes, or done any evil. How could they? They haven’t even been born yet! So, obviously they’re innocent.
And because of their size, they are not capable of defending themselves from those who wish to do harm to them. That would suggest that it’s our moral duty to protect them from harm, since they can’t protect themselves.
3. Abortion brings irreparable harm to those human beings who don’t have the ability to protect themselves from harm, and who we have a moral duty to protect from harm. Thus, abortion is morally wrong, morally repugnant, and must be stopped.
Abortion is not reparable harm but irreparable harm – it harms a human being in a way that can’t be repaired, and which is permanent. Harm such as bruises and broken bones can heal, but killing a member of our species is permanent – it cannot be fixed.
Take some time to think about this 3-step philosophical process. Ponder it in your heart. Try to think about it from the perspective of us anti-abortion people. It should help you understand our mindset.
Obviously, many of you pro-abortion advocates don’t refer to the unborn as a human being, or member of our species, or unborn child like we anti-abortion people do; you instead refer to them using the label fetus. Fetus comes from the Latin word for offspring, but the effect of using this word in our English language is about disconnecting and distancing our natural human emotions from that small human inside the woman’s womb in order to become more at peace with the process of terminating its life – what we call abortion. To convey the same idea using a slightly different set of words, it’s about dehumanizing that small human being in order to rationalize terminating his or her life, and to do so by convincing oneself that he or she is not really a human being at all, but merely a fetus. In fact, some of you go even further and call that unborn human a “blob of tissue.” Such an act, even if it is just word-play, is to us just a form of intellectual dishonesty. You’re really playing a mind-trick on yourself.
So, let’s sum up the two arguments against legalized abortion that I’ve given so far before we move on:
a) Abortion isn’t needed to support a woman’s rights, especially her rights to her body, life, and freedom. You can support a woman’s rights without needing to use abortion as the means to achieve her rights. My personal story makes that clear.
b) Abortion brings irreparable harm to those human beings that we have a moral duty or obligation to protect from harm given their level of innocence and defenselessness, thus abortion is morally wrong, reprehensible.
Capital Punishment and Abortion
Many of you who are pro-abortion are also the same people who are against capital punishment.
What is capital punishment? When a member of our society does some terrible evil, and brings pain and suffering on other members of our society, such as through rape and murder, or by being a serial killer, it becomes proper to bring some kind of justice on the victims. It’s also important that the perpetrator gets punished for what he did for bringing that harm on others.
This is where the idea of capital punishment comes into the picture. Historically, the reasons behind capital punishment were threefold. First, it was a way to punish the perpetrator for the evil they committed and make sure they never committed evil again (I mean if you’re dead you can’t commit any more evil, right?). Second, it was a way to bring justice to the victims of that evil person. Third, it was seen as a way to frighten other members of society, who might be prone to committing gross acts of evil, into not doing the evil deeds that they might be thinking of doing. In all three cases, it was seen as a way to make society safer for the rest of its members to carry on with their lives without fearing that evil would happen to them.
In essence, capital punishment is about terminating the life of the most guilty and evil of all human beings.
Those of you who are against capital punishment argue that even the most evil and guilty of all human beings shouldn’t be sentenced to death because they are, in fact, human beings. To you, all human beings deserve the right to live – even the most evil and guilty of all human beings.
So, let’s make a comparison here between the two viewpoints – pro-abortion and anti-capital-punishment, at least how the two viewpoints appear to those of us who are anti-abortion:
Pro-abortion – It’s perfectly morally acceptable to terminate the lives of the most innocent and defenseless of all human beings.
Anti-capital-punishment – It’s morally wrong to terminate the lives of the most evil and guilty of all human beings.
Do you not see a contradiction there? To those of us who are anti-abortion, there is a stark disparity and contradiction between those two beliefs. To us, those of you who are pro-abortion and anti-capital-punishment at the same time are practicing cognitive dissonance, a form of doublethink, by holding both views simultaneously.
You’ll find that the inverse tends to be held by those who are anti-abortion: they think it’s morally wrong to terminate the lives of the most innocent and defenseless of all human beings, but also believe that it’s morally acceptable to terminate the lives of the most evil and guilty of all human beings, especially if doing so increases the number of innocent lives that are saved. Oddly enough, this inverse of the left’s cognitive dissonance is itself NOT contradictory or a form of doublethink.
Here’s another thing: if you haven’t noticed, if you are against capital punishment, you are against it for the same reasons anti-abortion people are against legalized abortion – in both cases the argument is that human beings have an inalienable human right to live, and to life, and that this right should not be taken away.
So let’s sum up the three arguments that I’ve given so far.
a) Abortion isn’t needed to support a woman’s rights, especially her rights to her body, life, and freedom. You can support a woman’s rights without needing to use abortion as the means by which she achieves her rights. My personal story makes that clear.
b) Abortion brings irreparable harm to those human beings that we have a moral duty or obligation to protect from harm given their level of innocence and defenselessness, thus abortion is morally wrong, and reprehensible.
c) You oppose the termination of the most guilty and evil of all human beings on the grounds that all humans have a right to live, but then turn around and support the termination of the most innocent and defenseless of all human beings as morally acceptable, and claim it’s morally wrong to not allow it. Thus, a stark contradiction, a cognitive dissonance, a doublethink.
Now that I’ve given those three arguments, let’s move on to another set of observations that I’ve made concerning the subject of women’s rights, women’s empowerment, and then once I’ve made these other observations, I’ll come back around and tie all these things together.
Hiding the Other Elements of Women’s Empowerment
I’ve tried to make it clear that legalized abortion isn’t even needed to support women’s rights, and support for legalized abortion might actually be a form of cognitive dissonance when compared to an anti-capital-punishment stance, but despite this, the political left attempts to make abortion rights the end-all-be-all epitome of women’s rights. Now why do you think this is?
I believe that the left’s attempt to keep the focus entirely on abortion is really about deflecting the focus from several other things that represents women’s rights, women’s enablement, empowerment, and the general lifting up of women – things which, if we’re to be honest, the left is generally lacking, and which the political right, the conservatives, have a general advantage, but which you’ll never be aware of if you haven’t taken the time to pay attention to these other things. One could argue that the left’s attempts to keep the focus on the issue of abortion is really a desire on their part to keep people blind to the other issues that represent women’s rights and empowerment. The idea is to make sure people don’t pay attention to those other issues, all by keeping the spotlight off those other things and on the issue of abortion.
What are these other important issues? Let me begin.
Women’s Suffrage
When you look at the history of the struggle for women’s suffrage – the right to vote, here in the United States, it can be summed up in the following statement:
The Republicans, representing conservatism, tried for 40 years to try to give women the right to vote, but kept getting shot down and shut out by the Democrats, who represent progressivism.
In 1878, the Republicans brought a proposal to Congress that would give women the right to vote. But, the Democratic party, the controlling party at that time, voted it down.
The next year, the Republicans tried again, only to have the Democrats tie up that bill in a committee, something they did for the next several years. In 1887, a woman’s suffrage bill got to the floor again, but got voted down again by the Democrats.
Women decided at this time to take the issue to state legislatures. Wyoming, a state controlled by Republicans, became the first state to give women the ability to vote. One by one, one state after another, ones controlled by the Republicans, gave women some form of the right to vote. By the time World War 1 started in 1914, eight states had given women the right to vote. US Congress tried once again that year to pass women’s suffrage, only to have it get defeated again by Senate Democrats.
In 1916, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to the US Congress.
By 1918, a little before the 19th amendment ball got rolling, 15 states, run by Republicans, were giving women the right to vote in some way.
At that time, the Republicans scored most House and Senate seats, allowing them to have the two-thirds majority they needed to pass a women’s suffrage amendment, which allowed them to move forward with that plan, one that eventually lead to the ratification of the 19th amendment to our Constitution about a year later, which gave women the right to vote.
If you listen to the Democratic party itself, the progressive left, they keep pushing a false narrative that it was the Democratic party that was responsible for women to have the right to vote. In reality, it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, that were responsible for that. Yes, there were some Republicans opposed to that plan, and some Democrats who were supportive of it, but still, after everything was said and done, it was a mostly Republican endeavor with much of the opposition coming from Democrats.
Empowering Today’s Women Economically
I want to make a comparison between two different scenarios.
In both scenarios, there are a multitude of women who finish college, perhaps with undergraduate degrees in business and MBA’s, that want to enter the working world and have a business career that leads to them moving up the ladder to a place of leadership and success. They want to become managers, business executives, CEO’s, or own and run their own successful businesses.
In the one scenario, the business and overall economic environment is one that allows many, if not most, of those women a shot at proving themselves, and moving into a place of success. Many of these women are in a place, and in an economic environment conducive to women’s economic and business empowerment.
In the other scenario, the business and economic environment is one that greatly reduces and diminishes the ability for women to be successful, to become empowered, through some kind if leadership position or through having a thriving and successful business. In this second scenario, there are still some women who are successful, and who become economically empowered, but the number of women in that good place is greatly reduced, substantially diminished, compared to where they are in the first scenario.
Obviously, if you want to maximize the number of women who are successful in the business world, and want to maximize the number of women who run successful businesses, and thus maximize the number of women who are economically empowered, rather than minimize that number, you do so by going with the first scenario, not the second.
So, this begs a question – what kind of an economic and business environment maximizes women’s economic empowerment, and what kind minimizes it? Obviously, if we want to continue to lift women up, then we should go with an environment that maximizes their empowerment, right?
A thriving, vibrant, robust and growing economy maximizes the number of successful, growing businesses, and ensures a large quantity of available leadership positions such as managers, executives, and CEO positions, many of which can get filled by women.
A stagnant economy with limited or no growth limits keeps down the number of leadership positions available, thus reducing possible women’s economic empowerment. This kind of environment also increases chances of business failure, thus reducing the possibility of women running a successful business.
So, what kind of policies maximize economic and business growth? Keeping business taxes low, and keeping the number of regulations imposed on businesses to the bare minimum, helps to maximize business profits. I know there are a lot of people on the political left, who also are pro-abortion, who don’t like the word “profit.” But it’s these profits that give businesses the money that allows them to grow and allows for economic growth – the kind that empowers women.
Maximizing profits, like is done by keeping taxes and levels of regulations low, helps to maximize business growth, and thus maximize the number of available jobs, including business leadership positions, that are available, many of which will be given to women when they earn it.
In my opinion, it is the Republicans, the economic conservatives, whose low tax and regulation stance helps to create the kind of conditions that maximize women’s economic and business empowerment.
The progressive left, under the guise of the Democratic party, on the other hand, is always pushing for higher and higher taxes to pay for more and more government programs, which results in reducing the kind of economic and business environment that empowers women.
And what do these government programs do – the reason behind the Democrats/progressives needing higher taxes? Their programs do nothing to help people out of poverty, nothing to put them on the path to prosperity, and nothing to bring economic uplift to people. The only thing their government programs do is to make people more dependent on the government. So, the Dems raise taxes to pay for programs that don’t work to economically empower women, but precisely the opposite. In reality, all those government programs do is help them create the kind of toxic mindset needed to secure more votes for themselves to keep themselves in power.
In summary, the Democratic/progressive plan to raise taxes hurts women, taking away their ability to become economically empowered, whereas the conservative plan, under the guise of the Republicans, to lower taxes improves, and even maximizes, women’s economic empowerment.
The Nuclear Family and Young Girls and Women
It seems like the political left is constantly trying to discredit the traditional two-adult nuclear family structure, or trying to suggest that other alternative types of household arrangements, most notably the single-parent household, is just as good for society, for children, including young girls who still have yet to grow into adults, and for women, when comparing them to the traditional two-adult nuclear family structure.
But the problem with searching for alternative forms of household arrangements is that everything else falls flat on its face when compared to the fact that nothing else comes close to being as stable and safe for everyone than a nuclear family which has, at its head, two loving adults that are married to each other and are committed to each other in a healthy relationship.
If you don’t believe me, then consider the following facts:
Girls who are raised in two-parent households – the nuclear family – are twice as likely to not be living in poverty compared to children who are raised by one parent. This means being less likely to be disadvantaged and underprivileged. This means getting in better schools. This means a jumpstart in life for accomplishing life goals and being successful – something that can be empowering to young girls.
It also means that they’re more likely to eat healthy meals, stay healthy, and not go hungry.
Girls in this environment have a higher level of emotional health. They’re happier. They’re less likely to suffer from depression or commit suicide. They fare better in knowing how to handle and resolve conflicts since they have a better example in seeing two adults handle it. They’re more likely to get that encouragement and emotional support they need to flourish. They’re more likely to get into a healthy, long-lasting relationship themselves when they become adults.
All of these things work together when it comes to their education and academic pursuits. They’re less likely to drop out of high school. They’re more likely to get a college degree. They have the emotional fortitude, consistency, and patience to get to that academic level they so desire.
Women who are in a committed relationship with someone else, as opposed to being single, are more likely to have the emotional and financial support they need, which allows them to be more likely to succeed at whatever endeavor they attempt to achieve, such as going back to college to get their master’s degree, or starting their own business.
What it Means
Now I want you to think about these things. If the things I mentioned here are true, then we need to strengthen the traditional two-adult nuclear family structure. We need to push it as superior to all other types of household arrangements. Yes, there are times when someone may have no choice, such as when a woman with children becomes a widow and is left being a single mother, but in this article I’m talking about the ideal, the best, the superior format to empowering girls who are still growing up, and adult women. If the facts that I just gave you are correct, which they are, then the two-adult nuclear family structure is still the best available format to empower them.
If we are to compare young girls in the nuclear family structure to young girls who are being raised by single parents, usually single mothers, we find that the young girls and adults from nuclear families are more empowered, more capable of succeeding, and more capable of achieving their dreams in life, because they are in a position to more actively fulfill those things than any other type of household arrangement can offer them. These girls and women are empowered.
It is at this point that politics enters the discussion.
If I were to compare the Republicans and the Democrats, the conservative right and the progressive left, I’m left concluding that the Republicans, the conservative right, does more, much, much more, than the Democrats, the progressive left, to strengthen the nuclear family structure, and work to bring it back where it’s lacking. The left tends to vilify the two-adult nuclear family, sometimes even referring to it as fascist (despite the fact that Hitler was a Bohemian and Mussolini had many mistresses, so neither were fans of the traditional nuclear family – both were willing to let the nuclear family be only if it could serve the purposes of the state, and the elitists that control it, just like today’s left), and they look at other types of household arrangements as equally valid and good for society as the nuclear family structure even though they are inferior and do so much to disempower women and girls, thus leaving them in a place of disadvantage.
The left are always pushing programs and standing on policy platforms that work to destroy the nuclear family structure. For example – the left’s social welfare programs over the last half century have done a great deal to decimate the black nuclear family. Instead of only 25 percent of African Americans coming from single parent households, like at the start of our “war on poverty,” today only about 25 percent of African Americans come from two-adult nuclear families – which has done much to make young blacks underprivileged and disadvantaged. The same could be said about its effects on young girls.
All of this leaves me to conclude that the political left, the same people that push legalized abortion, because they always seem to be attacking the nuclear family, work to disempower and disadvantage girls and women, making them less likely to succeed, less likely to be in a place where they become leaders, and less likely to accomplish their life goals.
Maybe this is one of the reasons the left focuses so much on legalized abortion – to divert their attention from other subject matters, like this one, where the left is NOT empowering women, but disempowering them.
Bringing It All Together
So, now let’s bring everything together. What are the four arguments I’m presenting now?
a) Abortion isn’t needed to support a woman’s rights, especially her rights to her body, life, and freedom. You can support a woman’s rights without needing to use abortion as the means by which she achieves her rights. My personal story makes that clear.
b) Abortion brings irreparable harm to those human beings that we have a moral duty or obligation to protect from harm given their level of innocence and defenselessness, thus abortion is morally wrong, reprehensible.
c) You pro-abortion people oppose the termination of the most guilty and evil of all human beings on the grounds that all humans have a right to live, but then turn around and support the termination of the most innocent and defenseless of all human beings as morally acceptable, and even claiming it’s morally wrong to NOT allow it. Thus, a stark contradiction, a cognitive dissonance, a doublethink.
d) Completely focusing on abortion, making it the end-all-be-all epitome of women’s rights, even though it’s really not, is really a means by the political left to divert attention from other political subjects in which the left is sorely lacking when it comes to women’s empowerment.
Now, there are a good many other arguments out there validating our anti-abortion stance, some of which are moral in nature, and some of which are philosophical, but these four arguments here are my own. If you are debating in your own mind and heart whether you should support or oppose legalized abortion, please consider my four arguments and add them to your repertoire of knowledge and arguments in that internal debate you’re having as an objective person.
Finishing Up
Before I finish this article, there is one more observation I need to make, and that has to do with comparing and contrasting the two sides of this debate – the pro-abortion side and anti-abortion side – from a moral standpoint.
Pro-abortion people will go so far as to claim that opposing abortion is as evil as Hitler was, or as evil as the Holocaust was. They think that allowing the termination of what, to us, can only be described as the most innocent and defenseless of all human beings, that they are on a level of moral superiority and goodness akin to the Biblical angels.
To us anti-abortion people, this vilification puzzles and intrigues us because, to us, the 60 million unborn humans lost to abortion, just in our country alone, since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision was made back in the early 1970’s, represents a type of halocaust, only this time, of a magnitude 7-8 times the Nazi Halocaust. To us, legalized abortion is so evil that it’s akin to Hitler and his Halocaust, but to you pro-abortion people, you’re convinced that opposing this procedure is so evil that it’s akin to Hitler and his Halocaust. Both sides can’t be right.
Think about the moral ideas of both sides here. Each side has completely different ideas of what’s good versus evil, or what’s morally right versus what’s morally wrong. The pro-abortion side thinks the anti-abortion people are evil for not supporting legalized abortion. The anti-abortion side thinks the pro-abortion people are being evil because they are sanctioning the termination of what, to us, can only be described as the most innocent and defenseless of all human beings.
And what is the argument always given by pro-abortion people as to why we should support abortion? The argument always seems to be that the unborn offspring represents an inconvenience to the mother, and that the mother should have a right to get rid of that inconvenience which only serves to get in her way. An inconvenience? That’s the argument? But all babies inconvenience their parents in some ways. How many parents have lost out on some sleep because of their baby’s needs? They don’t turn around and terminate their child’s life because of that! To us, the argument against inconvenience sounds extremely shallow, superficial, and selfish. That’s the argument you want to go with? That’s a terrible argument!
That’s all I have to say for now.
