Life Links 10/13/09

Keith Pavlischek writes about how a recent encounter and conversation with Sojourners' Rev. Jim Wallis has left him with the strong impression that Wallis is pro-choice.

In addition, I told Wallis as bluntly as I could, that as far as I could tell his position and that of Sojourners was indistinguishable from the old Mario Cuomo position of being “personally opposed” to abortion while wanting to keep the procedure legal. I suggested that neither he nor Sojourners could honestly be labeled pro-life because, for that term to mean anything, it has to involve advocacy for the legal protection of the unborn. Wallis was equally frank in response. He simply rejected my suggestion that the “legal protection of the unborn” had anything to do with being pro-life. Both of us left that conversation with a clear understanding that Wallis was, quite simply, pro-choice on abortion.

Here's another instance of pro-choice intolerance, this time at Princeton University. Posters with photos of unborn children and pregnant women were defaced.

Public Safety was notified of the first instance of vandalism on Thursday at around 12:45 a.m., Cliatt said, noting that all six posters on the lawn had been torn off their plywood mounts. She added that “debate with words, not soft-focus photography” had also been written in black ink on one of the pieces.

“The irony of that is that there was text on all the posters, except the one where the vandal had removed the text,” said Princeton Pro-Life member Matthew Sanyour ’11, one of the students who first found the ruined posters on Wednesday night.

The LA Times has a story on self-described abortion addict Irene Vilar.

Again and again during their 11-year relationship, she rebelled: "Forgetting" her birth control pills, she would get pregnant, feel the thrill of self-determination, then panic that she would lose her husband, seek an abortion and collapse in relief and despair.

"Of course, this did not mean I wanted to do it again and again," she said. "A druggie also wants to stop every time."

"Her story is just so tragic," said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life. "It really underscores everything we always say in the pro-life movement -- that abortion is part of a very sad story for women." For proponents of legal abortion, who often invoke the Clinton-era mantra that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," Vilar's story raises uncomfortable, and perhaps unanswerable, questions about the use of abortion as a first-line tool of birth control.