The Semantics of "Choice"

A few months before I left Gainesville, FL for Steubenville back in 2003, the University of Florida chapter of NOW decided to stage a "protest" at the University plaza in support of "reproductive rights." They announced this several weeks in advance in order to increase their numbers, not realizing that all their hard-core supporters - who could be counted on the fingers of Major League Baseball pitcher Antonio Alfonseca's hands with digits to spare - had already joined the group and pledged to show up at the protest.

The day before, a friend of mine placed a handful of phone calls to some friends to see if anyone was interested in going to the plaza to peacefully counter-demonstrate. With that modest effort, he managed to round up more than twice as many people as the feminists could muster despite all their efforts.

When the feminists saw that their unwelcome detractors were attracting more attention from passersby than they were and that people were receiving greater exposure to the pro-life view as a result (in short, that their eagerly anticipated event had not only been a miserable failure, but counterproductive to boot), the main organizer of the pro-abort protest apparently forgot herself and began screaming, "What about my right to f**k?! What about my right to f**k?!"

To answer her question, it's not a right; it's a privilege, and it requires the consent of another person of legal age acting without compulsion (and a lot more besides in order to do more good than harm). But more on that another time.

One can't help but wonder, given the glaring inconsistencies in the pro-aborts' point of view, what exactly they mean when they say they support "a woman's right to choose." They insist that they are "pro-choice" rather than "pro-abortion," but I can't recall the last time they held rallies to support women who actually chose to keep their babies.

They claim women should have a right to choose what kind of life they want to lead, but scorn women who choose to embrace their roles as wives and mothers, saying that such women "set the women's liberation movement back."

They claim that government has no right to tell a woman "what to do with her body," but I can't recall the last time they denounced China's demonic one-child policy, by which the Chinese regime forces women to abort pregnancies of which they do not approve.

So while they claim to be "pro-choice," it really seems as though you have to make the "choice" they would make in order to win their approval.

Let's set that hypocrisy aside for a moment, though, along with the obvious fact that a genuine right to choose does not extend to taking the life of another human being for the sake of one's own convenience, and let's look at the semantics behind their application of the word "choice."

By "choice," of course, they ostensibly mean the choice of whether or not to have a child or to voluntary terminate a pregnancy. And this choice applies only to women. Men don't get pregnant, so the reasoning goes, so they don't get a say in the matter (this scornful view of the complementarity of the sexes in the act of parenting is yet another common bond the abortion rights movement shares with the gay rights movement, by the way).

But let's look at this matter a bit more closely. Is this really a choice? If a woman truly has the power to choose not to have children, then it would stand to reason that she would have the power not to become pregnant in the first place. Planned Parenthood exploited the lust for this type of power (itself inspired by a different kind of lust) beautifully, making artificial contraception its centerpiece in the decades prior to Roe v. Wade, and then using the (Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, Estelle) Griswold v. Connecticut decision - which made it illegal for the government to ban the sale of over-the-counter contraceptives and also created the previously non-existent right to privacy - as a stepping stone and legal precedent for the Roe v. Wade decision. Women who wanted absolute control over their fertility looked to artificial contraception as the means to prevent pregnancy while still being able to engage in sexual activity. Since that time, the "sex-without-consequences" mentality has been the calling card of the culture of death.

The problem was, the pill did not give women nearly as much control over their fertility as its supporters promised (and dishonestly continue to promise). No matter how hard they tried, they simply could not stop conception at will. Herein lies the first fatal weakness in the "pregnancy is a choice" argument. If pregnancy were truly a choice, there would be no need for contraceptives. Likewise, there would be no need for abortion. Because women who did not want to become pregnant simply would not become pregnant.

By the same token, just as no sexually active fertile woman can prevent conception at will, neither can she choose to become pregnant at will. No amount of fertility methods can help a woman conceive at will; and even when such methods do work, women have no control over the number of children that are conceived. Just as it is not possible to prevent pregnancy, it is not possible to dictate when pregnancy is to occur. This is hardly a characteristic of something that can legitimately be called a choice.

So if pregnancy isn't a choice, then what is it? It is a possible outcome of a choice. It is a (here comes a word the abortion rights movement and hedonists in general have come to dread) consequence of a choice, and therefore not really something that women have control over. Unless, of course, women (and men, for that matter) choose not to engage in the activity that leads to the potential consequence of pregnancy. Again, we come to a word that strikes fear into the hearts of the hedonist culture of death: abstinence. The very notion that sexual activity is a choice is antithethical to those who have become slaves to their own passions. Because they can't (or won't) control their own impulses, they naturally assume that no one else can either (the parallels with the gay rights movement continue to pile up here). Therefore, they refuse to acknowledge that sexual activity is a choice, pretending instead that it is a biological necessity that no human being can do without and which no human being can choose to avoid (if that idea was followed to its logical extreme, we'd have to overturn every rape and child molestation conviction in our nation's history on the grounds that the perpetrators were only satisfying what was for them a biological necessity and were therefore not responsible for their actions). Hence the refusal to address what is truly a choice and the need to pretend that it is the consequence (or rather, whether or not to run away from the responsibility that the consequence entails) that is the real choice. Kinda puts the vulgar rant of the unhinged feminist at the beginning of this post into perspective, doesn't it?

You'll hear many pro-lifers say that the abortion rights movement is about the right to engage in sexual activity without consequences. To a large extent, they are correct. But they're only scratching part of the surface. It is, at its core, a movement obsessed with control. Control not only over the whole range of choices they make, but also complete control over the consequences of those choices and - lest anyone serve as a living reminder that what they are doing is morally wrong - control over how others perceive those choices (here we see more common ground with the gay rights movement). It is no coincidence that fraudulent "Catholic" groups such as Call to Action and the atrociously-named Catholics for a Free Choice embrace the views of the culture of death: their constant rantings about not being included in the decision making of the Church screams lust for power, as does the advocacy of such groups for women's ordination (when was the last time you heard an advocate of women's ordination talk about anything other than what kind of power access to the sacramental priesthood would bring? You certainly don't hear them talk about the humbling, self-sacrificial aspect of the priestly ministry, because they want no part of that aspect of the cloth).

Why this ravenous need for control? For the same reason that they are incapable of true Christian charity: namely, the fact that they reject the One who orders all things, the One at whose name every knee shall bend. To reject God is to reject the need to submit ourselves to the authority of One who is greater than ourselves. In the absence of such a One whose authority liberates us, the need for power and control over every aspects of one's own life becomes paramount.

All for the sake of a "right to choose." It hardly seems worth it. God bless!


In Jesus and Mary,
Gerald