Thursday, August 23, 2007

Abortionist's latest tool: the Koran

A woman walks into a pregnancy resource center, saying she's a Muslim and her religion permits her to have an abortion.

The counselor whips out a "Pregnancy Options Workbook" and shows the woman where the book says Islam forbids abortions. Impressed, the woman opts to be a client of the pregnancy resource center and keep her baby.

If that really happened, you can imagine the uproar. News would reach Planned Parenthood that the pregnancy resource center blatantly used the woman's faith to manipulate her decision. Planned Parenthood would feed the story to its friend Linda Greenhouse at the New York Times, and the rest of the press would follow with a new wave of smear stories about pregnancy resource centers.

Well, someone really did use the Koran to influence a pregnant woman who was contemplating an abortion, but there was no uproar. And the reason there was no uproar is that it was not a pregnancy resource center employee who manipulated a woman's decision to keep her baby. It was an abortionist who boasted of convincing a Muslim woman that her faith permitted her to abort.

Here is what happened, according to the abortionist "Bon" of the blog Abortion Clinic Days:

The Post-it said, "AT-TI-TUDE" all caps. The young woman was in traditional Muslim dress, African-American, and bristling with...with something. I guessed that it was my job to find out what.

It turned out to be not so different from many women who feel like they are caught in a trap of their own making. She got pregnant, then "did the right thing and married at age 16, to a man she did not love. She had 2 more children with him, still didn't love him, but clearly did not wish him pain either. She had fallen in love with another, someone outside her culture. She knew it could never work. It was a mess, but a compelling mess.

Her self contempt, her anger at her situation and everyone around her, seemed to spring from the great divide between what she wanted and what she knew was right. Her religion guided her in everything--it was her rock. She accepted the finality of it, as a guilty person accepts a punishment.

"It's against my religion," she said defeatedly as though there could be no further discussion. I said, "Well, it may not be as clear as that. Muslims believe that the soul enters the baby at 120 days--about 16 weeks. You are about 5 weeks." Then I pulled out the Pregnancy Options Workbook (www.pregnancyoptions.info) and read her the section about Islam and abortion. It does not offer a free pass, by any means, but it does put Mohammed's proscription about killing your children in some historical context. He decried the killing of female infants, a widespread practice in his time. It also listed the acceptable reasons for abortion. It talked about atonement.

When I read the part about atonement meaning fasting for two months, an invisible veil fell from her face and there was a beautiful look of hope radiating out. "I can do that," she said. This launched us into a wonderful discussion about forgiveness, compassion, the condition of women, and other topics.
 [Read the full entry.]
At the end of Bon's entry, the abortionist adds a P.S.: "I want to address the inevitable comment that I somehow made her feel 'OK' about abortion, or encouraged her to have one. It was clear to me that she would have one no matter what. What I offered was a way that she could 'be' with it that did not further cripple her life and the beautiful contribution she could make to life."

Coming after the abortionist wrote that the patient's "religion guided her in everything--it was her rock" and that she "accepted the finality of it, as a guilty person accepts a punishment," such a disclaimer is utterly disingenuous. Would any abortion advocate believe it if it came from a Christian pro-life counselor who had cited the Bible to a pregnant woman? Heck, I'm pro-life, and I don't think I would believe it. Of course the abortionist was trying to influence the woman's decision — otherwise, she would have saved the education in Islam for the post-abortion counseling (something I have a feeling she doesn't offer).

I can't say I'm surprised. People of faith have long served as abortion advocates' useful idiots — witness the Planned Parenthood-funded Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Still, Bon's brazen boasting suggests she needs a more thorough education in Islamic law. I recommend she run her apologetics by her local imam. No doubt he will be quite impressed by her "[putting] Mohammed's proscription about killing your children in some historical context."