It is a beautiful apostolate that works to help bring healing to post-abortive women. She is a licensed therapist with a remarkable gift for healing of souls and she uses that gift to help all sorts of different people in crisis, including women dealing with the terrible trauma that often accompanies abortion (and the often horrendous circumstances that lead to it).
Oftentimes, those circumstances include enormous pressure from men who call themselves “prolife”, until the sacrifices they routinely demand of women in crisis requires something of them, at which point:
Congressman Rokita claims to be anti-abortion but gave thousands of dollars from his leadership PAC to a man Politico called “the biggest hypocrite in Congress,” a similarly pro-life Congressman who’d encouraged both his ex-wife and mistress to have abortions. According to a new report from The Journal Gazette, Congressman Scott DesJarlais received $9,000 over several years from Congressman Rokita’s leadership PAC, the Fund for American Exceptionalism. That money came after reports had broken that despite his views, the supposedly anti-abortion Congressman pressured his mistress into having an abortion and encouraged two more for his ex-wife before they were married.
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A conservative Republican congressman whom conservative organizations have praised for being an anti-abortion crusader sent text messages to his married lover in January, urging her to get an abortion after believing she was pregnant, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
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Bechard alleges that Broidy, a Republican mega donor, impregnated her and then pressured her to have an abortion. “Initially, he supported her keeping the baby,” she says in the court documents. “But he quickly changed his tune and began demanding that she gets an abortion, insisting that ‘Nobody can know.’ “
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Jason Miller, who served as a campaign surrogate for President Donald Trump and political analyst on CNN, has been accused of slipping a woman a pill that induced an abortion, according to a 14 September 2018 court filing in a custody case.
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And, last but not least, the Most Prolife President in the History of Ever, having famously declared, “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” refused to say whether he has ever paid for abortions for women with whom he has had sex.
The point is simply this: women do not have abortions for fun. They have them, very often, because they are under enormous social and financial pressure to do so, and that pressure often comes from conservative males who can’t be bothered about money or who, worse still, simply enjoy the feeling of power over people weaker than themselves. That is why the #1 abortifacient in the US is poverty and if you are serious about reducing abortion, you will do the one thing the GOP death cult is committed to never doing: have pity on the poor.
Instead, what the Cult consistently does is first punish the poor with more poverty and then treat them, not as victims of trauma forced into being traumatize post-abortive women, but as monsters, sluts, and criminals.
A businessman turned state representative from rural Oil City, Louisiana, and a Baptist pastor banded together earlier this year on a radical mission.
They were adamant that a woman who receives an abortion should receive the same criminal consequences as one who drowns her baby.
Under a bill they promoted, pregnant people could face murder charges even if they were raped or doctors determined the procedure was needed to save their own life.
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A faction of self-proclaimed “abolitionists” are seeking to make abortion laws more restrictive and the consequences of having the procedure more punitive than ever before.
Emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they say they will not be satisfied until fetuses are given the same protections as all US citizens — meaning that if abortion is illegal, then criminal statutes should be applied accordingly. While major national anti-abortion groups say they do not support criminalizing women, the idea is gaining traction with certain conservative lawmakers. And the activists and politicians leading the charge are nearly always men, CNN found.
This year, three male lawmakers from Indiana attempted to wipe out existing abortion regulations and change the state’s criminal statutes to apply at the time of fertilization. In Texas, five male lawmakers authored a bill last year that would have made getting an abortion punishable by the death penalty if it had gone into law. A state representative in Arizona introduced legislation that included homicide charges — saying in a Facebook video that anyone who undergoes an abortion deserves to “spend some time” in the Arizona “penal system.”
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Men running for a number of statewide offices in Georgia have also vocalized their support of total abortion bans. “There’s no exception in my mind,” former football star Herschel Walker, a Republican who is running for the US Senate, told reporters.
Mastriano and Walker have not expressed support for prosecuting women who have abortions. They did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
While an overwhelming majority of Americans support legalized abortion when a woman’s life or health is at risk, Ziegler said the disappearing “life of the mother” exception stems from a deep distrust of both women, science and the medical establishment. The new focus on punishing women for undergoing abortions — as seen in several bills recently proposed — is also only likely to intensify, she said. As abortion providers close up shop in states with bans, it is going to become increasingly difficult to charge doctors if women travel to other states for the procedure.
“That’s going to make it more appealing to punish women,” Ziegler said.
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For pastor Gunter in Lousiana, the “pro-life establishment” is not taking a hard enough stand against abortion.
He told CNN he doesn’t think someone can be truly “pro-life” while also believing that abortion is acceptable in certain circumstances. He said he will support nothing short of an all-out abortion ban with homicide charges and that unlike some of his peers, he refuses to sacrifice his principles for political reasons.
Gunter, who “grew up in church in diapers” and is now in his 30s, said in a recent speech that he once believed that opposing abortion simply meant voting for “pro-life” candidates. But when a seminary professor invited him and other men to spread the gospel outside an abortion clinic in 2008, he said everything changed.
That day, he said he watched 15 women go inside the clinic and “murder their children.” One of them, Gunter said, couldn’t have been older than 13 and he believed she was being forced to undergo the procedure by her mother.
“She’s a child, and her mother pulled her into that clinic,” said Gunter. “That day changed my life. I went home, and I was newly married… (my wife) was pregnant with our first child. I’d been seeing ultrasound pictures of my son and I thought to myself ‘My God, someone killed a child just like my son, same age as my son, looks like my son. How can they do that?”
After that, he says he began confronting women as they entered abortion clinics every week. And in an attempt to create more sweeping change, he decided to get involved politically. He said he approached Rep. McCormick, who did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment, earlier this year about the Louisiana bill that ended up making waves across the country. It even sparked outrage from the largest anti-abortion group in the state — one that Gunter said he had worked for but recently parted ways with because he felt it wasn’t doing enough to outlaw abortion.
Gunter’s impassioned plea at the committee hearing in May was met with applause, and the vote in favor of moving the bill to the full House ultimately came down to a group of state lawmakers that included a former law enforcement officer, a criminal defense and personal injury attorney and an entrepreneur who makes a living designing “man caves” and selling game room furniture.
Lawmakers then gathered on the House floor to debate the bill while dozens of supporters gathered outside the chambers in what resembled a church service, reciting Bible passages and swaying together while singing hymns such as “Amazing Grace.” Jeff Durbin, an Arizona-based pastor and head of a Christian production company Apologia Studios, which has more than 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, emceed and live-streamed the event. Durbin, who once played Michelangelo and Donatello in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and became fervently religious after overdosing on ecstasy, is now “unapologetically seeking to criminalize and eliminate all forms of abortion without exception.” He did not respond to requests for comment.
He and five other men addressed the crowd at the state capitol, citing proverbs and describing women who get abortions as murderers.
“We have… a righteous bill that punishes those who choose to murder their children,” T. Russell Hunter, the founder of anti-abortion group Free the States, yelled into the microphone, saying that any truly “pro-life” law should hold pregnant women accountable for their decisions — not just the medical providers. “Abortionists do not wake up and go out into the culture looking for children to kill; mothers bring their babies to them to be murdered. They are guilty…they have murdered their children under the color of law and the Lord God hates it.”
Hunter’s group describes itself as “abolitionist, not pro-life” — echoing Gunter’s argument that many in the movement are compromising on their values. “While many who call themselves pro-life agree with us that abortion is murder,” Free the States writes on its website, “abortion has not been opposed by the pro-life political establishment in a manner consistent with its being murder.” Hunter told CNN this movement is not “about wanting to punish women or something silly like that,” and that anyone involved in the decision to terminate a pregnancy should face criminal charges — including fathers.
“Another Texas woman spoke out about being forced to carry her dead fetus for weeks after suffering a miscarriage.”
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[Idaho GOP State Senate candidate Scott Herndon] says women should embrace their instinctual “sacrificial behavior.”
“If a mother is in a life raft with a child and there’s only enough food and water to save one, I’m guessing most mothers would not throw their child overboard and drown them,” he said in an interview with CNN when asked about medical circumstances where a doctor may deem an abortion necessary to save a woman’s life, such as a cancer diagnosis that requires aggressive treatment.
With the exception of Consistent Ethic of Life people like my friend and such folk as Rachel’s Vineyard, the “prolife” movement has morphed into a deadly monomaniac heresy far more interested in punishing post-abortive and even miscarrying women than in helping them. It is about force, fear, domination, control, punishment, and spite. It is an attempt at salvation by law, the very thing the New Testament says can never save anybody. And the GOP strategy of using the unborn as human shields for GOP selfishness and cruelty, focusing all energy on attacking abortion supply, and offering only punishment for women while turning a blind eye to GOP policies that increase abortion demand is one of countless reasons why this fruitless and stupid and deeply corrupt heresy must be defeated both at the ballot next month and by an actual return to the Catholic tradition of the Consistent Life Ethic.
What the MAGA “prolife” death cult is attempting is the imposition of Police State of Heaven, the umpteenth iteration of a form of secular messianism and an expression of antichrist religion, parading around as the gospel, yet again. We never tire of falling for this song and dance from the Utopia Promisers:
CCC 676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, 576 especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism. 577
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