Three Bad Ideas for Women

Few book titles have had the sticking power of Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences.” Even people who’ve never read it find the blunt title instantly compelling. Weaver’s thesis was that the ideas that we absorb about the world, about the way things are or should be, inevitably direct our actions. Though the book was published in 1948, before many current bizarre ideas had fully emerged, the thesis is an eternal one. It sets people to wondering which ideas were the seeds that sprouted our present mess, and which new ideas might be helping us out of it — or further in.

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Monkey Can, Monkey Do?

[Beliefnet, May 29, 2001]

It's got the head of a monkey and the body of a monkey. But not the same monkey.

You probably don't want to hear any more details of this Mondo Bizarro medical news item. According to pioneering scientist Robert White, the mix-and-match creature he fabricated in a 1970's experiment survived for "many days." This experiment raised hopes, he told the BBC in an interview last month, because "People are dying today who, if they had body transplants, ...would remain alive."

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Moment of Silence

[Dallas Morning News, March 10, 2001]

Listen. Do you hear the turmoil simmering over the nations’ most painfully divisive issue? Do you hear protesters and counter-protesters clashing in the streets? Do you hear opposing sides contending in a battle of rhetoric and passionate will?

Me neither. Pretty quiet out there. Once there were magazine covers devoted to the abortion debate, panels earnestly arguing on TV, politicians sweating out meticulously vacant sound bites.

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Abortion Politics and the "Rape and Incest" Exception

[Citizen, October 2000] 

Coming soon to a podium near you: local politician Bluster K. Fluster, running for re-election, asserting his deeply held personal belief that abortion is wrong. There's an exception, of course: cases where the woman conceived due to rape or incest.

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RU 486, the Abortion Pill

[Beliefnet, September 28, 2000]

Observers of the abortion debate disagree about nearly every topic, but for the last decade, one prediction has won pretty near consensus: when RU 486 arrives, it will change everything. Now that the FDA has approved the "abortion pill," we'll get our first experience of an all-chemical abortion--what some pro-lifers call a "human pesticide." Previous methods involved a direct surgical removal of the child, but RU 486 will be an inside job.

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Born to Live, Left to Die

[Citizen, July 2000]

She wrapped her baby boy in a crib bedsheet covered with tiny balls and bats. He wore an angel necklace and a felt diaper. Carefully she laid him where someone was sure to find him, near a parked car, 200 feet from the entrance to the Indianapolis Community Hospital.

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Grieving for Septuplets

[Beliefnet, February 1, 2000] 

 You have to imagine, first, the seven babies curled and fitted around each other like puppies in a basket. Each has his or her separate water-filled sac, and within these sacs they rest or exercise, sometimes jostling their neighbors.

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Rock for Life

[Beliefnet, January 24, 2000]

When I saw the pink earplugs in his hand, I felt older than I’ve ever felt in my life.

I had been invited to be a speaker at an all-day rock concert, and the host had warned me in a prior e-mail that the groups following me would be pretty loud. The afternoon bands, I was told, were “kind of mellow -- my mom likes these bands.” (Reading that sentence was the second oldest I’ve felt.) But “the bands at night are hardcore, which is very loud and the lyrics are basically screamed out.”

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Susan B. Anthony, Pro-Life Feminist

[Focus on the Family, January 2000] 

Susan B. Anthony is a hero of the feminist movement, and with good cause; she was a trailblazer in the women's movement of the late 1800's. A Quaker who never married, Anthony devoted her energy

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The Abortion Debate is Over

[Christianity Today, December 6, 1999]

The twenty-seventh anniversary of Roe v. Wade is coming up, and I have some bad news. The abortion debate is over.

For a couple of decades there it was the hot topic, the cover story of magazines, subject of television debates, and flashpoint of political campaigns. Many a punditorial brow was furrowed over "this difficult, controversial choice."

Then the public got bored.

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