I don’t think I’ve ever been as uncomfortable for someone as I was at a pro-life event a few years ago.  I was the emcee of the banquet that was being keynoted by a remarkable woman named Rebecca Kiessling.  Before the event, one of the invited lawmakers was working the crowd and stopped by the head table.  Apparently wanting us all to note his pro-life bona fides he expressed that he had always been unabashedly pro-life in all cases except rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

Rebecca Kiessling was the product of a conception by rape.

I braced myself for the impending conversation and prepared to go call a wrecking service to help him pry his foot from his mouth.  To her immense credit, Rebecca casually and politely engaged the man and said that she hoped her testimony that night would help him in his understanding of what it meant to be pro-life.  I don’t think he had any idea what she meant at the time.  I’m sure he did afterwards.

It’s always been a bizarrely incoherent position to say that you believe abortion is wrong because what is conceived in the womb is a separate, distinct, living human baby, but then to turn around and say that you’re okay with murdering those babies if their dad was a bad guy.  If abortion is wrong because it’s a living human baby, that doesn’t change regardless of paternity.  The inconsistency of rape exceptions is a monumental roadblock intellectually and logically to the pro-life position.

But that same feeling of discomfort I felt for the clueless lawmaker all those years ago came back to me watching an online undressing that happened to a left-wing activist named Alexis Isabel recently when she posited the following justification for keeping abortion legal:

“Ending abortion will bring nothing but pain. Not only for women, but for children. Children will be born to parents who can’t afford them, parents who aren’t ready, or they will live their lives in foster care. More poor kids, more abused kids, more traumatized kids.”

It is at once astounding and depressing that a mind can be so addled by the luxuries and privileges of the modern age that it can come to such a revolting conclusion: the answer to unwanted children is to kill them; the answer to poor kids is to kill them; the answer to foster kids is to kill them; the answer to child abuse is to kill kids.

Fittingly, there were several that shared their stories to help Alexis remove the scales from her eyes:

“I was abused as a child, Alexis. My dad was a violent pervert. We wore 2^nd-hand clothes and sometimes couldn’t afford groceries. You think I’d be better off dead? Today I’m happily married w/3 kids of my own. Stop using other people’s pain to justify murder. We aren’t your pawns.”

And:

“I was terribly abused & grew up in a single-parent welfare home. Stop using lives like mine for validation. Because I like my life, warts and all- & you know what would’ve helped when I was a child? Pro-choice people stopped insisting people like me were better off dead.”

Please understand this isn’t about “owning” a lib.  This isn’t about shaming Alexis.  She deleted her tweet and I can only hope she did so out of an earnest recognition that somewhere along the line her moral compass has become calibrated to the whims of convenience and self-idolatry. 

The more prevalent these kinds of revelations become, however, the quicker we can hasten the day when people are rightfully humiliated to make shameful justifications for killing other human beings.  Life is precious – all life.  Whether your Dad was a rapist, a pervert, a deadbeat, or a molester. 

The answer to our social problems isn’t murder.