| Hey guys, I will tell you the normal stuff of now in another post, but I want to tell you guys about an experience I had last week. I am taking US History (Post-1865) online through OSU-OKC. Each week, I have to participate in an online discussion board on a topic my prof. assigns. Last week, she gave us the option to write our opinion of either prohibition or women's suffrage. Around ten girls (no guys) had posted ranting about how oppressed women were and how they are so proud that women stood up to tyrannical men for rights, blah, blah, blach. So after reading all of this feminist stuff (and after I found that the link to the prohibition article didn't work), I just had to do women's suffrage. Now, I am not against women having the right to vote, I think they should. But the suffrage movement of the early 1900's puts a bad taste in my mouth because I know what led to, the feminist movement of the '60's. I layed it on the line, I wrote about my negative feelings toward the movement based on its ramifications (promotion of abortion in the name of women's rights, political correctness, reverse discrimination, etc.) in society. As you can see, abortion was only one of the issues I had, but I got confronted with this. I began to have my first debate over abortion in my life and it was with a girl classmate online. By the way, in less than a month of attending Summit and learning about how to refute pro-abortion arguments, I got to use what I learned. She first threw up the cliched, "What if a woman, is raped? Do you want her to go through all that trauma?", line. I quickly pointed out that this so-called argument doesn't address the issue, but rather side-steps it. The argument for or against abortion is whether or not the unborn is a person. If he is, than all these "what-ifs" are irrelevant because no circumstance (outside the rare need to save the mother) can justify abortion. If it isn't a person, than all these "what-ifs" are unnecessary because no one needs a reason to remove some tissue. So I asked her to debate the personhood of the unborn and nothing else. She said that she believed that a fetus becomes a person when the heart starts beating. I devoted two emails to convince her that personhood cannot be constituted by an increase in any kind of physical development. If someone came out and said that a rose isn't a rose until it blooms, does that change the fact that the non-bloomed rose is still no less a rose? I stuck to using strictly logic and science in my arguments and didn't bring up the image of God and things like that. Bible verses and concepts are irrelevant to the non-believer. By now, I am feeling pretty confident, I have successfully refuted all of her arguments up to that point but her next email put me into somewhat of a depression. She had said that the reason she was debating with me, is because she herself had had an abortion when she was 16 years old. She tends to think that pro-lifers (especially male pro-lifers) wouldn't continue in their stance if they were placed in her shoes. Then as I looked back on my emails and arguments, their directness, I then suddenly felt like the most heartless jerk on the planet. This girl didn't need an intellectual argument (and I understand she waited until deep in our debate to tell me this, and I was never judgemental), she needed Christ and all the comfort in the redemption that He bestows. As fellow TeenPacters, many of you have sat under seminars on how to refute pro-choicers as I have; these are great but they can't help but teach us in a vacuum. All of our position seems to make so much sense and we can't imagine why anyone would think otherwise. This is because no matter how many seminars we go to, books we read, etc. we can never feel the pain and confusion and fear that many girls feel when they are put in this situation. All we have learned is why their logic is flawed and how to defeat their logic (again, these resources are vitally important because we must know how to defend the truth). Yet, now I know that when you finally encounter a person who has personal baggage and guilt tied to this issue, the debate takes on a whole new perspective. I am a Christian before I am a pro-lifer, and as a Christian, I am called to speak the truth in love and show the Gospel and the salvation of sin to the lost that I meet, including some pro-choicers. So I emailed her back saying that what drives my position is my Christianity. I then talked about the Gospel, how we all are guilty of sin and deserving of God's wrath, that God bestows faith on some as a gift, their eyes are opened to the truth and they are saved and adopted into the Kingdom forever. This ended the debate, for all I know, she went on with her life. But I know that God is sovereign and the seeds that He plants through us will grow in the water and soil of His grace and love. Caleb |
