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The urban legend is that Prolifers are anti women or anti-women‘s rights. And I would
suggest to you that that is not the case at all. For starters, I work for an organisation
based in Christchurch that provides support for women in crisis pregnancies- very difficult
pregnancy situations. And that support---some of the that women we work with have been literally
have been pushed from pillar to post by the official organisations, that the government
organisations, have designed to care for them. And we’re sort of the last resort who’ll
take on the cases that often no one else will touch. And often they’ve been left to it.
So…and some of these women we work with, we really do put our money where our mouth
is, we provide the practical support, the assistance, the emotional support that they
need and we offer alternatives to abortion and we do that right…and our support doesn’t
end at birth. That support carries…we’ve got clients who we’ve been working with
for almost four years now. They came to us when they were pregnant and we’re still
working with those people. Some of them we just---we had a case recently of one young
woman who has after three and a half year has got on her feet finally and is able to
understand the basics of budgeting and really doing things for herself and being empowered
to do that and that’s awesome but. So it’s not like we just go ,”alright baby’s born
now. See you later.” It goes right beyond that. I think that’s just one example of
million. There are a lot of centres like that that operate around this country and around
the world. So I don’t think it’s fair to say that to be prolife is to be anti woman.
The reason I mention this is because all too often in this I think vitally important discourse
Prolifers are accused of being unsympathetic or uncaring to women in these situations simply
because they refuse to give their assent or their support to the act of abortion and it‘s
wrong to correlate the two: refusal to say “yeah abortion is something ethical” with
this idea that prolifers don’t like women . And I think it’s a very unfair and a very
hollow thing to level at prolifers as well. To be prolife is not to be antiwomen and instead
I would suggest to you that the prolife position is that we are pro the life and the rights
of all human beings involved in a pregnancy no matter how difficult and complex that pregnancy
might be. And I also want to take this opportunity right at the start to clarify that the abortion
issue is not a religious issue. Instead it’s an ethical human right’s issue. I think
this is very important because often I’ve had this in discussion with people you only
say that because you’re Christian you only think that because you’re so and so. The
reason that I am prolife I speak for myself here personally is not because of some religious
article of faith or some blind dogma or because some priest walked up and said, You must be
prolife. That is not why I’m prolife. Instead it’s because I’ve scrutinised this issue,
I’ve applied the light of human reason to it and I‘ve come to the conclusion that
the prolife position is the logically sound position and it represents an authentic humanism
that is built on the best traditions of well reasoned human ethics.