Living Waters posted a video on “choice” yesterday. If you want to read this article I’d like for you to watch the video. It’s not easy, but I want you to hear what Comfort, L.W., and Emeal are saying. Once you’ve listened Zwayne I think we should talk about what he says. I think it’s pretty important that this video not go unresponded to.

We Need To Talk About This. Let’s Talk About What Is Said About Abortions And Those Who Perform Them

First and foremost: even though it’s 2017 I still have to say that abortion is not murder. Abortion is legal. Therefore it is not murder. The actual definition of murder is: killing someone unlawfully. What Comfort, Living Waters, and Emeal Zwayne want to do is argue from emotion. They use murder as a buzzword to make you think abortion is negative. It isn’t. Let’s get that out of the way from the start. I think this is an appropriate way to start things off given that the video starts off by defining choice. It’s clear that L.W. is interested in defining words so I thought they’d appreciate having the word murder defined for them.

Doctors are not assassins for performing a legal procedure. When families pay them for an abortion it isn’t blood money that the doctors are getting, it’s the same as money given to a doctor for a check-up, or to a dentist for a routine cleaning. Abortion is legal. It’s not shameful or immoral, for a family to make a difficult choice and for them to prioritize the living members of their families that are already born and independent over a fetus.

Also abortions are not a new holocaust. I can’t believe that I have to say that either, but no. They aren’t. There aren’t doctors going around hunting for women who are pregnant to force them to abort their fetuses. No one is being pressured into having an abortion by the government. Pregnant women aren’t hiding from the government because they are afraid of doctors deliberately terminating their pregnancies. That’s why the government generally doesn’t pay for abortions. Comparing abortion to the holocaust is moronic. I can’t believe there are still anti-abortion people who think comparing a government-led extermination of a specific set of people (and anyone who resisted or opposed these orders), to a private medical procedure is an appropriate analogy.

What Happens When Abortion Is Outlawed?

I don’t know if Zwayne is a proponent of outlawing abortion. I won’t claim that he is. But if abortion is outlawed, abortions don’t stop. They just stop being safe. And to know this I can look at Honduras. In Honduras abortion is absolutely illegal. Has that stopped abortions? Nope. In a nation with some 8,000,000 people abortions still happen. In June of 2016 an article appeared on a Honduran newspaper named La Prensa which discussed at length what has taken place in Honduras concerning abortions. I did an English translation of this article which can be found by clicking here. If you want a summary: in Honduras once abortion was outlawed women and girls started self-inducing abortions using Cytotec a medication meant for gastritis (although some doctors still perform abortions, but if they are discovered they are arrested for performing abortions).

When abortion is outlawed abortions don’t stop they just stop being done safely by professional doctors. This is universal. People like Comfort and Zwayne want to make abortions less common but if they were to guilt-trip people into outlawing abortion, abortions wouldn’t stop happening. That’s why people with this mentality are dangerous, not for themselves or for their families, but for people who want to have a choice.

How Can Living Waters And Other Ministries Actually Successfully Reduce Abortion Rates?

I’m going to be generous and operate under the assumption that Living Waters wants to reduce abortion rates. If they do here’s what they can do: they can support efforts to provide fact-based sex education. They can use their money on less trashy movies and videos and use it on providing low income families with resources that empower teenagers through education and access to birth-control. They can create catchy spoken word poetry about objective sex education. They can create neat poetry events where they give out free birth-control. What appears to reduces abortion rates the most is generally access to birth control and providing young people with objective, fact-based sex education. If the people behind this video want to reduce abortion rates they should team up with groups that provide sex-education and birth-control, not produce what appears to be nothing more than anti-abortion propaganda.

Producing a video where they call doctors hit-men, and call a medical procedure murder, won’t reduce abortion rates but it could reduce sympathy for families that are struggling with what to do if a pregnancy endangers a living member of their group. This video doesn’t help women that are suffering because of pregnancies, it doesn’t give anyone anything useful, all it does is proselytize. All it does is make people feel guilty. Comfort, Zwayne, and Living Waters could probably work with an organization that is determined to reduce pregnancies, but they instead choose to use their time in an absolutely ineffective and potentially offensive way.

If Comfort, Living Waters, and Zwayne want to make 2017 a year where they try to reduce abortion rates they should team up with organizations that do real work in this area, and that includes groups like Planned Parenthood. If they don’t want to do that they should instead work to create networks where people are provided with birth-control, instructed on how to use that birth-control, and given quality and objective sex-education. I do know that while this video will appeal to their supporters, it isn’t actually going to have a real effect on the abortion debate. That being said they have an audience and should use their audience responsibly.