Hate Mail

I wrote recently on the Generations for Life blog about the hate mail we get on a regular basis at Pro-Life Action League/Generations for Life/Families Against Planned Parenthood.

As you might guess, with all the attention recently surrounding the fight against the Abortion Fortress of Aurora, we’ve been seeing far more hate mail—which is almost always sent anonymously—than usual.

Like this:

[Message from You Suck A** (burninhell@stupidrepublicans.com)]

you people are f***ing losers and should burn in hell for harrassing women

You Suck A**

And:

[Message from PRO LIFERS ARE A JOKE!!! (f***you@lickmya**.com)]

you should be ashamed of yourselfs lying to the masses about abortion and pregnancy and getting youth involved if you hated abortion so much you;d be handing out condoms not lies !!!! i hope there is a hell so you all can burn in it! god does not promote hate and lies. you are using his name in vain. get real jobs you losers!!!

PRO LIFERS ARE A JOKE!!!

And:

I hope your own 12 year old daughter gets raped and pregnant so that then you can deal with this situation from a reality perspective.

Now, the temptation we feel is to respond to hatred with hatred of our own. And it's hard to imagine anything more vile than telling someone you hope their 12-year old daughter gets raped.

But, as I recently said in a comment on a post on the Generations for Life blog, we as pro-lifers must resist this temptation. We can't stoop to the level of hating anyone. Period.

Bryan Kemper of Stand True illustrated this point brilliantly in a recent commentary titled "Loving compassionate pro-life vs. Angry anti-abortion".

It begins:

The title of this commentary should seem like a no-brainer for Christians. It is so clear from scripture that we must love our enemies and have compassion on others. While we must take a stand against evil and share the truth, it has to be done in love.

Read the whole thing.

Speaking of anonymous messages, over the weekend an anonymous comment was posted on my Trotting Out the Same Tired Old Talking Points post from a couple of weeks ago, in which I wrote:

Ah, yes, because everybody knows that making contraception more widely available is the answer to preventing abortion, right?

Right?

Mmmm...not so much.

The anonymous commenter said:

Actually...it does

http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2007/10/11/index.html

First, although I allow them, under normal circumstances I find the practice of posting anonymous comments really, really annoying—and not a little dastardly. At the very least, sign a pseudonym at the end of your comment. Sheesh.

The link pointed out by the anonymous commenter is a news release from the Alan Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of the Wal-Mart of the Abortion Industry) trumpeting the already infamous "compilation of estimates based on estimates", which pro-life bloggers had begun to vet as soon as it was released two weeks ago. (See more hole-poking of the study here.)

Those who believe in the Creed of Contraception and the Sacrament of Abortion can kick and scream and yell and shout all they want about how the former helps prevent the latter, but in the grand scheme of things, it, um, doesn't. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Recently, I responded thusly to an e-mail that came to the Pro-Life Action League from someone asking about failure rates for the Pill:

Statisticians who assess the effectiveness of contraceptives use the term "perfect use" to describe the ideal conditions under which the lowest possible pregnancy rates can be achieved. For the pill, with "perfect use", the pregnancy rate is, as your doctor said, around 1%.

However, the term "perfect use" is, for all practical purposes, useless. It's merely a theoretical concept that offers a false sense of security. How often does "perfect use" occur? Rarely? Ever?

On the other hand, "typical use" is a much more accurate gauge of a given contraceptive's failure rate. Even the Alan Guttmacher Institute—the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the U. S., and one of the largest providers of contraceptives as well—acknowledges with "typical use", the pill has an 8% failure rate.

This statistic also appears on the same page from the AGI's website:

"Fifty-four percent of U.S. women who had an abortion in 2000 were using a method [of contraception] in the month they became pregnant."

They then say that this doesn't mean that contraceptives fail 54% of the time, and then say that these women apparently didn't use their contraceptives "perfectly".

Of course they didn't use them perfectly, because in all likelihood, no one uses them perfectly.