Right to embellish

Back at Union Station this morning, I saw a group of people who'd clearly been in town protesting. One of them had a beautiful faux-fur coat on, and a GIANT cross. One of her friends was a little more casually dressed, but she was carrying maybe two dozen fake roses.

They had a sign, which said, "Look what you lose when you choose," and had a picture on it. The picture had a baby in it, but the baby was sort of in the background, out of focus. The foreground was a picture of presumably the mother's hand with a wedding band on it, with the baby's hand resting on top of it. The script on the sign was lovely, and sparkly scrapbook-store-looking silver and gold snowflakes surrounded the picture.

Some thoughts:

• I don't care where you stand on this issue*, the sign was pretty.
• A lot of people spell "lose" as "loose" already. That drives me crazy. I am glad that these folks got it right, even when rhyming it with "choose," which I would think would make one more inclined to misspell it.
• I saw several protesters of several kinds this week, and all of them were well-behaved and not acting like jackasses. No screaming profanity, no "God Hates Fags." Seriously.
• What do snowflakes have to do with abortion? Is there some kind of every-one-of-us-is-a-perfect-and-unique-individual thing going on in the pro-life movement these days? Because if so, I have not been keeping up. Also if so, they need to be more explicit, because I am pretty smart and also inclined to think in metaphors, and it took me about eight hours to come up with that.
• The sign had it almost right. You are more likely to convince people not to abort with pictures of cute babies than with pictures of fetuses that look like aliens.
• The sign was just a little off. The dominant image was definitely the wedding band. I am not sure that wedding bands are what people lose when they choose, literally or figuratively.
• The sign was also a little bit off here: Under current law, everyone chooses. The people who choose what the pro-lifers want them to are still choosing. For that matter, since most of those folks seem to be Christians (and these ones certainly were), under the doctrine of free will everyone chooses. That is what theoretically makes choosing not to abort so superior, that it is an exertion of free will. If we don't have free will, everyone does what God wants us to anyway.
  

*Where I stand on this issue, for the record: Firmly in the pro-choice camp. I have spent enough time making signs, though, to appreciate a well-crafted one.