The Lazy Slander of Pro-Lifers
One of the most frequently repeated canards of the abortion debate is that pro-lifers really don't care about life. As much as they talk about protecting the unborn, we are told, pro-lifers do nothing to support mothers and infants who are already in the world. Liberal writers such as Matthew Yglesias are given to observing that pro-lifers believe that "life begins at conception and ends at birth." At Commonweal, David Gibson, a journalist who frequently covers the abortion debate, asks how much pro-lifers do for mothers: "I just want to know what realistic steps they are proposing or backing. I'm not sure I'd expect to hear anything from pro-life groups now since there's really been nothing for years."
This lazy slander is as common as it is untrue. Of course, there is much more that needs to be done, but in the decades since Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers have taken the lead in offering vital services to mothers and infants in need. Operating with little support—and often actual opposition—from agencies, foundations, and local governments, pro-lifers have relied upon a network of committed donors and volunteers to make great strides in supporting mothers and their infants. It's time the media takes notice.
In the United States there are some 2,300 affiliates of the three largest pregnancy resource center umbrella groups, Heartbeat International, CareNet, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA). Over 1.9 million American women take advantage of these services each year. Many stay at one of the 350 residential facilities for women and children operated by pro-life groups. In New York City alone, there are twenty-two centers serving 12,000 women a year. These centers provide services including pre-natal care, STI testing, STI treatment, ultrasound, childbirth classes, labor coaching, midwife services, lactation consultation, nutrition consulting, social work, abstinence education, parenting classes, material assistance, and post-abortion counseling.
Religious groups also provide crucial services to needy mothers and infants. John Cardinal O'Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, famously pledged to assist any woman from anywhere experiencing a crisis pregnancy, and the current Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, recently renewed Cardinal O'Connor's pledge. The Catholic Church—perhaps the single most influential pro-life institution in the United States—makes the largest financial, institutional and personnel commitments to charitable causes of any private source in the United States. These include AIDS ministry, health care, education, housing services, and care for the elderly, disabled, and immigrants. In 2004 alone, 562 Catholic hospitals treated over 85 million patients; Catholic elementary and high schools educated over 2 million students; Catholic colleges educated nearly 800,000 students; Catholic Charities served over eight-and-a-half million different individuals. In 2007, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development awarded nine million dollars in grants to reduce poverty. And in 2009, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network spent nearly five million dollars in services for impoverished immigrants.
The Catholic Church is far from the only pro-life religious group that assists the needy. At the Manhattan Bible Church, a pro-life church in New York since 1973, Pastor Bill Devlin and his congregation run a soup kitchen that has served over a million people and a K-8 school that has educated 90,000 needy students. Pastor Devlin and other church families have adopted scores of babies, and taken in scores of pregnant women, including some who were both drug-addicted and HIV positive. The church runs a one-hundred-and-fifty bed residential drug rehabilitation center and a prison ministry at Rikers Island. All told, the church runs some forty ministries, and all without a government dime.
La complejidad hispana: Todo cambió en el 2012
The Latest in Movie News, May 20, 2013
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David F
A few years ago several single mothers went through the RCIA at my church (and given their situations and age of their children, their children did also). They were made welcome. They had not been made welcome at several other churches. Being pro-life, in my view, does not simply mean providing healthcare or financial support; it also means (for instance) not shunning or otherwise making unwelcome single mothers. Jesus, who dined with sinners on multiple occasions, told the woman taken in adultery to go forth and sin no more; he did not condemn her for her past behaviour. The Catholic school in New York a few years ago that fired an unmarried woman who became pregnant did not in my view send a pro-life message; it sent a message that any similar woman (or female student) who became pregnant could avoid a lot of problems like loss of a job by simply having a secret, legal abortion...reject the sin, not the sinner.
Christian Lawyer
Interesting that almost all the services identifed as being provided by the pro-life movement concern woman and "infants." So, they've moved from only caring for babies in the womb to caring for them through infancy. At least that's a step forward. Now, if they could only care about the rest of their childhood. And it's more than a bit disingenuous for the "pro-life movement" to take credit for all the Catholic "social justice agenda" (for which I give Catholics great credit) when the Evangelical part of the pro-life movement spends a significant part of their political muscle opposing that very "agenda." Further, the idea that the availability of contraception leads to more abortions is just ludicrous. The pro-life movement is in complete denial of the fact that the universal health care, social safety nets, and other social justice policies of our European friends, all programs the Evangelicals demonize, have resulted in far lower abortion rates there than in our country.
John M
The pro-life argument needs to be persistent, that sex can always lead to pregnancy, even if attempts at birth control are made, so when a woman chooses to have sex she has already made her choice to give birth to the baby that she may conceive. The follow-on is that those who are pro-life will be with the woman to support her to encourage the father to remain in the household, and to help them find resources to strenghthen their relationship if it wavers or weakens, so their child will continue to have the benefit of its father and mother working together to raise the child to adulthood, hopefully in a Christian household. This approach will, hopefully, counter the pro-abortion crowd's arguments about "reproductive choice", which amounts to promotion of a lifestyle of uncommitted and uncontrolled sex, and emphasize that pro-life means conception-to-grave support for mother, father, and child.