Life Issues

If you haven’t yet seen this, you must read the weeklong series at Creative Minority Report called The Baby Gianna Story. It’s a personal story of one woman with an unwanted pregnancy who changes her mind and fights for her daughter after another young woman not only convinces her otherwise, but makes it her personal mission to become an advocate for mother and daughter. And you won’t believe what they have to battle to give this child a chance at life: not just the baby’s abusive father who pressures the mother to the point of violence, but also health-care professionals at a Catholic hospital who apply coercive pressure to abort this child. Yes, at a Catholic hospital.

So it’s both a personal story and a look at how Catholic hospitals deal with doctors and other professionals within their facilities who openly defy Church teaching. One of the best pieces of writing on a Catholic blog in recent memory.

A writer in the UK’s Guardian newspaper proposes that children, especially those in the First World are an unconscionable burden on the rest of us.

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO2 every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess…

In 2050, 95% of the extra population will be poor and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today’s standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis…

He then proposes that in addition to voluntary birth control and voluntary abortion, we should start adopting limits on the number of children people can have, which would result in, presumably, involuntary birth control and involuntary abortion.

In 1729 Jonathan Swift was using satire when he suggested that the Irish sell their children as food for the rich. But these people aren’t joking any more.

Have you ever noticed, however, that the authors of such pieces, even as they tell as that we should “cull” First World children, they never once consider how much they could benefit the planet by offing themselves? How much would they reduce the carbon footpring if they were no longer destroying trees and wasting ink on their offensive and predictable left-wing columns in newspapers, not to mention the rest of their conspicuous consumption?

[Link via Off the Record.]

One of the arguments made by pro-aborts is that legalized abortion gives women freedom from the “tyranny” of the their unborn children, that it gives them choices and options (other than the first one to have sex that resulted in a baby in the first case, of course). The reality is that the availability of legalized abortion usually results in less freedom for women at risk of being pressured by people in their lives and by their own life plans.

The latest case in point: A a pregnant teen was stabbed by her ex-boyfriend, the father of her child, because she refused to make the “proper” choice. He allegedly told police that “she was going to abort the pregnancy ‘one way or the other.’” So much for the freedom of the mother.

This isn’t an isolated instance. Whenever I’ve participated in a pro-life vigil outside an abortion clinic, I’ve always seen obviously reluctant women being figuratively and literally dragged into the door. At one Operation Rescue action back in the early ’90s, I saw an obvious mom, dad, and young adult daughter get out of a car and head to the clinic door. At the last minute the daughter turned and started to head back to the car, but dad and mom grabbed her arms. The crying girl was then dragged by her parents and the clinic escorts through the clinic doors. All this happened in full view of pro-abortion counter-protesters, police, and the media, but they all turned a blind eye.

I’ve seen a very interesting illustration of this phenomenon in pop culture just recently. There’s a new TV show called “Defying Gravity”, about a group of astronauts in 2050 on a mission to visit 7 planets in our solar system. There’s a running plot about a mysterious being manipulating the mission and the crew, as well as a series of flashbacks by the characters to recent events in their lives before the mission began. Think of it as “Lost” in space, so to speak.

One of the astronauts, Zoe Barnes, had a brief sexual encounter with one of her fellow astronauts five years previously during training for the mission, resulting in a pregnancy that could end her chances at being selected for the mission. In the premise of the show, the Supreme Court has reversed Roe v. Wade evidently, but one of her fellow astronauts tells Zoe that she “knows a guy”. With the pressure from her friend and from her own ambitions, it is understood at this point in the story that she aborted her child. Interestingly, Zoe keeps hearing the sound of a baby crying on board the ship, a sound that nobody else can hear. Is it her own guilty conscience or perhaps the mysterious being? We don’t know yet.

While this is fiction, the pressure on many to abort their children is very real, whether from boyfriends, husbands, or fathers or from bosses and career ambitions or from fears of whether she could be a good mother or from well-meaning doctors giving a difficult diagnosis of pre-natal birth defects or complications. A quick Web search for “pressured to abort” will garner dozens of similar stories.

Legalized abortion-on-demand, far from granting freedom of choice to women as pro-aborts claim, has created an opportunity for confused or reluctant women to be forced onto a path they would have been better off not having had opened before them.

President Obama has chosen his Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, to replace David Souter. As expected she’s very liberal and she’s not a pro-lifer by any means. But then we couldn’t have expected anything else from the most pro-abortion president ever, and anyway she’s replacing another liberal member of the court and so the conservative-liberal balance remains.

So, it’s interesting to see the abortion-related criticism against Sotomayor coming from’pro-abortion groups. It’s not that she’s too pro-life, there’s certainly no evidence of that. No, it’s that she’s not quite rabidly pro-abortion enough.

In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”

In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.

Judge Sotomayor has also ruled on several immigration cases involving people fighting deportation orders to China on the grounds that its population-control policy of forcible abortions and birth control constituted persecution.

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

And in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

In my quick read of these summaries I see only a judge abiding by the law, who doesn’t undermine it just because she might not like the pro-lifers’ position. Did these radical abortion groups want her to rule against the pro-lifers who thought police used excessive force, to deny them their day in court simply because she doesn’t like their politics? I suppose it’s some small— very small—measure of comfort that she’s not one of those judges who rules on a whim. (What does it say for our society that we have such low expectations for our jurists?) Was she supposed to deport the Chinese woman to a country that would subject her to a forced abortion?

I say this reveals a lot about those who support so-called abortion rights in this country, that these groups don’t really care about women having a choice, but that they view pregnancy and childbirth as evil by default.

Meanwhile, the White House, instead of telling the bloodthirsty mob of Moloch-worshippers to back off, has tried to placate them with assurances of Sotomayor’s reliable vote on any abortion-related case that would come before the Court.

But White House officials appeared eager to send a message that abortion rights groups do not need to worry about how she might rule in a challenge to Roe v. Wade.

“He did not specifically ask, as we’ve stated for the past several days,” Gibbs said. “But as I just said, I think he feels — I know he feels — comfortable, generally, with her interpretation of the Constitution being similar to that of his.”

Win one for the blood-red horde.

Photo credit: Official White House photo.