It’s About Making Babies!

Sam’s Stories today has a poignant message – her husband is rooting for Ron Paul as candidate. And Sam is quite opposed to Ron Paul’s anti-abortion stand.

I recall the activism that got abortion legalized. The argument went that illegal abortions killed too many women. That unwanted births threatened women’s lives and the lives of their families.

I hope that no one I know ever needs an abortion, but I actively support the need that the choice be available.

I would be happier if every ‘pro-life’ person would sign up, to pay for the medical care and social disruption of every woman that would have chosen and abortion, and pledge to care for the resulting infant.

I have never believed that abortion was about promiscuous behavior. Abortion is about escaping poverty, about salvaging the lives of mothers and families. About letting young girls have a life, instead of derailing them away from school, away from friends, and away from family.

In 1982 I met a woman, then 29, sent by her parents to the Lutheran home for unwed mothers in Minneapolis. I know that two years ago the unwed mother program in the Ponca City School System was restricted to high school girls – there wasn’t room for the 7th grade and 8th grade unwed mothers. Or the 6th grade pregnant girls. I am not aware that the program, or the need, has changed any. While I am relieved that school girls are no longer banned from town due to pregnancy – I graduated high school in 1970, and recall a Sophomore year girl ‘sent away’ because pregnancies weren’t allowed in school! – I haven’t seen any anti-abortion answers to the devastation unwanted pregnancies wreak among the young, the poor, the struggling, and the oppressed.

Using the snappy ‘pro life’ label for radical anti-abortion activism is probably good PR, but really misses the point. The anti-abortionists, too many of them, are *not* pro life – they have focused on a single, isolated, minuscule part of the problem – pregnancy and birth. Rather than deal with the way society, the law, the economy, and families impact the lives of those affected by an unwanted pregnancy, they lean on often perverted religion and on charismatic rabble rousers to do their thinking. In the real world there are life and death decisions. Only the willfully escapist will claim that such decisions have already been made, just deal with it.

About Ron Paul? I suggested Sam should look at all the issues and ethics involved, in each of the candidates. But an anti-abortionist gets a mark ‘against’ from me.