Over at Patheos, I blog [1] about the obligations both sides of the abortion debate have in the current case of the young migrant woman and her prematurely born child:
So I ask you, if you are pro-choice: write everything you write on this issue like it was a letter to this child. If you can, go further – every time you are about to write a word on this issue, imagine yourself looking at this child at five or ten years of age. Imagine looking at them when they turn twenty or thirty.
Imagine looking them straight in the eye and saying “In the compassionate society I’d prefer to see, you would be dead. You would have been aborted earlier – quietly, invisibly – and you would not be here. Maybe you would be a loss, but you and those like you are the loss I will accept to ensure that no woman has to carry a pregnancy to term after being raped. You and children like you will have less of a right to life in the womb than those whose fathers are not violent criminals. Maybe that isn’t fair. But then, neither is life.”
I think those of us who are pro-life are just as obliged to face the woman:
Because, after all, it is not just the government that has failed this young woman. We who call ourselves pro-life have failed her too. By failing to do justice to the dignity our immigrants and asylum seekers, by failing to vote on the care of the most vulnerable rather than the state of our next paycheck, by refusing to demand more from our public representatives, by allowing a culture of shame and secrecy to surround victims of rape, by failing to ensure that a circle of support and protection surrounds every pregnant woman regardless of “socioeconomic status”, by failing to get out there and help women like this ourselves, we have all in some way done our part in allowing this woman to become a victim of a throwaway culture.
I invite you to read the whole thing [1].