By Judie Brown
The New York Times recently published Lori Szala’s insightful commentary entitled “The Problem with Linking Abortion and Economics.” Szala opined that an argument that links the “need” for abortion to financial well-being among women has a dark side, and stated: “It’s a profoundly dehumanizing argument. It reduces mothers and their children to mere economic objects, and amounts to saying we are justified in killing those who impede our economic progress. Parenting presents undeniable challenges, but no one argues that those challenges give parents the right to kill their children.”
Szala’s assessment is both accurate and reasonable, but we must never forget that those who clamor and scream for abortion rights are rarely accurate and hardly ever reasonable.
For example, the Guttmacher Institute—Planned Parenthood’s research arm—published a study on abortion among the poor and stated that poor women need abortion because they understand “the economic impact unplanned childbearing would have on themselves and their families.” The Institute goes on to state: “Most abortion patients say that they cannot afford a child or another child, and most say that having a baby would interfere with their work, school or ability to care for their other children.”
Apparently the idea of practicing chastity in order to avoid pregnancy in the first place is not something poor women—or perhaps most women—consider a viable option in our era of quick and easy fixes. In fact, leftist publications like The Nation run to Planned Parenthood’s corner in defense of their killing ways, claiming that “the war on Planned Parenthood is also an assault on poor women of color.” But contrary to that claim, we are confronted with the fact that Planned Parenthood targets black women by strategically placing clinics in minority neighborhoods.
Once again we see the disparity between the facts and the hyperbole designed to convince the public that abortion is good for the poor, an asset to women who live below the poverty level, and a boon to the economy.
But the one mistake abortion advocates make time and time again is the most obvious one. They don’t understand that motherhood is a blessing. Motherhood begins when the child’s life begins at his biological beginning, not when a female who is already a mother decides she does or does not want her child.
The decision to reject her baby exposes a mother’s loss of her sense of self. Perhaps she does not understand that she is with child, or perhaps she simply does not care. Either way, Mother Teresa’s words about poverty bear repeating:
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
It is that specific poverty of love that we must strive to restore. Our society needs to foster a love that welcomes children instead of a mentality that sees them as disposable waste. Curing poverty begins with love, not death.
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