By Judie Brown
The well-known Mother Goose rhyme that began “There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile” made an excellent jump rope poem and was easy for little tykes to learn. But these days when we think of crooked men, we are more likely to contemplate politicians than we are little old men with crooked cats. So, what’s the difference?
The crooked man in the poem was probably impaired and unable to stand up straight. Today’s crooked man is a deceiver, a manipulator. To wit, he is an all-around scoundrel. The thing about this is that there are crooked men and women everywhere. So who is to say where one might find the most devious among them?
For our purposes, let’s start with the challenge about the abortion pill brought to the Supreme Court by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Subsequently the nine justices ruled, 9-0, that “the pro-life doctors who brought the case do not have standing—they were not injured, and so the court does not intervene.”
Even though the Alliance “sued on behalf of women who were injured by the abortion drug by the thousands—including women who have been killed,” the court refused the case. The decision exemplifies the type of crooked man to whom we refer.
In a similar vein, though much more heinous, is the story of Ayala Isenberg, a young woman who was sexually abused but who eventually broke that cycle. She told Live Action News, “My abuser had always told me that if I got pregnant, which he knew was a possibility, he would beat me to force me to have a miscarriage. So, when I discovered I was pregnant, I remembered holding my stomach, praying to God the baby inside me would go away.”
While Isenberg miscarried her baby, the experience changed her life. At the hands of a crooked man she conceived a child, but in the hands of a loving community she became an advocate for life, telling her story—“To Be a Pro Life Jew”—on Substack.
We also see that New York senator Chuck Schumer—a politician and a crooked man who has spent years supporting abortion—is currently upset. You see, while this crooked man favors directly killing a preborn baby, he is also an advocate of in vitro fertilization. If that sounds like an oxymoron, then please read what he said on this matter: “Today’s bill protecting IVF is as pro-family as it gets, and we should vote yes today. . . . It is a contradiction to claim you are pro-family but then turn around and block protections for IVF.”
Perhaps Schumer does not see the paradox in his statement, but we do. And we sincerely hope that he is able to discern it as well.
The crooked man—a human being who sees personal choice as the guideline dictating life or death decisions—is too much with us these days. Whether in the classroom, in Congress, or in the media, these are people who have perhaps rejected truth in deference to public opinion.
We hasten to say that average Americans seem to be as twisted in their thinking as the crooked men noted above.
The solution is a simple one. Once an explanation is provided, clarifying what the term pro-choice means and what abortion does to a child, we will see more Americans than ever before who want to be identified as pro-life. In fact, as more people think about what abortion actually does to people, we suggest that the crooked man is becoming straighter by the day.
To think about things with an untwisted mindset requires genuine understanding. Once the hyperbole, the confusion, and the deceit are cleared away, a rational person can see that abortion kills.
It is as plain as the nose on your face: Crooked men err because they have yet to understand that pregnancy is a blessing—and that’s a fact.