A million government jobs

 

What do you call it when you take over an organization and fire a majority of the staff? A Musk? A Milei? Perhaps a Trump 47?

Everyone is so freaked out by this concept. They see it as raider behavior, unfair to the workers, and possibly devastating to the economy. It’s the sort of thing that venture capitalists do after an unfriendly merger, after all.

Too many people don’t understand economics.

I’m not saying that massive layoffs are without costs, especially in an area that has put all of its eggs in one economic basket. My town is currently reeling from John Deere’s decision to move production to Mexico.

But in a healthy economy, layoffs are as much opportunities as they are obstacles. When one group stops using a resource, another group has the chance to obtain it at a lower cost. Local industries which have been struggling to find qualified staff will grow because former Deere’s workers are looking for jobs. It has been decades since the farm equipment giant was hiring unskilled labor, too, so they are people with valuable education and experience. A lot of those workers will lose some income, which is hard, but it also happens to various people all the time.

The government is different in some ways. Too much of the fat in our bureaucracy only exists because bureaucracy might as well be a synonym for cancer. It starts as healthy cells trying to accomplish something valuable and becomes a tumor with the potential to destroy the organism. Economic forces generally stop it from being lethal to private enterprises, but the government is sadly, mostly immune to the cure. The percent of revenues that actually make it to productive activities has been shrinking rapidly for decades in public institutions. Your local school is probably a prime example. Teachers who decades ago shared a handful of administrative staff are now seriously outnumbered by them, while educational outcomes have tanked by every single metric available. If you wanted to cut that budget, you wouldn’t fire the teacher. You would fire the backroom, but every time the budget is threatened, the plan endangers the jobs of classroom staff.

If you can find an honest teacher and get her to speak off the record, the odds are she knows those people eat reports for breakfast and everything they do actually makes the frontline job harder and less effective. Frankly, the whole economy needs far fewer people who create nothing but obstacles to output. The only downside to firing them is the risk that they will continue to hamper productivity anywhere they land. The upside is that the whole organization would probably be healthier paying their unemployment than letting them keep their jobs.

This is why the corporate raiders start this way. And corporate raiders exist because they can increase productivity and cut costs. We shouldn’t be afraid of this, even when it hits us personally. We should be afraid of the people who take almost half of every dime we make to produce goods and services we would never buy at going rate.

Tales from the Sidewalk, Day 3: Nowhere

I wasn't on the sidewalk today. I didn't even look at the schedule. I was home for most of it, doing housework as I had been trained to do in times of immenent grief. As a kid I found this exasperating, but I know now it is a gift as mindless tasks fill the ever present need to be doing something and put your life in better condition for the coming chaos. 

My uncle died at 3:00. He wasn't exactly a great role model. He worked extremely hard, but he also partied very hard.  He was known for his epic gatherings hosted every Friday the weather allowed. We joked, standing around his cooling body that he has forced us to get together at his place on a Friday one last time. 

He leaves behind a wife, two sons, one daughter, five grandchildren, two great grandchildren, fifteen nieces and nephews, and countless friends. 

Tales from the Sidewalk, Day Two: The life sandwich.

Today is a sandwich day. Not the eating kind, but existential kind. The kind where I experience the ways life is being cheapened not just in its beginnings, but also at its end. The kind where my prayer time outside an abortion facility is interrupted by a frantic call from my mom who is at the bedside of her brother who is dying of hospice.

I make a frantic call of my own, asking my co-leader to take over my role messaging vigil participants to fill up our calendar for a day or two so I can go to her. I suppose I should think of it as going for them. All of the six siblings and a couple of their spouses are crowded into the house. For most of them, hospice is a thing they accept or even embrace. In the sixty years or so that palliative care has been part of Western medicine, they've become slowly acclimated to the idea that someone will come along and declare that your life is over and pump you full of morphine until you die. It's easier that way. None of the awkward lingering that the elderly tend to when given such extreme measures as IV fluids. Without the large families of the past, it's almost impossible to imagine doing things any other way. Nursing homes or full time home care are insanely expensive and the two or three kids their generation had are ill equipped to pay those bills or do that work, even when almost everyone is holding down a full time job. This is the moment when the housewife suddenly becomes a precious resource with her flexible schedule and well-earned ease in dealing with other people's bodily fluids. Of the sixteen first cousins on that side, most of whom are married, I am one of only two who don't work in a paying job. The other is disabled. I will hug them and try to make sure they eat and drink and listen when needed, but I'm really there for my mom. 

So I leave the sidewalk as soon as my replacement arrives and run home to throw dinner in the crock pot for my family. I grab an old Bible on my way out the door. On the sidewalk I read from a Bible app, but there I need something that can be passed around. Something that doesn't have to be re-charged. My uncle's family used to be members of our church. They believe in God. They're pretty sure they own a Bible. I have a whole collection, including ones left behind by several of my husband's grandparents and great aunts and uncles. I suspect that Great Aunt Marie, who I never met, won't mind if I leave her study Bible there for them. 

We were very close to this uncle and his kids when I was growing up. My folks helped build this house. A million memories flood me every time I am here. Playing king of hill on the pile of construction sand and eating bologna and ketchup sandwiches when it was just a two-by-four skeleton. Making a fort out of an old log pile. Tromping through the woods. Telling dirty jokes in the tree house. My older and cooler cousin teaching me to slow dance on the driveway before my first junior high party. Panic attacks from the years before I started medication and any large crowd would put me into fight or flight mode. My uncle sure could draw a crowd back in the day. They had great parties here. Panic attacks create irrational fears. I still have to take a few calming breaths when I arrive to remind myself that I'm safe and that I drove myself and can leave at any time. But I can't. Because my uncle is dying and my mom needs someone to hear her when she says, "this is wrong." Someone to say, "I won't let them do this to you."

In survival training they say you can go three minutes without air, three days without water and three weeks without food. My uncle is on his third day without fluids. If you've ever had a really bad hangover, which is mostly dehydration, you have a pretty good idea of how he feels. Or how he would feel if he wasn't receiving a full dose of morphine every time he showed signs of regaining consciousness. If there is ever any doubt of whether I'd want to be artificially hydrated in my final days, let me be clear. I fully consent to IV fluids. I demand IV fluids. I've actually looked into what it would take to have the equipment on hand at home just in case. DO NOT LET ME DIE OF DEHYDRATION.

He may not die of dehydration. He's also laying flat on his back and they are suppressing his cough reflex with drugs. In between visits from the hospice nurse, who clears his airway, his oxygen levels slowly drop as his airway becomes more and more clogged. He may just choke to death on his own phlegm. Also low on my list of ways I want to go. 

Everyone wants so badly to reduce his suffering. There was a time when I might have agreed that was a worthy goal. Nobody likes suffering. At almost fifty I know I am better for having suffered. None of the great epiphanies in my life came in the midst of ease. I have never grown closer to God in comfort. Character doesn't come from getting what you want. Of all the things I can't imagine my life without, none of them were without hardship and discomfort. To quote The Princess Bride, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

The worst part may be that my uncle didn't choose this. It was chosen for him. He wasn't actually dying in an imminent sense until hospice got involved. He had some dementia, was still physically weak from successful cancer treatment and was probably over-medicated. Then he had an injury that made him unable to care for himself. His wife and daughter who are also in poor health couldn't care for him, so when his hospital time was up the doctors asked if they wanted him sent to a nursing home they didn't feel they could afford or hospice. There are other options, but you have to demand them and fight for them and spend money out of your own pocket. Hospice is free and oh, so easy. 

On the first few days, when they took away all his medications, he was mentally sharper than he'd been in months. Just a week ago we were watching the birds out the window and he laughed when I made a joke and growled when a squirrel managed to get on to the bird feeder. Today he lays there looking translucent and taking the raspy, rattling breaths of the dying. He hasn't been awake for days. He may never be again. 

I want to be indignant and bully my way to bedside and demand that they do better. I want to write my congressman and my hospital and my church and demand the WE do better. I'll probably do the latter, but the former is a battle my mom already lost and starting it back up will only create a fight and not a solution. Still, I'm ashamed as I sit there in the awkward quiet as we try not to upset the man we're killing. Ashamed of myself and my family and my society. Ashamed of the cult of death that believes that the way to end suffering is to kill the suffering. 

I love you, mom. I won't let them do this to you.

And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance.

Romans 5:3

Tales from the Sidewalk, Day One. Hope.

The moon is still up as I don my old "Pray to End Abortion" sweatshirt and leave for the first day of the fall 2021 40 Days for Life campaign. My life is kind of in shambles right now. I feel like I'm already praying for life constantly with an uncle in hospice, one friend in Mayo waiting to find out if he has a treatable form of lymphoma or a variety that kills you quickly and another friend at the University Hospital where his toddler is struggling to survive to her third round of chemo. It's the last one, whether it works or not. My husband is spending his vacation trying to get his late father's neglected house in salable condition. I helped him load dozens of boxes and bags into a moving van yesterday and I ache everywhere. My step daughter is refusing to go to school. We've gone through every punishment we can think of - to no avail. My anti-depressant isn't working as well as the one I had to give up because of my auto immune condition. If you drop by my house, well, there appears to have been a struggle. The toilet is clean and there are dishes to eat off of and clothes to wear. Sorry about the dog hair. He's a German shedder. My phone fell off the charger last night and I only have 20% of my battery power.

But I'm headed out to Planned Parenthood at 7:00 in the morning on a Wednesday feeling horribly guilty that I can't quite get myself to the mental place I want to be in. "Fear not." It's all over the Bible. It's the message I try to convey to the women who I meet as a Sidewalk Advocate for Life. I have so many resources I can offer them in terms of physical and emotional support, but the one thing that I have to bring is hope. Hope that they are stronger than they feel. Hope that the people I represent really will make sure their needs are met. Hope that their baby will be worth all the challenges. Hope that I find really hard to feel on that sunrise drive.

Our rally was poorly attended. I know we were up against several other events, including The Church at Planned Parenthood, but the vigil calendar looks like a ghost town, with only three other hours filled that day besides mine. That's 8 more hours I have to find coverage for. I'm there for the first hour because I'm the leader. After volunteering for several years I agreed to take over last year when the old leader left the area to be near her grandchildren. Like me, she understood that leadership comes from getting your own hands dirty as often as not. The best way to get people to go where you send them is to invite them first to come to where you are. 

Even with that calendar to fill, I spend the first half hour on my knees. This the one part I don't struggle with. Well, my knees don't love it, but I have no trouble finding things to say to God in the cool quiet of the morning. The Lord's prayer centers me. Then I pray for the clients who walk through those doors of death, the staff, their vendors, the community, the nation and the church. I pray to fight back the lie that women can't have meaningful, valuable lives unless they chase sex rather than love; that the natural rhythms and power of the female body are bad; that any other work is more important than bringing up the next generation. I pray that God will drive out the worship of self from all hearts, especially mine. 

I'd love to say my work here is selfless, but that would be a lie. I'm here because too many people I love were in the cross-hairs of the abortion industry before they were born - the children of parents who were young or poor or in a bad relationship or not really in a relationship at all; people who had some prenatal diagnosis that may or may not have significantly affected their life. Some of them survived actual abortion appointments, though most of them don't know that detail. How could you ever tell your child you seriously considered snuffing out their life before they took their first breath? Too many women - and men - I know have been damaged by the abortion of their own child. Too many grandparents have had to beg for the lives of their grandchildren only to be ignored and left to grieve both the life of their descendant and a their damaged relationship with their child. The scars of abortion and its victims are real. I know people are sinful and we'll never really wipe out all abortions. I also know how much we all suffer from living in a community and a country where you can kill your son or daughter in a strip mall in broad daylight on a Tuesday afternoon.

So I pray until my knees are numb and the hope comes. The power of the Holy Spirit doesn't magically fill the calendar, but twenty or so text messages goes a long way toward that. As I read from the book of Psalms I'm reminded of contacts I haven't reached out to yet. I recall a stack of contact cards and the name of the elder I met from a large church I haven't managed to connect with. Our campaign will get through the day. God will make it possible.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them.

Psalms 34:19 

You're not really pro-life unless...

If you were really pro-life, you'd support expanding welfare.

You call yourself pro-life, but I don't see you adopting a special needs child out of the foster care system.

Where are the pro-lifers when Trump puts children in cages?

Sound familiar? I rarely go a day without discovering a new way in which I'm not pro-life enough for some acquaintance of mine (and occasionally people I thought were friends). The ever-expanding list includes several things that are completely NOT pro-life (read about those here). Mostly, though, it is made up of things that people in favor of abortion THINK pro-lifers aren't doing. 

Please understand that the only thing you have to do to be pro-life is believe that the law should protect human beings from being intentionally killed from conception to natural death. That is the definition of pro-life. The list of situations in which we find it acceptable to end another person's life should be incredibly short and, "because they are dependent on me," should never be on it. We are not at war with our own offspring. Babies are not trying to hurt us. They have not committed any heinous crimes. We do not get to kill them. 

My most recent favorite is this one by Alyssa Horton that talks about what we aren't doing for women. Trying really hard not to assume her motivations, because maybe she really is that ignorant, but for the record, we're doing ALL those things. I'll admit I'm old and I've been in the movement since the 1970's but there isn't anything on that list I haven't personally done except be in the actual delivery room (I would if someone asked). My best friend in high school had two kids before we graduated. I went to prenatal classes with her for moral support. I've shared my tiny apartment with another girl who was tossed out of her parent's home for refusing to have an abortion and then my parents took in that baby's daddy when he was briefly homeless because the baby forced him to change all of his life plans. I've bought diapers and formula and stayed up all night with the single mom when her baby was in the hospital. I have babysat so a single mom could get a break or go to class or job interview. I've lost track of how many kids I'm not biologically related to who call me Aunt. 

I'm not bragging. The other reality of being a pro-lifer for four decades is that I know I'm not special. Before pregnancy centers were everywhere, most of us just did these things on our own, from our own pockets, without a moment's hesitation. We were never ignorant of how hard pregnancy can be and how issues like disability or poverty could make a situation seem impossible. Most of us were mothers. Most of us were poor or working class. Lots of us had been told that we should have abortions. Some of us had listened. 

Now, we have whole networks of people who dedicate themselves to meeting the needs of pregnant women in difficult situations. As a trained Sidewalk Advocate for Life and 40 Days for Life leader I have access to resources I would not have dared dream of a decade ago. The pregnancy center I work with does so much more than free pregnancy tests and crisis counseling. We match clients with volunteers who walk with them for at least a year AFTER baby is born. All that personal stuff Alyssa thinks we aren't doing, they do. Also, we provide prenatal vitamins, maternity clothes, baby clothes, diapers, cribs, formula, high chairs and car seats. We have parenting classes. We have mentors for men who want to be good fathers but are not sure they know how. We connect women without insurance to free or reduced fee maternity care. There are funds I can access for a woman with that will pay her back rent or utilities today and help her find appropriate financial support or a better job for the future.

What about the really hard cases? Well, I can put a woman who has been abused on the phone with a specialized counselor who can connect her to local exit and shelter services or if she's in immediate danger, the police. If a victim of sexual abuse agrees to talk to me, I can put her on the phone with another mother from rape who knows exactly what she's going through. If she's coming out of our facility, which only does medical abortions (the so-called abortion pill) when she talks to me, I can give her the number of a doctor who does abortion pill reversals right here. He will see her immediately. 

If all that fails, I have information on post abortion healing right there on the sidewalk. I can connect her to a trained local counselor or a specialized national group that will walk with her through the process of repentance and forgiveness. I have the gospel of Jesus Christ in my heart to connect her to love and compassion and hope. I will sit next to her at the memorial service for the unborn while she mourns her baby. I've done that before, too. 

If you are pro-life and all this stuff is news to you, I encourage you to connect with your local pregnancy center. There are around 3000 of them U.S. and most can be found pretty easily on Google or at Care-Net.org. While volunteering and financial support are always appreciated, just knowing their name and phone number can save lives. 

I would do anything for Life, but I won't do that...

Part 2 of, "You aren't really pro-life if..."

If you are on social media, any social media, you have seen the claims that you "aren't really pro-life if you don't support or oppose _______." In a world where the humanity of the unborn becomes harder and harder to deny, the forces promoting abortion are trying to make the human rights of the fetus more contingent on the actions and opinions of others, not less. I have devoted one blog to the things the pro-life movement is doing for women in crisis to empower them. Read it here. I am sure that list will continue to grow as we find more and more ways to care for families. Still, there are things in the accusatory posts that are not and should not ever be on those lists. 

Universal birth control

I know it seems counter-intuitive, but birth control actually causes more abortions than it prevents. I could write a whole book on it, and someone probably has, but the short version is pretty simple. Every type of birth control fails. Every single day thousands of women who thought they were 'protected' see a positive pregnancy test. A woman using hormonal birth control correctly every time for her entire fertile life has about a 30% chance of having an unplanned pregnancy. The percentage is higher for barrier methods. The illusion that they cannot get pregnant leads women to have sex in situations where they would not even consider having sex in if they thought pregnancy was a likely outcome. We don't know the exact numbers, but ask any pregnancy center director and they will tell you almost every client had access to or was using birth control and says they thought of their birth control method as basically fail-proof. As a result, they had sex with someone they did not want to have a child with or someone who did not want to have a child with them. Birth control changes behavior, even when it is not being used. Abortion rates are higher when birth control is readily accessible than they are when it is unavailable. This would be true even if hormonal birth control did not have so many unpleasant and dangerous side effects.

Free Universal Everything

The most basic thing to understand about how socialism does not prevent abortion is the reality that abortion rates in socialist countries are higher than anywhere else in the world. (I will talk about Scandinavian countries in a moment, but to quote them, "stop calling us socialists.")  Governments who expect to have to provide everything you need only value people who are working today. Their economies are so bad at producing the things people need right now that they can't afford to think about the future value of potential workers. A $300 abortion procedure is a lot more attractive to the those in power than a $10K delivery followed by 70-ish years of living expenses.  At the same time, people who expect the government to provide everything they need fail to do the things necessary to provide what children really need - like pursue education, get and stay married, invest in careers, buy homes, have money in savings. The result is "free and easy" abortion combined with women who feel like they cannot really provide for their children and men who feel no obligation towards those children. Socialism is the enemy of the nuclear family. This would be true even if socialism was otherwise a moral thing. 

Now, before you say, "But Sweden," (even though Sweden has asked us to stop doing that) please read this article from The National Review. The reality is that the social safety net in Sweden is only possible because of the economic robustness of the United States. We are still the engine that drives the world's economy. Every dime we pour back into taxes instead of into creating wealth actually makes it harder for places like Sweden to provide those massive public benefits.

Vote for Pro-Abortion Candidates

To introduce this topic, I need to mention the first rule of statistics. Correlation does not equal causation. Just because two trend lines match up doesn't mean that one caused the other. The latest abuse of correlation is the idea that because abortion rates have been lower under Democrat presidents than Republican presidents people who abhor abortion should vote for people who are vocally in favor of abortion at any time (up to and even after birth), for any reason, at public expense. This isn't because Democrat policies reduce abortion rates. This is because we spend the entire Republican administration fighting for abortion restrictions on both the state and federal level and the Democrat administrations spend their entire administration tearing them down. At the same time, Republican policies build the economy and Democrat policies build government power. All these things take years, so the effects of one administration's policies are generally experienced under the next. If you look at these numbers on a state-by-state basis, that reality becomes crystal clear. After states enact abortion restriction, abortion rates decrease. Where abortion access is increased or stays the same, abortion rates follow suit. 

Support Laws that Play Both Sides

Most pro-lifers would be shocked by the amount of legislation that restricts abortion in some circumstance but affirms the "right to abortion" in general. It's a game that law makers play to get support from the middle. The official pro-choice position is "abortion, any time, any place, any reason," but very few Americans actually support that. In fact, very few humans support that. Most people are only okay with abortion because they think it happens almost exclusively early in pregnancy and in so-called crisis situations. There's a reason the abortion lobby doesn't trot out the married, suburban, white mother of two who decided at 5 months that she didn't want to be pregnant during her summer vacation. So we play the middle game. We write laws that say you absolutely have the right to kill your baby as long as you do it before some arbitrary point. Or that you can kill your baby for any reason except for its sex organs or chromosomes. It is not just okay to demand legislation that is 100% correct, it is vital. If you have not had those laws thrown back in your face (if you were really pro-life, how come you supported a bill that says, "we affirm the right to abortion.") you will. You cannot speak out of both sides of your mouth and expect your word to mean anything. 

Why does my doctor want my baby to die?

 

This is Khaleesi Cortez. She was diagnosed with HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome) with Ventricular Septal Defect. Doctors have given her a 50% chance of survival. One of my pro-life Facebook pages has been praying for her and offering comfort and support to her worried mom. The comments section is full of personal stories from moms who were told they were carrying a child who wouldn't survive, a child who was horribly disabled or a child who would only live in excruciating pain. Being pro-life, they carried their child to term, mourning and praying, as their doctors encouraged them to 'terminate'. They were called selfish and heartless for fighting for that 'small' chance that their child would have meaningful life, often by the very person they were paying to care for their baby's health. 

Every one of them had either a perfectly healthy baby or a child who required some medical intervention before going on to live a pretty much normal life. Dozens of nearly identical stories. Miracle of miracles.

Or maybe not. I'm not saying that God does not heal some of the those babies. I know prayer works. I know God rewards the faith of parents who fight for their sons and daughters. But I also know the dirty little secret of obstetrics: the vast majority of OB's and maternity hospitals would rather send you to abort a perfectly healthy, wanted baby than possibly do a high risk delivery. 

It's almost inconceivable that a person who has put in the years it takes to become a medical specialist would turn on the very patients he or she is dedicated to caring for. After all, if having a baby was easy and risk-free, we wouldn't need obstetricians. Who would hire a doctor to monitor their pregnancy knowing that person would come at it with the attitude that if anything is wrong you should just toss out the baby and try over, like they were a difficult letter you were writing? A lot of women don't have any choice. This is the overwhelming position of OBs and the maternity hospitals. What evil has corrupted them?

The problem can be summed up in one word - liability. Modern mother baby wards are amazing things. Big birthing suites with fancy equipment greet the women in labor, along with one of the highest staff-to-patient ratios in the hospital. New parents are pampered and offered gourmet meals to celebrate their new child. The biggest cost isn't the fine furniture, the state of the art machines, the specialist nurses or the even the brand new building. It's liability insurance. An OB in private practice can expect to pay up to $200,000 a year for liability insurance, with most paying at least six figures. For comparison, your GP probably pays $10-25K. Maternity wards pay far more.

The number one thing your doctor hears about from hospital administrators isn't "improve patient outcomes." It's, "reduce risk." Your health and your baby's health haven't been job one for decades. Risk management is. When faced with a fetus with any abnormal test results, the average doctor isn't thinking about how to help that child or how to prepare you for the possibility that your child will be medically challenged. He is thinking of how to get you off of his service. For him, financially, the best outcome is that you accept a referral for an abortion. Once you make that choice, his liability goes from millions of dollars to zero. So he gives you the worst possible scenario. If one in a hundred babies with that result die, you will be lead to believe your baby is NOT going to survive birth. "Termination" will be treated as the next, obvious course of action. It may even be scheduled without any discussion. Unless you demand them, no postmortem tests are done on aborted babies. There are no statistics on how often a perfectly normal, possibly viable baby is violently murdered for the crime of having one bad test result. Given the number of women who have prepared to deliver a baby on its deathbed only to be handed a child with no apparent health problems, the number is probably staggering. 

Why are baby doctors and hospitals in that situation? There are three primary reasons. First, the statute of limitations (the time you have to sue) is often much longer for birth issues than for other issues. The injured party usually has two or three years from the time the injury is discovered to file a complaint. But if the injured party is a minor (such as newborn) that clock doesn't start ticking until they are 18. The doctor could be sued two decades after the delivery for a birth injury. Second, delivering a baby is risky, even with a healthy mother and baby. Women and babies die in childbirth every day even with the very best medical attention available. Birth is the hardest thing most human bodies ever do. Systems pushed to the edge sometimes break. That's just reality. 

A thing called "wrongful birth" is the third, ugliest, reason. The existence of abortion has created a pot of gold for lawyers representing parents who claim they would have aborted if they had known they were going to deliver a sick or disabled child. Sometimes, they even represent those children. A doctor can be sued, often for the entire cost of caring for a special needs child, if they might have predicted that outcome and didn't or if they downplayed the possibility. The court system has cast doctors as the gatekeepers in a eugenic dystopia where only the physically perfect should be allowed to be born. A nightmare that grows as genetic components are identified to more and more conditions. Can a child who inherits a gene making them more likely to develop cancer or suffer from depression sue the doctor who delivered them? Someday, they might. 

I hope, if you've read this far, that you want to change this. That this is not the sort of care you would want as an expecting parent or the situation under which you want your OB to operate. Fortunately, there are things that can be done to change two out of three of these issues. There is no such thing as a wrongful birth. The law needs to acknowledge that. Write your congressmen, especially at the state level. While you're at it, demand legislation that distinguishes between malpractice and chance. Sometimes, the doctor does everything right and someone dies anyway. Sometimes the doctor makes a very human mistake. As long as doctors are human, this will happen. Holding a doctor liable for millions in either of those situations just drives people out of medicine. It doesn't make for better doctors or better patient care. If a doctor is grossly negligent or committing actual malpractice, he should be charged by the criminal justice system. Tort reform along these lines would literally save lives every day. 

If you're pregnant, don't assume that every OB will consider your child as much their patient as you are. Most of them won't. Find a pro-life obstetrician. Your local pregnancy center probably knows who they are and they'll be happy to tell you. Look for a Guiding Star clinic or a catholic hospital. If you cannot find a pro-life OB, be upfront with your doctor before those tests start coming up. Most importantly, if your doctor tells you that the ultrasound or other screening shows something horrific, take it with a grain of salt. Take it with a whole block of salt. Prenatal diagnosis is not an exact science. Most doctors will treat any fetal health test result that is outside normal limits as a 100% positive sign of the worst possible scenario. That's just not accurate. It's hard enough to diagnose many diseases in an adult who you can see and touch, who can tell you where it hurts and answer your questions. Imagine trying to diagnose someone from nothing but an ultrasound and some blood work. Sometimes they get it right. But a lot of the time, they get it wrong. 

Lastly, remember that no diagnosis is a life story. A fetus who does have a heart problem or down syndrome or may not live long is still a human being. Every second of their life is precious. Every struggle they will face is part of the universal human condition. Every one of them was knitted together by a loving Father in His image. Every one has a purpose.