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.