I think it’s safe to say that the great American writer John Irving is about as credible a historian on abortion in America as anybody alive.
Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules was all about the conflict between a young orphan opposed to abortion and a physician who did illegal abortions. (Irving also wrote the award-winning screenplay for the hit movie of the same name that starred Michael Caine and Toby McGuire.)
Never one to sugar-coat his opinions on all kinds of political and cultural issues, Irving has a lengthy think piece in today’s New York Times under the heading “The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade.”
If you read the entire, lengthy piece here, you’ll come to this blistering assertion by Irving:
Whatever the anti-abortion crusaders call themselves, they don’t care what happens to an unwanted child —- not after the child is born —- and they’ve never cared about the mother.
I used to believe it’s unfair to dismiss all pro-life activists as insensitive to the welfare of a mother and child after the child is born. But it is a relatively small number of pro-lifers who commit themselves to care for even one baby and mother after the baby is out of the womb. Look at the numbers of babies and children that are available for adoption or foster care and explain to me why those numbers are extremely low with so many pro-life Americans around.
How about you, pro-lifer.
How many unborn babies have you ever contracted to adopt or care for from the day they are born? Or how many desperately poor mothers have you pledged to support morally and financially once a baby is out of the womb? Are you a foster parent?
Are you in the process of adopting either a born or an unborn child because of your pro-life commitment?
If you’ve put your pro-life belief into that sort of genuinely pro-life action, I salute you.
But you are not representative of the masses of pro-life crusaders unwilling to put their stridently pro-life and Christian belief into practice.
* * *
All that said, one only has to look at how children are being treated under the pro-life(?) administration of Donald J. Trump on the U.S. border with Mexico today to see that pro-life crusaders aren’t entirely pro-life.
In the past week we’ve had report after report of the cruel and inhumane treatment of children — including babies who have no diapers — in American detention centers on Trump’s watch.
You have to wonder why supposedly “pro-life” crusaders aren’t outside American detention centers where Central American children are being denied everything from toothbrushes and soap to food fit for human consumption — not to mention anything like basic health care.
A prominent law professor who inspected one of the centers told of a babies without diapers being cared for by siblings from age 10 to 14.
Another observer described an American-managed detention centers for children as “a human dog pound.”
(Of course, if animals were being treated with this kind of cruelty, a million American pet lovers would descend on the White House demanding a stop to it. I’ve said before that many people care more about abused animals than they care about abused humans.)
All this because of Donald Trump’s cruel “family separation” policy — a policy that was supposed to have ended a full year ago.
Where are the pro-life crusaders, who teach their children in Vacation Bible school to sing about how Jesus loves the little children of the world?
Why aren’t they out marching and demanding that the pro-life administration treat this inhumane treatment with the urgency of a national emergency?
Might it be because they care more about life in the womb than they care about brown children outside the womb?
Leave a Reply