NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE O n Good Friday, as you probably know, a judge issued a ruling in Texas to sideline one of the drugs used in chemical abortions. It never really went into practice, and that judicial debate will likely wind up in the Supreme Court before long. It was a sober reminder that abortion in the United States is both intensely complicated and far from over. Reactions were — as is typical, especially after last June’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade — hysterical.
One of the reasons I write about abortion so much is that I have the perhaps naïve belief that people of diverse views and experiences about abortion can find some meeting ground. Abortion is a human tragedy. We should be able to agree there, even if you believe that abortion is necessary to prevent other tragedies.
A video went viral around Easter of a woman, evidently homeless and high on drugs, giving birth to a baby right on the streets of San Francisco. Abortion is evil and the ending of a human life. But I can also understand why someone might conclude that it is better for that child not to be born. I don’t agree. But I get it. Watching the video, I thought of my own Godson born with drugs in his system, nearly smothered to death by his birth mother within a month of his birth.
These are not situations that should be relegated to right-vs.-left talking points. These are people who need on-the-ground help that communities, including faith-based ministries, are probably going to be the best at, with, of course, expert help, but also with more love for fellow human beings than for winning political debates.
That we have to argue about abortion and all the surrounding issues in the political realm is one of the most unfortunate things about where we are today. I am absolutely grateful that Roe v. Wade was undone. It was an unjust law, based on bad law, bad history, bad science. (The list goes on.) But I also know that every time abortion is in the news, the debate is often like pouring salt on open wounds for women — and men, too, because some of them do care and some of them are hurt knowing that a child of theirs has died. Nothing beats the most intimate violence that was done to the child and the mother, though.
During private conversations, I heard some much more humane reactions to the news stories about abortion pills. So how do these pills work? How often is this happening? Wait, you can get them at CVS? One older woman recounted to me her miscarriage in the 1970s. It was early on, there was a lot of blood — at home, in her bathroom — she didn’t recognize a developing baby, but she knew what was going on. She was losing her baby. Now consider when the death of the baby happens later in a pregnancy, and you made a choice, even if under intense pressure (which questions the freedom in it) to make this happen. And you see. And you know.
The 2019 movie Unplanned was a dramatized version of the story of Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood director in Texas who eventually became a pro-life activist. The movie had an R rating. Why? Because of the scene where she’s undergoing a chemical abortion in her bathroom at home. There is a cruelty to leaving women and girls to deal with their dead babies alone. You might call it health care or freedom. But could we help women and girls not have to get to this miserable point in the first place? Is she in a college dorm? Is she married, and are they in need of resources? Is she all alone? Is this likely to happen again? These don’t have to be pro-life or pro-choice questions. Some of us adults could actually ask them together.
As part of the March for Life weekend in Washington, D.C., this year, I gathered a group to hear the testimonies of two women who wound up founding maternity homes — one called Mary’s Shelter in Fredericksburg, Va., and the other the Mother Teresa Home in Buffalo, N.Y. They never really planned to do such a thing, but because of personal encounters with pregnant women and girls — one involving her own son — they came to realize that one of the primary needs for moms is housing. Good Counsel Homes in the New York metropolitan area are a similar endeavor.
They’re all about meeting needs in quiet and urgent ways. We need more of these. Local laws often keep government housing from any kind of preferential treatment. That’s often where the Beatitudes can come in handy — people looking at people with the merciful eyes of faith. But you don’t have to be a believer, and it’s got to be safe to say that there are people who tend to vote Democratic and others who tend to vote Republican, and none of them want to see women having babies on the street, for one thing.
We’re in a different time, after Roe, but many of the needs remain the same. Euphemisms hide pain, talking points exacerbate it, and neither end the underlying problems. That’s urgent work, that all the noise can keep us from meeting the challenge of working together on, as a matter of policy and politics and daily life.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.