Today is the annual March for Life.
For the life of me, I don’t understand how the March for Life is still a thing, but here we are.
I guess it’s time to say a few words about abortion again.
I enjoy talking about abortion, because I like it when both sides of a polarized debate get in my com box to verbally abuse me. It’s a treat when pro-choice women accuse me of abusing my daughter and tell me to kill myself. I think it’s really fun when pro-life men ask me and my traumatic secondary infertility how many abortions I’ve had, accuse me of mortal sin, threaten to tell my bishop I shouldn’t be receiving Communion, internet stalk me to find what parish I attend and write to my pastor, and so on. It’s really worth the few hundred dollars in tips I make a week to feed my family. And no, in my experience, the tip jar doesn’t fill up faster when I go viral.
Anyway, enough with the sarcasm.
This is the point at which people ask if I’m secretly “pro-abortion.” They always do. I got that question on Twitter just yesterday.
Why would I bother to be secretive if I was pro-abortion? I’d shout it from the housetops if I was pro-abortion. It makes me feel unclean to be associated with all the corruption the pro-life movement is constantly displaying in public. But here I’m stuck, because I still can’t think that abortion is ever an appropriate answer. I think that the correct number of abortions is zero. I want to create a world where every human life is welcome and cherished from the beginning to the natural end: mothers and babies, LGBTQ people, disabled people, people who commit crimes, people in foreign countries we’d like to bomb for oil, everyone. I criticize the pro-life movement because it’s not right that a movement which ought to have the moral high ground is so corrupt. It is not right that the first priest who comes to mind when you think of the pro-life movement is not in good standing and appears to have done unspeakable things with a corpse. It’s a scandal that the second priest you might think of is an emotionally abusive bully who became a celebrity by pressuring his girlfriend into an abortion. It’s not right that the female figurehead of the pro-life movement who makes bank to show up and tell her bogus conversion story is an overt racist who wants her own son profiled by police and attended the sedition riot. It’s wrong that pro-life politicians have so little understanding of a woman’s body that they propose laws that could kill us and don’t see the problem. It’s despicable the way the movement exploited their most famous figurehead for fame and attention. It’s disgusting the way people at the March for Life behave abusively and still get painted as heroes. This is wrong. It’s disgraceful. And anyone who values human life ought to be the first to stand up against it.
These people manage to make opposition to tearing babies apart look cruel and oafish.
And that makes me angry. It ought to make you angry as well. It’s wrong from the beginning to the end. Anyone with a conscience should speak up against it.
So here’s what I have to say about abortion, on the day of the annual March for Life: what if we did better?
What if we took all that money and all that effort, all that carbon footprint, all those charter buses and Rosaries and what have you, and put it to good use?
How about if, instead of an annual marching event that doesn’t get covered by the media because it’s not really news, we put all of those resources toward helping women and children?
Not passing laws, not electing politicians, but helping women and children?
What would happen if every pregnant person in this country knew that they would have easy and affordable access to all the healthcare they needed, that they could escape from abusers, that rapists would be punished, that there was a generous social safety net available to get them through? What if there was no question that every baby born would have a loving home, either with adoptive parents or with their biological parents, and a society to live in that was nurturing and safe? Would this end abortion forever? No. But it would make it far rarer. And isn’t that what everybody wants?
It is what you want, isn’t it?
Or do you just want to congratulate yourself with an annual marching event, and pass laws punishing people for doing what you don’t want?
I know what I want. I want people to live.
The March for Life has nothing to do with that.
Image via Pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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