There’s a lot of news I want to talk about today. Much of it involves the pro-life movement.
None of it is good news.
I’m reading the story in the Washington Post, about two women who lost babies they desperately wanted due to premature rupture of membranes. They may have also lost what was left of their fertility, and they’re lucky to not have lost their lives, because the Florida hospitals refused to treat them in timely fashion. The hospitals were afraid of liability due to Florida’s strident abortion ban. One of the women ended up passing the baby in the bathroom at a hair salon, losing half the blood in her body; now she needs risky surgeries to remove what’s left of the baby’s placenta from her womb. These surgeries could damage her ability to carry a baby to term even further than it’s already been damaged. All this for a baby that was absolutely terminal and was born dead in her mother’s hand. This happened because of a movement that calls itself “pro-life.”
I am reading the story, side by side with a story of the latest mass shooting in America. There will likely be another mass shooting by the time you read this. The year 2023 is 100 days old today, and we’ve had 131 mass shootings. Today’s shooting did not take place at a school or a church but a bank. Four victims plus the shooter are dead, and nine more victims are in the hospital. The shooter is said to have been a current or former employee. He probably intended to die in the mass shooting. As has been frequently pointed out, the perpetrators of mass shootings often intend to die from suicide during the shooting spree, going out in a blaze of glory. This makes it all the more ludicrous that some suggest the death penalty for any mass shooters caught alive. But in any case, today’s shooter is not alive. He’s said to have used an “AR-15 style” semiautomatic rifle, which is legal for an American to own.
In America, depending on your location, you can’t get lifesaving care just in case your terminal baby might have a tiny bit of a heartbeat left. The hospital doesn’t do that because they care about the baby; they do it because they’re scared of getting in legal trouble. They have to eke out a pregnant woman’s agony as long as they can to make sure it doesn’t look like they gave her an abortion. But, often in these same states, you can buy a gun. You can buy guns of all kinds and horde them in your home. Trying to restrict the buying and hoarding of guns in any way is an infringement of our freedoms.
You can bleed a woman half to death and destroy her fertility for the sake of a baby who may well be already dead But you can’t do anything to stem the flood of guns plaguing America.
We are a pro-life nation and we love our freedoms.
These aren’t the only stories I wanted to write about today. I also wanted to mention that Texas’s governor Greg Abbott wants to pardon the convicted murderer Daniel Perry, who first honked at a crowd of protesters, then deliberately drove his car into their midst, and then gunned down one of the protesters who was armed. A jury of Perry’s peers found him guilty, but Abbott is concerned that Perry ought to have been shielded from consequences because of Texas’s “Stand-Your-Ground” law. Abbott is pro-life, and loves freedom.
I also wanted to talk about the recent dueling rulings by judges— one banning the sale of mifepristone and one saying we should disregard the ban. That mess will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court. Mifepristone is a medication used to induce a first trimester abortion by stopping the supply of progesterone. But, because it causes that drop in progesterone, it’s also used in the management of miscarriages along with mifepristol which opens the cervix, so bleeding can be induced and the baby can come out naturally with less trauma to the mother. I asked around my friends and found several had been given mifepristone to help with their miscarriages, so they could deliver the baby at home and hold them and say goodbye. Without the medication, their miscarriage would have ended with a surgery and not being able to hold the baby, since a fetus removed in that type of surgery is classified as medical waste and incinerated. Today I wonder how such a surgery would go, in hospitals where abortion is banned today, in light of the Washington Post article, but that’s another story. I also found out that mifepristone treats several other medical conditions completely unrelated to pregnancy, because the drug also blocks cortisol. But if the judge who banned mifepristone has his way, all of these people will be out of luck.
If there is a way to legally ban elective abortions without torturing and endangering women having miscarriages, the pro-life movement does not seem interested in such a thing. They want to do things this way.
These are the news stories I’ve been thinking about, on a Monday afternoon, in the United States of America: a pro-life nation were we value our freedoms.
I’ve typed the words “pro-life” and “freedoms” so often this afternoon that they’re beginning to lose all meaning before my eyes. They just look like a collection of syllables that signify nothing.
This is appropriate, all things considered.
I wish we were a different kind of nation.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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