I believe it is safe to say that I am irritated this week by a lot of things surrounding the notorious Hobby Lobby Supreme Court Ruling. I am irritated for at least ten reasons, but for the purposes of this particular posting I am only going to address the simple, glaring and most uninformed and misunderstood problem with this decision. Yelling from the rooftops that this is a pro-life victory is a myth. This may be a pro-birth victory, and it is certainly a victory toward further controlling and making life more difficult for women, but it is anti-child, anti-family and certainly has nothing to do with being pro-life.
I truly believe that there are people who call themselves pro-life who really are just that. They are convicted to the belief that life starts with conception, and they are concerned not just with forcing a woman to carry through with a pregnancy under any and all circumstances, but also are concerned with what happens to that child while in utero and beyond. However, they are a very small minority from everything that I can ascertain. I do not call myself pro-life but am quite sure that I am more pro-life than some of that movements loudest voices. Why? Because I am more concerned with what actually happens in a child's life while they are developing in the womb and in the years following their birth.
I have worked in social work for 15 years, I have lots of years of training and education and I have worked with lots of kids who have probably been victims of blind devotion to pro-birth stances. How do I define the pro-birth folks? Mostly, I see them as the folks who only care about winning the battle of keeping contraceptive devices out of the hands of the women who need and want them under some deluded idea that it kills babies. An egg and sperm meeting up may or may not be a baby. Not going to argue that here. Not really important to this opinion. After fertilization a whole bunch of things have to go right in order for a woman to get pregnant. Many times that does not happen.
What pro-birth folks then do is turn their backs in every other way to the needs of women and children. Fertilized egg=baby and abortion is wrong. They fight against every form of birth control that they see as even close to being abortion whether they understand the process or not. In many cases they are the same people who believe welfare needs reform, food stamps and WIC should be cut, and so forth. They chant and hold signs that shame women and tell women that there are plenty of people who want to adopt. This is also a myth.
Lots of people want to adopt healthy, strong, white, non-drug addicted, under the age of one babies but the bottom line is that those are like the elusive Chupacabra. What pro-birthers have managed to do is increase the number of kids who are languishing in the system because their mothers did not have access to contraception, went through with pregnancies they did not want/could not handle, and raised kids for a year or two in situations of abuse, neglect, and horror that no child should have to endure. This translates to kids who become undesirable through no fault of their own because they are born malnourished, premature, with drug or alcohol addiction or behavior difficulties that no one really wants to deal with. They then get put in foster homes who cannot handle them and just shuffle them to the next home which does even further damage. Ten years down the road you may have a kid who has never been in a loving home, who is so damaged that they may never really be able to recover, and those pro-birthers are nowhere to be found.
Is it a problem with our society? Most definitely. Is it a problem of poverty? Sure. But it is also a problem that goes far beyond that. Rich white women have unwanted pregnancies too. Those kids may suffer but the problems might look different. Who do we blame? And does it really matter? No. It does not matter. The bottom line is that cheap and easy access to contraception is the best way to address this in the immediate future. Are there kids who overcome even all of these obstacles? Sure. But the overwhelming majority are left to suffer, and even the resilient ones who the pro-birthers rally behind as examples of why abortion is wrong suffered for years as powerless children at some point.
So, if you are truly pro-life, more power to you. But do not ever think that I am fooled by the rhetoric. I can see the hypocrisy a mile away. Pro-birthers also tend to think that marriage equality is wrong and that same sex couples cannot be good parents. However, same sex couples are often the ones taking in these languishing kids because no one else will. We travel overseas to adopt kids from other countries while ignoring the babies in our own who need homes and love more than ever. And for good measure, many pro-birthers are so fundamental in their beliefs that they also want to tell women how and when to feed those babies that they want them to have under any and all circumstances.
It is ludicrous, and I am over it.
