So-called pro-life Republicans took the balance of power in Tennessee this year, but I’m left wondering, are you really pro-life?
Or are you just anti-abortion? Being anti-abortion is much easier. With the push of a button and the stroke of a pen, you simply criminalize an option you don’t like. Just be sure, in the fiscal note, to build in some additional prison space, along with some serious emergency-room costs for women driven by desperation to the unsafe and illegal.
The difference is simple: to be truly pro-life, one has to devote at least as much effort toward saving the babies already outside the womb. As Aunt B. so eloquently notes,
One in five babies in that neighborhood did not live to see their first birthdays. You have a better chance of celebrating your child’s first birthday in Afghanistan than you do on the south side of Nashville. In Memphis, an infant dies every 43 hours (yes, those are tiny coffins). Every other day a family loses their baby.
That’s not going to be an easy challenge. It would mean funding access to birth control for people you think should simply abstain, putting aside the values you think they should have, in deference to the realities they actually live.
It would mean putting more resources into prenatal care for girls and women you don’t think should be procreating to begin with, whose children you will have to pay to feed, clothe, doctor, and educate for the next 18 years.
Are you really pro-life? Your actions will serve as your answers.
* * * * *
If you’re serious about success, Say Uncle sums it up nicely.
To be truly pro-life you believe only God can take a life. This rules out capital punishment and guess what? WAR!!!!
State government has many issues to face. Hopefully the new regime will leave the gay and abortion issues in the churhes where they belong and deal with the economic issue hitting this state.
Am I really pro life?
Well, my 17 year old daughter got pregnant, decided to keep the baby and I’m providing a home for her and my grandchild while she finished high school and is now going to college.
So yeah, I’m living my convictions.
That doesn’t mean that I am responsible for the choices other parents or their kids make. That’s where your little lecture breaks down. It is not the government’s job to bill me for somebody else’s mistake. That’s the job of families and local communities.
Too bad there aren’t community activists working on that.
I guess it is the choice of words you use. Your daughter chose to keep the baby, you chose to take them in and help. It was all about choices. That is what I call pro-choice in the true sense of the term. It is all about choices.
True enough, Rich. You’re not responsible for other people’s mistakes, so you shouldn’t be allowed to limit their options. Fair enough?
Good post Netmom.
@country truth, this is an economic issue. It cost big bucks to take care of people in the way Netmom suggests.
@Rich Hailey, I don’t think the world is big enough anymore to allow you such isolation.
Nice post, Netmom.