Obama asks the professor: “What would cause a mother to contemplate taking the life of a child? It has to be something awful. It has to be a woman without shelter, medical insurance, without the next meal on the table”
With all due respect to the Obama and to the professor: the only kind of poverty that would lead a woman (or unfortunate pregnant teen-ager)to end the life of her unborn chikd is not exclusively material poverty. It’s also poverty of a different sort, one that isn’t alleviated by purely material measures.
To quote the late, great Catholic psychiatrist, Conrad Baars:
“Abortion is a form of psychic self-destruction, and if practiced on a large it will have the gravest consequences for any society which condones it. Abortion is an act of aggression, not an assertive act. Abortion is the ultimate denial or non-affirmation of both fetus and mother....and abortion will push her deeper into her loneliness and isolation, to provoke a depression which in our experience is malignant and incurable”.
The very people who should be willing to affirm the pregnant woman are the ones who choose to abandon her-—starting with the man who fathered that unborn child.
It’s a societal problem that transcends the fundamental need to care for the material needs of the pregnant mother and goes to the crux of the problem—a society which is losing it moorings of family structure and familial resources which protect all of its members.
Yes—there needs to be basic support for the woman who finds herself pregnant and unable, alone, to care for herself and her unborn child.
And there also needs to be the awareness of a more deeply troubling problem-—if there is “no room in the inn” for this unborn child, then the “final solution” is the seek-and-destroy mission that puts an end to the “problem”.
We can only wish that the answer is shelter and food and insurance, but we know that it’s much more than that.
Abortion is the Human Sacrifce to the god of Convenience.