Posted on 07/13/2019 5:42:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
For decades, those who opposed abortion attempted to humanize the growing fetus, the preborn baby. Thanks for years of hard work from dedicated pro-lifers and to ultrasounds, three-dimensional sonograms, and scientific breakthroughs on fetal development, even pro-choicers have admitted that yes, the thing growing inside a woman is a human baby. But what happens when pro-lifers stop there, when they cast aside every other vulnerable human being and focus solely on the baby? A stalled movement.
Abortion is not all about the baby. The pro-life position should not be all about the baby. The mother needs help. She’s in a vulnerable position. The abortion workers are people too, many of whom went into their jobs with good intentions. Dehumanization of any group of human beings is contrary to the pro-life position.
When Abby Johnson, who worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years, rising to the position of director of her clinic, walked out after assisting in an ultrasounded-guided abortion and realized the inherent humanity in the womb, she started a ministry that humanized abortion workers. She loved them and helped them to leave their jobs and find life-affirming ones. She’s helped over 500 abortion workers leave the industry, including seven doctors.
Groups like Feminists Choosing Life of New York, Feminists for Life, and New Wave Feminists have turned the focus from babies to women and all of their needs. They have rightly focused on the value of having a consistent life ethic by cherishing all human life from conception to natural death and abhorring all violence.
Recent news has focused on the challenges that people crossing the southern border of our country are facing. There are no shortage of news stories that have covered the terrible circumstances and conditions families and children are facing. Destiny Herndon-De Le Rosa, who heads up New Wave Feminists, read those stories and decided to take action. I joined her in creating the Bottles2TheBorder campaign, an effort to help children especially who were released by detention centers and sent to a respite center in Texas along the border.
These kids have nothing. Babies have no clean diapers. There are no toys. No one has shoelaces because they were taken at the border when deemed a weapon. Water is a persistent need. We set up an Amazon registry with everything the respite center needed and it sold out in two days. We set up another one and had to close it early to sort through all the donations before we take them to the border this weekend.
The campaign took off totally on its own, organically appealing to the desire of pro-lifers to do something, anything. But then there are the people who commented on our social media posts saying things like "we have enough people here" or "these people (migrants) are entering illegally so we shouldn’t help" or “by helping we are aiding traffickers.”
Whether you’re saying it inwardly or outwardly, you're really excusing yourself from being pro-life. You may simply be anti-abortion. Don’t say you’re pro-life.
We cannot continue to fight for the dignity of human life and dehumanize people - that includes people of any race, sexual orientation, religion, or political party. I can disagree with a person or their actions and still treat them with dignity and respect. Some of the comments I have read from self-proclaimed pro-lifers and Christians have really made me shake my head.
I also understand that many of the people who are making statements may not have thought through what they believe. Maybe they have never really been around a multi-ethnic community. But ignorance should cause us to ask questions, not make statements.
Asylum is a form of protection that is granted to individuals who are fleeing their own country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. People requesting asylum at the US border have the right to do so without being criminalized, turned back or separated from their children. They are seeking safety. Many asylum seekers come from countries where there is conflict, disaster or a weak rule of law.
To be eligible for asylum, a person must ask for it at a port of entry. There is no way to ask for a visa or any type of authorization to enter in advance when seeking asylum; you have to show up at the border. These people are following the process that is in place. They are in this country legally, according to the process of seeking asylum.
Earlier this year, Venezuelans and Central Americans were among the largest groups of people to apply for asylum in the United States. People living in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are enduring violence that mimics a war zone. Many Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. border have traveled together in caravans for safety. The number of illegal border crossings is at historic lows according to Customs and Border Patrol figures. What has increased is people seeking protection. In their eyes, there is no place scarier than their own homes right now.
I live in Houston, Texas, the most diverse city in the United States. Many of my friends migrated to this country to escape guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua, communism in Vietnam,, Christian persecution in Nigeria, and gang violence in Mexico to seek opportunities because of oppression in their homeland. Many migrants have endured harsh treatment and conditions, some have been abused and raped along the way, and yet they are willing to risk it. Many of them know the dangers of the journey, but they come anyway.
True freedom comes when we no longer deny others their rights so that some of us can be "free". There is no freedom in keeping others underfoot, in dehumanizing others, for we will always be bound to them in contempt. True freedom and empowerment doesn't clinch its fists, it opens its hand.
As a person who holds to a pro-life view, I have to ask myself if I lived in a world where abortion was unthinkable, but hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness had increased, would I have accomplished my "pro-life" mission? We must love our neighbor - that includes those who are addicted, abused, abandoned, accessing abortion, working in abortion facilities and yes, those seeking asylum at our Southern border.
Life/freedom coaches needed in their home countries.
Yeah - I’m gonna go ahead and say she’s not pro-life but a troll.
Any deaths of illegal migrants are merely very late term abortions, right, libs?
An unborn baby is not an “Illegal Alien” at the border and is not an Alien in the mother’s body.
Why, then, does she think it is ok or a good idea for the U.S. to practice a weak rule of law, if it makes people want to flee from it?
Sorry GOD made borders and the rule of law.
Enabling the invasion at the border is not pro-life. It is merely enabling the source countries to continue their corrupt regimes that focus on making life comfortable for the elites while inhibiting any economic development that would improve the standard of living for all of their citizens. It also ignores the reality that those corrupt countries can produce unlimited numbers of third worlders, while we are already at our breaking point in our ability to absorb and assimilate third world hordes. Arguably, we are past our breaking point, since the third world invaders are pretty much living in the same squalor they left.
The best we can do is to stop the invasion and help to increase the pressure on the corrupt governments to reform and work on development, which will both lower the birth rate and increase the standard of living.
I am assuming she believes a baby invades a woman’s womb flagrantly, and knowingly violating the law while doing so.
Ridiculous premise; somehow we pro lifers are responsible for the poor choices made by these individuals to walk through Mexico and expose their children to human trafficking???
I call BS - I am a very strong pro lifer who witnesses about once a week at our local PP.
The answer is to enforce our borders, get rid of the chaos, drug trafficking, etc.
THEN - help these people in their own countries. This is exactly how the Church used to do it before the ridiculous Vatican II crap. They sent missionaries to help people in their own countries.
Of course now these missionaries are vilified, although the vast majority were there to give shelter to homeless mothers and orphans, teach them skills, help with farming techniques, etc. the proverbial give them a fishing rod, not a fish - Aggressive conversions were actually not taking place.
At any rate, we need to get control and then later help out via VISTA, Peace Corps, etc.
Part of this is to expose the corruption and stop giving our money out until we are assured that it is actually helping the people, not their corrupt despots in charge.
What a stinking pile of offal.
No, people who work towards causes don’t need to link all of them together. They don’t all require the same tools, nor should they ever, ever, have set in stone hierarchies of priority.
Centralization isn’t a virtue.
Asylum is a form of protection that is granted to individuals who are fleeing their own country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. People requesting asylum at the US border have the right to do so without being criminalized, turned back or separated from their children. They are seeking safety. Many asylum seekers come from countries where there is conflict, disaster or a weak rule of law.
People requesting asylum at the US border foreign US Consulates have the right to do so without being criminalized...
‘I have to ask myself if I lived in a world where abortion was unthinkable, but hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness had increased, would I have accomplished my “pro-life” mission?’
I would ask if the all beneficent Deity had accomplished his ‘pro-life mission’, given the the above...
When those that are protesting for free borders start to be pro-life in large numbers, then *mayby* they can make this assertion.
Right now, it is just a bunch of hot air and misdirection.
This article is simply a backhanded way of criticizing and attacking the pro life movement. It is the typical liberal method to try to draw out an apology. Don’t fall for it.
Two signs bear you out: 1) Knocking pro-lifers using the abortionist lie that pro-lifers don't care about mothers or children; and 2) Taking the Communist position that we have to let our country and children be destroyed by foreign governments too corrupt to take care of their own.
Back in reality, continuing to enable corruption addicts like Venezuela, Mexico, and Guatemala won't cure the problem.
As anyone who has actually been in the pro-life movement knows, pro-lifers are the biggest adopters of babies of all races who escape abortion. They are also the biggest (maybe only) donors of baby clothes, food, and supplies to the thousands of shelters dotting this country supporting mothers who chose not to abort their children.
Someone who spouts those sentimental-snake arguments, if she ever was pro-life, won't be for long. (Anybody do a background check on the name?)
Our asylum laws need to be scrapped entirely and re-written.
These laws were written for the occasional Soviet athlete or airline pilot who defected, not the masses of "economic" refugees that are flooding our borders and making asylum claims.
No more asylum for anyone until we can get an handle on this.
There is basically no logic in the convoluted essay.
It is wrong to deliberately kill an innocent child.
It is wrong to deliberately trespass into a foreign country
Both things are wrong. Knowing one is wrong does not for some Unquantifiable reason make the other right.
Bingo - wants to pervert the pro-lifers into leftist shills...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.