We need to talk about your name - Pro-Life. It has to change.
Last week I listened to the podcast, The Daily, by Michael Barbaro for the New York Times, on the issue of Roe v. Wade. It was eye opening.
The first of this two part series begins by telling us about Norma Nelson McCorvey's (aka, Jane Roe's) life leading up to her desire to have an abortion - how she was raised in poverty by a violently alcoholic mother and abandoned by her father at age 13. She tried to run away from home many times, and at the tender age of ten, gets into trouble for stealing money from a gas station. After that, she's sent to a Catholic boarding school where she is sexually abused. After a stint at a girls' reform school, she is sent to live with a friend of the family, a man, who she says rapes her almost daily for three plus weeks.
She meets her husband at age 15, Woody McCorvey, who is also abusive and beats her relentlessly when he finds out she is pregnant. Unable to live with him, she returns home to her mother. The same mother who is a violent alcoholic. She becomes pregnant a second time and gives the baby up for adoption and it isn't until her third pregnancy that she reaches the decision to have an abortion. She's had one child, given another up for adoption and realizes she can't go through either of these alternatives again. To think the safest place she can find is back home with a woman who abused her as a child is mind-boggling.
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| Norma Nelson McCorvey |
You can listen to the podcast, linked above, to hear more about her life story. I haven't been able to stop thinking about her childhood all week.
How is it that we've spent decades being outraged over her desire to have an abortion and not in any story that I have heard or read are not outraged with how she was treated as a child?
Alcoholism, domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse are all part of the fabric of her young life - where is fury over those atrocities? How is it you say you are "pro-life" and yet the quality of this young life is so horrific and yet the details so absent from any discourse of what "pro-life" means?
Coincidentally, I happened to watch the documentary series on NetFlix, The Keepers, last week. Teenage girls were sexually molested and raped for years by clergy from the Archdiocese of Baltimore in this story and yet no one is talking about this either.
The quality of many of our children's lives is unimaginable. Who can truly imagine an adult violating a child in such monstrous ways? It happens in families and in the church. It is constantly swept under the rug and both the children and those who stand up for them are disregarded, made out to be crazy. The secrecy of what really happens behind closed doors has stayed locked up tight. Denial is a powerful force, but enough people have spoken out. It can no longer stay hidden.
And yet it is in the name of family and the church that we deplore abortion. The very groups that are so righteous in claiming they believe in and fight for life - the life of an unborn child - are the very ones who are either perpetrating or looking the other way when it comes to other horrors of childhood.
Pro-life movement - you need a new name. From here on out, as far as I am concerned, you are the anti-abortion movement. That is all. You may be against abortion, but you do not stand for life. If you were truly pro-life, we would be far more horrified by the thousand or more outrages suffered by Norma Nelson McCorvey before she ever decided she wanted to have an abortion.
Which, at the end of the day, she was never able to have anyway . . . .
Sincerely,
Christina Haas
A Woman Who Will Not Pretend Anymore
