Pages

A Thousand Previous Outrages

Dear Pro-Life Movement,

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.

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







I Might Have Been a Republican

If I was born 160 years ago, I think I might have been a Republican.

A new party, it was conceived in 1854 with the intention of abolishing slavery. Six years into it's beginnings, our first Republican President was elected - Abraham Lincoln. He lead us to and through the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery. It was party of rebels and activists, focused on human rights.


Yeah, I think I might have been a Republican if I lived back then

Fast forward to 2018, we have a different kind of Republican President. He's one who gloats about "grabbing women by the pussy", who tears children out of the arms of parents seeking asylum in our country and has just nominated a Supreme Court justice who he intends will make it his mission to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's not a party that's being lead by someone concerned with human dignity or human rights. 


Is this progress? 

This site is about caring for women who've had abortions. Make no mistake - the politics in the US right now are attempting not just to vilify women who would choose an abortion, but imprison them  by making it illegal. Like our President's election, which very few believed would happen, it is entirely possible that Roe V. Wade will be overturned. This is not a party I can support today and I have to imagine, Abe Lincoln is rolling in his grave watching the freedom of women now at risk.

Human dignity is an important aspect of being for life, "pro-life". And yet . . . .

Is it pro-life to imprison and separate families seeking asylum who are being persecuted in their  countries of origin?

Is it pro-life to have have the second highest rate of childhood poverty (after Romania) of 35 developed nations in the world? 

Is it pro-life to do nothing about gun control when our children can't be safe in their schools and even elementary school children are not spared from gun violence? 

Is it pro-life to prevent gays from having all the benefits and privileges of heterosexual couples? Is it pro-life to allow public establishments to refuse to serve someone of a different sexual persuasion? 

Is it pro-life to allow incest and domestic violence to occur because it is a family matter or because DNA should trump this type of "bad" behavior? 

I consider myself pro-choice, but I also consider myself pro-life. I believe all people deserve the right to live his or her own life under their own terms and with the same freedoms. Women and minorities deserve to be paid for the same job as a man at the same rate of pay. Children deserve to live without abuse or neglect and to have three meals a day in their bellies. We all deserve to love whomever we love - regardless of race, gender or religion. And this beautiful earth that we pillage and rape every day in the name of progress, I believe she is sacred and deserving of better treatment too.

Pro-life and Pro-Choice. I am both, and. 

And -  while sometimes, these values conflict, I believe in the end, it is my choice as a free person in these United States to decide for myself how address that conflict. 

From a President who abolished slavery to one who wants to enslave women.  Wow. We've come a long way, baby, and I'm not sure it's the vision President Lincoln ever had for his party or the Presidency.