The fact that these preborn children survived the hurricane is no cause for celebration for Whole Woman’s Health. Instead, it is just proof that more should be done to end their lives
As someone who experienced hurricane Andrew and spent 18 years in South Florida, hurricanes Harvey and Irma have been heavy on my heart. Growing up, I remember watching the news with my parents as the meteorologists attempted to predict the exact path of hurricanes. I can picture the massive lines for gasoline, the reports of power outages, and the flooding.
Thankfully, I also remember the relief efforts. Neighbors helped neighbors. Churches opened their doors to the community. When three hurricanes in a row battered Florida in 2004, I went with a team from my church and helped distribute food and supplies to the largely immigrant communities surrounding south Florida’s tomato farms. We returned during Thanksgiving to invite residents to a free dinner being hosted by a local NFL star. I will never forget the three men who responded to my lunch invitation by declining and offering me a sample of their Thanksgiving meal: freshly made fajitas served in homemade tortillas cooked on a small outdoor grill. Though they lived in a trailer park devastated by the storms, they wanted to share their meal with me, the person who was supposed to be helping them. Their generosity has stuck out in my mind as I read reports of the ongoing relief efforts in Texas and Florida.
It is against this backdrop that I encountered stories in Fox News, Cosmopolitan, Slate, and the Huffington Post about pro-choice activists who are responding to the devastation in the Gulf by raising money to provide free abortions to the survivors. The pro-choice Lilith Fund, which is leading the effort, wrote, ” We’re creating an emergency fund for Harvey survivors seeking abortion care. With increased barriers like temporary clinic closures, displacement, loss of homes/vehicles, and more, access to abortion just got even more difficult for those affected by Harvey.” Whole Woman’s Health, the abortion provider at the center of June’s Supreme Court Case, is providing women with free abortions and transportation during the entirety of September. No doubt, abortionists in Florida are preparing for similar fundraisers and promotions in the aftermath of Irma.
Unfortunately, these abortion providers decided to respond to violence and destruction by offering more violence. The fact that these preborn children survived the hurricane is no cause for celebration for Whole Woman’s Health. Instead, it is just proof that more should be done to end their lives.
As a pro abundant life person, I believe that killing preborn survivors is never an appropriate response to a hurricane. What these children and their parents’ need is compassion, hope, and help””not a heart-stopping, life-ending procedure.
The fact that abortion activists immediately turn to abortion a means of “aid” is not surprising. After all, they commonly refer to abortion as a compassionate response to rape, incest, sex trafficking, and poverty. Indeed, it is hard to find a category of human pain or suffering where abortion is not offered as a “solution.” Of course, this solution always results in the killing of a human being, often through an extremely painful (for the child) procedure that can leave mothers and fathers with a lifetime of negative emotional, and at times physical, effects. Yet, NARAL and her allies will argue that these women are in “desperate” need of having their children killed within the safety of the womb.
Thankfully, none of the aid workers I served alongside in Florida offered parents who lost their homes and life savings the option of killing their toddlers. After all, using pro-choice logic, isn’t it harder to support a 3-year-old child in the aftermath of a hurricane than to continue a pregnancy? Wouldn’t those parents then need the relief of having that enormous economic and emotional burden lifted from them? Instead, we provided them with the help they needed to raise their children with food in their bellies, education, and hope for a future. These are things that the preborn children “aided” by the Lilith Fund will never get to experience.
So, while pro-choice activists work hard to increase the death toll of Harvey and prepare their response to Irma, pro abundant life people in pregnancy centers throughout the region will provide compassion, hope, and help to the hurting””affirming their inherent dignity and right to life. The difference between these two responses could not be clearer. One ends more lives, the other saves them.
Only one could ever be called a “humanitarian response.”