In previous episodes we saw a writer at The Atlantic try to exonerate abortion from the Gosnell horror through semantics, and some other abortion rights folks make the case that collapsing a baby’s skull while still inside the womb is totally legit.
Today I’ve got a piece from ThinkProgress.com, where they argue that “poverty” drove women to Gosnell, so rather than try to help the woman and the child have a good life together the obvious solution is to further subsidize abortions for low-income women and consider allowing them later in pregnancies. They write:
Abortions are expensive, and they get even more expensive the later into a pregnancy they occur…Seventy percent of women who have had an abortion would have done it earlier in their pregnancy if they hadn’t had to delay to get the money. By the time the funds are raised, the pregnancy can be so far along that few providers will perform an abortion, but Gosnell regularly performed late-term procedures.
You see: It’s a sob story. These poor women just wake up pregnant, apparently through no fault of their own, and they cannot afford the simple medical procedure to have the condition taken care of. As they scrape together the cash the fetus does what fetuses do: it grows. That makes the eviction more expensive. Eventually, if they are not able to raise the cash until very late in the pregnancy, they are past the legal timeframe. Now they’re stuck, “punished with a baby,” in our President’s coarse phrasing.
But there is an out: an abortion provider who will perform a late-late term abortion. After all, the women wanted to terminate the pregnancy back when it was still legal, why should their inability to raise the money quickly stop them getting what they want, just a little later?
Enter Kermit Gosnell.
He was able to charge less because he didn’t bother with all the expensive extra things like trained nurses and proper medical equipment. If he did worry about those things he would have had to charge more, and then where would these women be? That’s right: punished with a child. Gosnell is providing a much needed service after all.
The piece continues:
As social worker Jeff Deeny wrote this week in The Atlantic, he’s seen many Philadelphia-area women living in poverty struggle with this very problem. He recounted the story of Ashley, a young mother on welfare struggling with homelessness and worried that another pregnancy would throw everything she was working toward off track…
For starters, she could avoid another pregnancy by avoiding having sex. Really: it is possible, and it is the number 1 way of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.
In his article Deeny said of Ashley,
Watching Ashley struggle with a decision that on one hand could ruin her own future but on the other ruin her relationship with her mother and her church was heart rending.
Having a child would “ruin her own future”? It would certainly alter her future, perhaps make it difficult in ways she hadn’t anticipated, but “ruin”? If given the proper support by her family, the child’s father, the community, there is no reason at all that having a child should ever “ruin” a woman’s future—that child is her child, the fruit of her womb, a new human person to love and be loved. What kind of future is not enriched by new life and love?
No one is ever punished with a child: children are an amazing gift, the assurance of a future, a new opportunity, a world of possibilities, a source of love and joy, posterity.
Children are so much more than a cost-benefit analysis, especially one done at such an emotionally charged time as a pregnancy.
More Deeny:
[I]f access to safe and legal abortions were expanded, and public funds used to provide them, there wouldn’t have been a Kermit Gosnell. The poor women upon whom Gosnell preyed would not be shunted into the black market if earlier on there had been safe, free services available to everyone in need.
(Emphasis by ThinkProgress)
Two points here: 1) ThinkProgress never even thinks about finding ways to assist mothers with crisis pregnancies to have smooth pregnancies and to keep their babies or put them up for adoption (like what the angels at AIM Women’s Center do here in Steubenville); their thought is solely on terminating the pregnancy and trying to pretend like that woman is not a mother and never had a child living in her womb.
2) ThinkProgress seems to think that the only reason women would go to a Gosnell would be because they could not afford an abortion sooner. What if they or someone with influence over them decide later in the pregnancy that the child has to go? There will always be Gosnells because there will always be demand for that thing that is just outside the arbitrary line of the law but looks remarkably similar to what the law allows.
Mother Teresa, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, said, “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child, and be loved by the child. From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortions. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents, and have grown up so full of love and joy!”