Harmonizing Abortion and Compassion

The recent discord is deafeaning.

by Crystal Chapman

The recent firestorm over the Bush administration’s decision to make the “unborn children” of poor women eligible for Medicaid funds has the pro-abortion lobby stumbling over its own contradictions.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said the goal of the recent initiative was to get low-income women more affordable prenatal care, greatly increasing the chances of delivering healthy babies.  It seems like a compassionate thing to do, but objections by pro-abortion groups show that they are more interested in semantics than in compassion.  The term, “unborn child” has them looking past the human element to the political one. “There’s a pattern here to establish fetal personhood,” said Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women. 

Beth Wilson, reproductive freedom project director for the Kentucky American Civil Liberties Union fears the term, “unborn child” will weaken abortion’s legal viability.  “If they declare a fetus a person in one area of the law and then another area and then another area, then ultimately they will overturn Roe or somehow make abortion illegal,” Wilson said.

Even before Roe v. Wade, the familiar chorus from abortion rights activists had been that abortion offers a compassionate alternative to poor women who are financially and physically overwhelmed at the prospect of caring for a baby.  The old refrain was that pro-life groups, in their quest for the moral high ground, cared nothing for the realities suffered by the poor.  But if the pro-choice tune seemed a little off-key before, its recent overtures do little to harmonize their position with compassion.

            Consider that Wilson called the Bush initiative “an insult to women.”   Since when is it an insult to a pregnant woman to refer to her as carrying an “unborn child,” especially if you’re offering medical and financial aid that would otherwise limit her—dare I say it--choices?

Don Fricks, executive director of Bowling Green’s Pregnancy Support Center, Inc., says the Bush directive “doesn’t sound like normal political jargon, but appears to be an initiative of genuine substance to women who often do not have a voice and need this kind of focus and concern directed toward them.”      

 The determination of pro-choice groups to hold poor women’s financial aid hostage to political semantics amounts to literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.  And where’s the compassion in that?   Their objections only point to where their sentiments really lie.  The politics of abortion isn’t about compassion for the poor; it’s about some women insisting on “reproductive freedom” to the tune of trampling on whoever gets in their way--even if it’s poor women, used to advance their arguments, and then callously discarded when their plight no longer suits the pro-choice agenda.

Presently in Kentucky there is no provision for criminal or civil action against an unborn child who is killed or injured as a result of violence or negligence. 

Consider also that pro-choice advocates also oppose two “unborn child” bills introduced this session in the General Assembly, even though neither bill affects abortion-minded women, or restricts abortion law.  House Bill 315, sponsored by Rep. Tom Kerr, D-Taylor Mill, would designate unborn babies as “persons” in law, granting civil recourse to hold assailants liable for civil penalties for the death or injury of an unborn child in the event of death or injury of the pregnant mother.  Similarly, Senate Bill 115, sponsored by Sen. Dick Roeding, R-Lakeside, would criminalize deliberate or negligent actions that kill an unborn child.  Roeding’s bill passed the Senate on Feb. 6.   

 Presently, Kentucky has no laws to address these concerns, which are becoming increasingly relevant, as in March of last year, when a couple from Kimper, Kentucky, on the way to the hospital to deliver a baby girl, was struck by a driver who ran a red light, killing the woman and her almost-born baby.  The family attended a funeral for the mother, and for the baby girl that Kentucky doesn’t even regard as a person. 

            Given their opposition to bills like Roeding’s or Kerr’s, it seems pro-choice advocates would rather have Kentucky regard children as “nonpersons” than to extend to them and their grieving parents the justice and compassion they fear will weaken their political position.

So the next time you hear the old refrain equating abortion with compassion, pay close attention to all of the lyrics.  Some of them appear only in the fine print, but they reveal that abortion advocates are often more interested in keeping the politics of abortion alive than in extending that same right to real people.        

Walter Jones is public policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky.