My involvement in the pro-life movement began when I was in high school and continued until my own maternal duties demanded my full attention. For more than ten years, I worked in crisis pregnancy centers, prayed and counseled in front of abortion clinics, marched, petitioned, picketed, and visited pro-lifers in jail. Though it was small potatoes by comparison to what others have sacrificed, it was some of the most difficult, heart-wrenching, and spiritually rewarding work I have ever done.

But none of my dealings with pro-lifers during those years prepared me for the near complete indifference of so many fellow pro-lifers and co-religionists to the outrageous injustice of the war in Iraq, or their elevation to the status of a demigod of a president whose public harangues are redolent of those of every tyrant or dictator who has ever promised to bring his own brand of peace, equality, and justice at the point of a sword; a man who now brazenly claims that his actions are no longer to be subjected to scrutiny because he won the election.

Have years of circulating photographs of aborted babies hardened us to the photographs of dead or hooded, naked and leashed inmates in American military prisons? Has listening to the ugly shouts from mobs of pro-aborts outside of clinics deafened us to the screams of Iraqi mothers mourning their children and husbands, of children mourning their parents? Will the hungry, thirsty, and naked who are imprisoned in George Bush's gulag, or the homeless, sick, and dead in American-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, not have their angel-advocates at the Last Judgment? Is Arab life less sacred? Are the born worthy of no pity?

Why do pro-lifers not speak out against the use of chemical weapons, napalm and napalm-like bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do pro-lifers not condemn the use of depleted uranium weapons which will continue to deform unborn Arab babies long after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forgotten by Americans? Shame on pro-lifers for allowing the pro-choice Left to claim these issues for themselves. What do we get in exchange for our support, anyway? Alberto Gonzales, who supported the "right" of underage girls to get abortions without their parents' consent in Texas. Have you ever heard him criticize Roe vs. Wade as vocally as he does the Geneva Convention? It's a twisted sort of calculus that dictates that we swap support of George Bush's unjust and unjustly fought war for some gutless rhetoric against abortion.

God will never prosper our work so long as we are so parsimonious with our compassion, and willing to barter in this way with our feelings of outrage.

January 25, 2005