Helping Which Other Women?
When Madeleine Albright repeated in the context of current politics her famous quote “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” it made me stop and think.
My decision is to vote for whoever best supports the “Little Minnows,” half of whom are women, wanted at inception by biological mom or not. And if the current woman running for office isn’t standing there, if I don’t support her that doesn’t mean I’m not helping other women.
The last time I saw my “Little Minnow” she was joyfully swimming around my womb pictured in a sonogram. That’s when I fell in love, and that’s when she got her name. The next thing I knew — not many weeks later — I was in a hospital and people I didn’t know far from home were claiming she was gone, and “cleaning up”. I’ll never know why, but it doesn’t stop the questions? Too much exertion? A virus caught traveling domestically? Who could know. I am grateful not to have deliberately jeopardized her health, and have empathy for anyone is asked to travel during a Zika threat.
Possible Potential Women (and Men) too?
Should all women not on birth control give up drinking in support of future possible “Little Minnows”? The link says the CDC thinks we should if we are of childbearing age. This article seems to imply that if men aren’t going to step up, women shouldn’t either. That has some terrible implications for the long term success of our values and our country. It could be how our country dies, replaced by someone else’s values that are wise enough to protect a future generation. We grow up thinking we are the center of the universe in this country, that individual health (physical, emotional, spiritual) and welfare is what matters. Worse, we live in a society still very harsh on single moms. Even though we have DNA technology to figure out publicly who they are better then ever before, we no longer have mores to make dads partners in raising children except in certain religious traditions. And we could question the effectiveness of those.
Life is a Relay
When I was in the 9th grade, my English teacher knocked a very similar attitude to this one out of me. She made the class realize life is a relay race, not an individual event. We can pass the baton to mentored children, biological children, adoptive children, and provide many other shades of support, but our lives will at one point be found empty of purpose if we do not find a baton pass of some kind. Thank you Mrs. Fuller. Christians should recognize this in the command to go forth and multiply, and it is also inherent in the great commission. For others, I would point to Richard Dawkins.
When choice isn’t even an even chance
Even if single pregnant women want to step up, the current support system, even including Solutions Pregnancy Centers, doesn’t provide much of an answer — they do not help destitute moms nearly enough to make lives without significant other family support “choosable” or “attractive”. Making abortion illegal doesn’t help, it makes moms desperate. Where are the orphanages and adoptive homes for the 16% of our potential children, children that started growing before society found them parents that wanted them? Why have so many women without support that chose life had to spend time in temporary shelters only to be kicked out, on the street, on couches or in their cars in the cold? I don’t have statistics but look around. They are all over! Even with the high number of abortions the moms that choose life are sometimes mercilessly punished, as if they shouldn’t have chosen life.
Help EVERY child?
How can Hillary Clinton close out a debate saying she will help every child, and not be counting the “Little Minnows” as potential children?
Jeremiah says he has a plan for all of from in the womb, and one of the 10 commandments says don’t kill. Life is lost along the way at every stage, long ago more often than now, and we are taught not to actively take human life. If we all held those values we could have those laws, but we don’t all, and we are a democracy.
The Bible says more about how we should act in pluralistic society. The Bible teaches two kinds of birth: physical and then spiritual. It actually says a lot more about spiritual birth. Specifically it says we are ALL made in the image of God, but the only ones that become his children are the ones spiritually reborn. But don’t stop there. It also tells us the attitude we are to have for the as yet unborn, the lost, the ones that different values from us. It does not say we should pass laws to make them act like Christians when they are not, nor does it say we are to punish or hurt them. We are to love them, to want their highest good, to nurture them, to bring them successful birth/rebirth as our most important commands — the great commission and our instructions to teach our children in Deuteronomy. Sometimes we fail and our children may not be spiritually reborn. That is a spiritual miscarriage.
If we take that analogy back to physical birth, it would say our full humanness as children of biological parents occurs at physical birth. Sometimes we fail and our physically unborn children die and sometimes the pre-born child jeopardizes the life of the mother, an equally precious value, and the doctor, the spiritual advisor and the family have difficult choices. I don’t think the Bible says the government in a secular society has to get a vote if the people do not want it to have one.
Making life “the best choice for both”
However, I want an America where the choice to kill is not selected, even when it is legal, by a would-be mom 99.99% of the time. That would mean one out of 10,000 would be terminated at human hands. That is the level we design a moderately reliable communications network made of machines. We are a form of biological machine and we can know how to do this, if we care. We are nowhere close. The total number of abortions in the last 50 years would add 1 person for six Americans. 84% of us are present, and the other 16% were “Little Minnows” killed at human hands. That is more “Little Minnows” killed per capita than were taken in the Chinese one-child policy according to some, we have not any call to think we are better than they. What politician will best step up? Because, Madeleine Albright, I’m standing with potential moms and the “Little Minnows”, and I can’t afford to care about the gender of a president until that is in hand. Especially if potential-mom can’t afford the “Little Minnow”, society can help find people on earth who can and should adopt. And until a pregnant woman can be linked to hope for a viable future for both herself and “Little Minnow” by choosing life, there really isn’t much of a choice for her, is there?
What if the 16% killed are ones that would have grown up the toughest, because they started the most challenged. What if they were our most creative because necessity is the mother of invention? Steve Jobs was such a child once, I’m glad his biological mom chose life. What if they carried some gene our physicians deselected for but that turned out to make them most prepared to handle some future unknown disease? We just aren’t that smart as a species. It’s not our decision to make. Even atheists recognize natural selection as a long process not controlled by the human mind.
If a company like Doritos gets it, when will the rest? I’m eating Doritos while I watch the politicians battle on.
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