Love Naomi Lakritz on life. Here she does a good job of exposing why President Obama’s rhetoric calling for dialogue on abortion is pretty meaningless:
Obama, who intends to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which permits partial-birth abortions, called on pro-life and pro-choice factions to find common ground.
Unless pro-choicers are prepared to acknowledge the scientific fact that a fetus as early as four weeks after conception is a human being with a beating heart and brain waves, and not a mere clump of cells whose humanness is relative only to its degree of wantedness, then no common ground is possible.
Obama made some redundant points when he said “let’s make adoption more available” and “let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their child to term.”
Adoption is already widely available through state and provincial governments and private agencies. What really needs to happen is for pro-choicers to stop limiting their talk to abortion when they discuss choice, and start promoting adoption. They need to talk in terms of women choosing life, as in putting their babies up for adoption, not in choosing death by condemning those unborn babies to being ripped apart and consigned to oblivion.
As far as providing care and support for women to see their pregnancies through to the end, there are plenty of pro-life agencies, both secular and faith-based, that are busy doing just that.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; there is only a need to promote the existence of the wheel so people can take advantage of it.
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Not to defend Obama, but I have to disagree with Lakritz on two points: In the US, adoption is not, in fact, “widely available.” Even domestic adoptions are often prohibitively expensive. Also, there is a great deal of discrimination toward certain parents/families who would love to adopt. (I know a couple who are dying to adopt but the husband is in a wheelchair and that is making it a much longer, harder process for them than it would be otherwise.)
As for the pro-life agencies helping women see their pregnancies through, there are some that can offer a lot of hands-on help, but they are few and far between. I volunteered at a local crisis pregnancy center and can tell you that we were quite limited in what we could do. We could only refer people to other sources for medical help, for instance, as we didn’t have the resources/staff to give it ourselves. The agencies that we referred to are not necessarily pro-life or pro-choice–they were just affordable, and often they were stretched thin and unable to see pregnant women in a timely manner.
It’s a mess out there. You don’t have to like Obama, but believe me, there is plenty of room for improvement.
From the little that I’ve seen of adoption in Canada (vicariously through friends seeking to adopt), there’s a big ideological barrier to actual adoption taking place. Friends of ours (with 3 children at the time) had been ‘on the list’ for a couple years, going through the hoops (which include parent-suitability tests involving things like finding out whether/how they (would) discipline their children – anything more assertive than saying “don’t do that, Johnny” being grounds for being taken out of the pool), and finally having their name removed from the list unilaterally for a particular baby girl they had met and were ready to adopt, because they had finally conceived and given birth to a 4th child. The agency decided that they didn’t need another child then, instead of realizing that this baby girl could have a permanent home with a good (well-to-do) family, instead of temporary residence with a foster family.