We’ve entered the earlier stages of the Republican primary season. I already can’t keep track of the candidates and the town halls. When I was much younger, I confess, I loved such things. I would watch C-SPAN until I couldn’t anymore. But things are different. Roe v. Wade has ended. And politics in many ways will never be the same.
It’s been a year. I have a friend who is an expert at all things political, who has served at some of the highest levels. He’s pro-life. But he worried about Roe ending. He knew we weren’t ready. He was right.
Of course: I’m grateful it’s over. It was unjust. But have you noticed the headlines over the last year? Have you seen the confusion? Have you been subject to the anger? If I had a dollar for every young woman who admitted to me how confused she is, how she doesn’t know who to believe, I could have opened at least one maternity home by now. (And I should have done so anyway! We should be thinking in such crazy creative ways. Moms need housing!)
One year out, so many of us haven’t fully adjusted. How many of us are doing things differently? Maryland is stockpiling abortion pills to hand out. Colleges are establishing emergency-contraception vending machines. Lawyers at hospitals are telling doctors not to care for pregnant women with sepsis and cancer, supposedly. These are times that call for a renewed kind of radicality on our pro-life parts.
Stepping up to the plate
Whenever I say such a thing in public, pro-lifers tend to get mad at me. The protest is that babies are dying and we are defending them. The other side won’t bend over backward to try to understand our point of view, so why should we be overly sensitive to them and their wounds? The answer, it seems to me, involves the beatitudes. It involves Jesus in his passion and death. It has something to do with knowing too much about the wounds people are suffering.
A year after the Dobbs decision that ended Roe, Pope John Paul II seems to be beckoning us. So many of us can still remember watching him suffer at the end of his life. He entered into that with such humility and love and trust. That surrender can’t really be seen without a connection to what he taught about the human person — including the unborn, including the married, including the women who have had abortions. God’s mercy was for all of them. And we need to be protectors and messengers of that mercy.
Now, daily, we will continue to have headlines about the latest fight in a state to protect the unborn at a certain number of weeks or to expand the availability of abortion. There was a certain Washington Post profile of a governor who is eager for the latter, who was described as having a Ouija board casually on the wall of her summer home. I don’t think the reporter meant anything about that, other than describing a scene. It’s a scene we need to be aware of. There is, of course, a supernatural aspect to it all.
In New York, we’ve been dubbed the abortion capital of the world. Most of us haven’t stepped up to the plate to combat that in radical ways, honestly. We have some saintly people, don’t get me wrong. But we should be opening our hearts and our homes in more creative ways, thinking about how to reach young people in renewed ways.
The old ways don’t cut it.
Combat with love
If you are a sidewalk counselor here, or if you pray on First Saturdays outside Planned Parenthood on Bleecker Street in lower Manhattan, you see and hear things that seem to rival Hell. So, the Ouija board makes perfect sense. But the hearts of those who ponder and feel pressured to abortion are so much more complicated and tender. And evil wants to wreck their lives forever. The only way to combat that is with love.
We will all want to vote the “right” way. We will want a candidate who is not for doubling down on abortion. But the Gospel of Life is about so much more than politics. If we can communicate love through politics, thanks be to God. But that’s a challenge. And one not everyone is up for.
What more can we do to show love to the girl or woman most scared right now? Think of the girls and women in our lives. And think of the women who have no idea where to go for help. Those are the kinds of questions the moment we are in demands like never before. And I don’t know that we quite realize it yet.
Now is the time.
