Let's be Honest. Anti-Abortion Doesn't Make You Pro-Life.

I'll get right to it: I'm on the side of every woman who chooses abortion as a solution to what she considers a problem in her life. I don't need to know her story. I don't need to insert myself in her decision-making. I don't need to be judge and jury as she goes through the act of aborting a fetus.

I do need to support her decision against those who chant "Abortion is murder" and "Baby killer!" I need to let her know her worth is not any more, any less because her choices about motherhood are different from someone else's.

 I can  do this without hesitation, without equivocation, and I do it as a woman who worked hard at conceiving my three children, never once considering abortion as a solution for an unwanted pregnancy. I can do this because it's not about me. My own life, my own feelings, my own sense of right and wrong, has nothing to do with any woman's decision to abort.

So let me speak directly to those who throw out that phrase "pro-life", as if aborting a fetus is the be-all,end-all of life as we know it here on earth. If you insist on inserting yourself into any woman's life, deciding for her that she must carry a fetus to term, you can't, in all that's holy, stop there.

If you force a woman to bear a child she doesn't want, it should be on you to insure health, wealth, and happiness to both. The real sin is in turning your back on her once your interference brings about the outcome you were hoping for.

Children don't raise themselves. Women don't suddenly become Mother Mary at the birth. Real life doesn't suddenly become wondrous or heavenly on the appearance of a baby.

You can't possibly understand the factors in a woman's life that would bring her to a decision to abort. It's clear you don't care. That's how you lose your case. You don't care.

 We could spend the rest of our days defining life: When does it start? What makes it precious? Who gets to decide? None of it helps the woman who finds herself pregnant with an unwanted child.

You need to stop. I'm a mother who loved that life--reveled in it--and I'm begging you to stop.

Too many of you have used abortion as the single issue bringing you to the voting booth, and, for the most part, your choices have been piss-poor. You've put people in power who are intent on controlling our lives from birth to death, who are working to deconstruct every comfort, every gain, every protection, and you've done it without any deep thought beyond putting an end to abortion.

Abortion won't end. Closing clinics, forcing women to wait, to get permission, to endure indoctrination--none of it will stop abortions. Praying won't stop abortions.

You know what affects abortions? Free, readily available contraceptives for both men and women, economic stability, sex education, free or inexpensive child care, work schedules allowing for parenthood, a promise to value every single life, regardless of color, creed, or nationality. All of that. In many cases abortion is more than a right--it's a necessity. Whatever the reason, the woman and her doctor get to choose. You don't.

You must know by now that Planned Parenthood provides essential services to millions of women and families who wouldn't otherwise have access to obstetric or gynecological health care. You know that abortion or abortion education is an infinitesimal part of their work. You choose to believe the lies. You cheer when clinics close. You need to stop.

If you voted for Donald Trump or any other slug purely because you thought they would bring an end to Roe v Wade, you need to recalculate. How is the sanctity of life better under them? If your personal life is okay, what you do about the suffering of others under this regime is now your obligation. It's on you to prove all life is precious.

If you can watch poverty programs disappear and health care become increasingly for-profit, knowing it's the children who will be harmed most, you need to tell me how you can do that and still insist you care about the child.

If you can watch mothers and children being torn apart, separated, because the mother dared to want a better life in America for her kids--if you can watch that and do nothing, you've lost any chance at staking a claim for decency.

Life begins in the womb but can thrive only in a culture where kindness and humanity are the norm. If we were ever there, we're swiftly moving away. You must see that. If you care more about fetuses than you do about the lives of people trying to exist, to survive, in a world turning against them, you need to stop. This can't be who you really are.

_____________

Cross posted at Crooks &Liars.

These Children Are Lost and They've Entered Our Village

Thousands of Latin American children have been arriving in the U.S. over the weeks and months, in scenarios more like that of a fictitious screenplay than of real life.  Out-of-control gangs, drug cartels, and corrupt government officials are the antagonists in horror stories of a kind we can only imagine. Poverty, exploitation, rape, torture, murder--so common now in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, there is little chance those countries will ever float free.

The parents, seeing no future for their children, have taken the most extreme, heartbreaking measures: they're sending their young ones away.  They're forced to pay dubious characters large sums of money to transport their kids over the Mexico-U.S border into what they've been told would almost assuredly be a safe sanctuary.

The children, some of them barely walking age, don't know why they were sent away or why they're here.  They don't even know where "here" is.  They're in a strange place, far from anything familiar,  their only safety in a group of other terrified children.

The older ones, hardly old enough to take care of themselves, have been charged with caring for the young.  By the time they've reached the border leading into the U.S, they've traveled over a thousand miles from home.  They're dirty and hungry and the fear of what's ahead (or behind) stays with them every waking moment.

Once across the border they're in desperate need of some proof that they are safe.  The promise was that the hellish thousand-mile journey would be worth it in order to get them to a place where they could breathe free, where they could ease their own fears and those of the smaller children they carried, and where, maybe, possibly, they might finally face a life where there is hope.

Instead, soon after they cross the border they're being met either by officials who move them into jail-like pens where they'll wait until, most likely, they'll be sent back to their home countries, or--and this is where it gets crazy--by angry protesters carrying ugly signs telling these small, defenseless beings to go home.  They're being told by snarling grown-ups that we don't want them here.

These children are refugees from war-torn countries.  We are the kind of country that demands of other countries the safe passage of refugees.  The U.N has already declared these fleeing Latin American children refugees and is asking the United States to treat them accordingly.  If we turn these children away, forcing them to return to their homes, we do it knowing we're sending them back to a life of abject, unrelenting misery. 

There is no good answer, no ready solution when thousands of children arrive at our borders without our permission, but at this moment we're in the throes of a humanitarian emergency.  We have children in need in our midst and if we're who we think we are, we will dry their tears and calm their fears.  We will fill their bellies and tuck them into warm beds.  We will keep them safe.  They came out of the darkness and into our light.  While we didn't ask for this, they are children and they are here and now it's our job to take care of them.   

  So who are these screaming, sign-carrying monsters who see these kids as some kind of marauding enemy?  Where do they come from?  Who taught them to hate so broadly they think nothing of scaring already terrified kids?

This was the scene near an intake center in Murrieta, California last week.  The buses being held back by American-flag-waving protesters are full of scared kids who spent many uncomfortable if not terrifying days trying to get to our border and the safety beyond.  They were instead caught by border patrol agents and put on these buses heading for a detention center, where they're to be housed until our people can figure out what to do with them.

In quiet moments I see in my mind's eye busloads of frightened children.  I see a menacing mob pushing toward those buses, blocking the drivers from moving forward.  I see signs that say, "Go away!  We don't want you here!"  And I have to remind myself that this is not a scene from their own ravaged countries but is, instead, a scene unfolding in the United States of America. 

I worry about those children and what will happen to them, but I worry, too, about the people waving those signs and turning away busloads of frightened, defenseless children.  They are a problem; their numbers are growing, and someday soon, when we've figured out how to keep those kids safe, we're going to have to figure out how we're going to live among people who would knowingly, purposely do this.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Alan Colmes' Liberaland. Featured on Crooks and Liars MBRU)

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Make Joy, not War!

 Wishing you all a merry Christmas season, and all the joys it brings.  Happy holidays and peace to all, including those who wanted a war so badly they made one up.

Will it spoil everything if I pass along this gentle reminder?  Christmas is a time of joy and good will for everyone; all ages, all regions, all religions.  Those scrooges who want to pretend there's a war going on over it, have, sadly, forgotten what it was like to be a child.

Their loss.

Hold tender these moments, so precious, so fleeting. And remember the children.

Always the children.


My highest hopes for a happy New Year,
Ramona

I don't need to know their names

It's Saturday, the day after what will forever be known as the Sandy Hook School murders.  Yesterday Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old man, broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and shot to death six adults and 20 small children.

We're all in shock and looking for answers.  We're crying, grieving, mourning, and we want answers.  We want gun control that actually controls guns.  We want people not to blame the guns but the shooter.  We want to know the names of the victims, and, as I write this, all news stations are on alert, awaiting a press conference where those names will finally be announced.

We decided long ago that when we know the names of the dead we make a connection; we see them as human beings and not as statistics.  When George W. Bush, in an atmosphere where so many people were against his wars, decided that it was too political to show our war dead arriving home in body bags, we were furious.

When President Obama finally opened it up, publicizing the names and showing us proof that the flag-draped coffins were back on our soil, we saw it as our chance to honor the dead in a way that actually meant something. 

I want to know the names of our military dead. There is something to be said for giving them public identities in order to recognize that they gave their lives in the service of our country.  They gave their lives for us.

But when I heard this morning that they were going to release the names of the children later today, I cried. I don't want to know their names today.  I don't need to know their names today.  I don't want their names associated with yesterday's horror.  Not now.

The emotions are still so raw it could be my own shock,  my own grief, my own thoughts as a parent and about kids in general, but if the lives of those kids can't be given back to the families, the least we can do as supporters, it seems to me, is to take a moment to remember them, not as victims of a gruesome murder but as wonderful, vivacious, funny, wacky little creatures who gave those around them, every day, a reason to love them.

I don't need to know their names in order to honor their existence and to mourn with the mourners.  I can picture them as children in every school, in ever community, in every home.  I see them in the eyes of every child who trots off to school thinking the worst that could happen to them is to fail a test or make their best friend mad at them.  I know who they are.

I don't want this first day without them to be laden with gun control arguments or off-the-wall, fact-free analyses about what happened and why, only later to to be capped with funeral dirge music as the names of the children are read off, as their sweet pictures roll on and off the screen, raw reminders that their deaths were the outcome of an unspeakable act of madness.  Not today.

Please.  Not today.

It all comes down to this, America: Don't be Cruel

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.
And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997. 
 Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.
''This is truly a lost decade,'' Mr. Katz said. ''We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.'' 
 The bureau's findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade -- including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession --had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country's poorest citizens.
 The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, September 14, 2011

 When all is said and done, if we can ever get beyond the grand-standing, the bloviating, the harumphing and the chest-pumping, the awful truth is that millions and millions of American citizens are now among the chronically hurt because of the current no-fault-of-their-own economic crisis, exacerbated by the current we'll blame them anyway political climate.

Families are hurting.  Our elders are hurting. Children are hurting.  Future generations will be hurting.  We've let yesterday slip by and tomorrow shows no great promise.  The time to do something is now.

Everybody knows that something must be done, but what keeps the wheels from turning, from moving us forward, is an ongoing, time-wasting argument about how best to appear to be saving the country while saving face, saving precious personal skins, saving the privileged elite.

There is no point wasting time talking about past history -- a couple of centuries worth of the same mistakes, the same indulgences at the top, the same misery at the bottom -- when nobody is in the mood to learn from it.

 We have now become one of those countries known throughout the world for deliberate cruelty to its own citizens -- the kind of despised country whose citizens we ourselves would have taken pity on not so long ago.

While it may be true that unprecedented numbers of America's children have experienced hunger or homelessness (or a desperate, unrequited need for health care) it's cruel to pretend that no single sweet child of ours is affected.  We're masters at shutting our eyes to real, live, scared and suffering kids.

It's cruel to play games with needed unemployment benefits by pretending they're one more example of undeserved governmental handouts to the lazy or misbehaving.

It's cruel to humiliate the jobless even more by pretending that anyone without a job isn't looking hard enough.

It's cruel to pretend that outsourcing and off-shoring have nothing to do with the loss of millions of life-sustaining jobs.

It's cruel to pretend that workers don't need or deserve representation when the need is so much greater now.

It's cruel for the richest country in the world to give private insurance companies the power to deny anyone health care and pretend that people aren't dying because of it.

It's cruel to allow profiteers to attempt to kill off one major historic source of national pride -- public education for every child without regard to race, creed, or income level -- and pretend that a) the public schools did it to themselves and b) no child is being left behind because of our negligence.

It's cruel to divert our national treasure, including and especially our young men and women, to foreign wars that don't concern us or affect us nearly as much as our own at-home social and economic wars.

But the cruelest reminder is that we almost had it in our grasp -- a fair and prosperous country we could be proud of -- and we let it slip away.

 There's no pretending it didn't happen.  There are enough of us still around who remember a different country, where it looked as if the American Dream would actually become a major possibility.  It was taken away from us, not by happenstance but by the mean and deliberate actions of politicians and power brokers.

You can say it a million different ways, but what it comes down to is cruelty by a thousand cuts. There was a time when we all would have fought against that sort of thing.  I'll say it again: This is some strange new century...