Aborting Freedom: The Pathetic Saga of the Fake Pro-Life Movement

The right isn’t raising anyone else’s babies. The right is barely raising their own.

by Rich Herschlag

Dick Reeder is my hero. I met Dick in year 2000 when he needed a civil/structural engineer. About ten years earlier he had resigned his comfortable position as an engineer himself, for Exxon, and gone to work pro bono for Good Counsel Homes, a not-for-profit providing free housing, healthcare and education for homeless single mothers and mothers-to-be. Good Counsel Homes had already established five housing facilities in the New York metropolitan area. Dick’s immediate need was a thorough evaluation of a large abandoned and dilapidated Hoboken school building for potential renovation as facility number six.

On a brisk autumn day I combed the cavernous turn-of-the-century brick and steel building for everything from structural problems to electrical wiring issues to hidden cast iron plumbing stacks. All this information fed a comprehensive value engineering report that itemized and estimated the costs of converting a musty empty shell into a home for about two dozen young women and their babies. The normal professional fee for a service like this was about $3,000. I took a zero off the invoice. I wanted to take at least another zero off, but I had babies of my own.

I can't report that Dick Reeder was happy-go-lucky in his noble quest. Rather, he was resolute and at times bordered on severe. I imagined he lived voluntarily in a world where desperation ran high and resources low. He had a life mission and no one ever said it would be easy.

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The so-called pro-life movement assaulting freedom, dignity and privacy in America today could not be further from the spirit of Dick Reeder. The recent weaponizing of around a dozen red statehouses illustrates this clearly. The gloves came off in Georgia, Missouri, and especially Talibama. So did any remaining pretense of concern for life, whether fetal or adult. There is no pending legislation in Talibama for housing single expecting mothers. There is no amendment for funding fetal health. Once an arrest warrant is served on an OB-GYN, prenatal viability is a dead issue. A miscarriage—brought on by stress, poverty, understaffed hospitals, lack of medical insurance, or draconian laws—is perfectly acceptable because it’s God’s will.

The right isn’t raising anyone else’s babies. The right is barely raising their own. The right isn’t taking stray children into their homes. Not even white stray children. The right has no plans to improve life for adults. The right has no plans to improve life for children. The right doesn’t even have a real plan to increase the number of viable pregnancies. The right wants your hands off its guns but its hands in your uterus.

Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living. While pretending to protect the unborn, Talibama senators and their coconspirators in other backwards American legislatures aborted their own moral and intellectual lives long ago. By failing to examine their own motives they have become victims of their own deepest unexplored fears while victimizing countless other people.

The odds of spiritually stunted legislators from yahoo states submitting, either individually or en masse, to any legitimate form of psychotherapy is, of course, lower than the odds of their fully funding Planned Parenthood. Psychotherapy is costly, time consuming and often painful for virtually anyone. Fortunately, however, just about anyone can choose to undergo a simple, quick, and cost-free version of therapy. Just think of a fear that is plaguing you, and mentally pull it away to see what fear lies beneath. Repeat a few times—ripping off the bandage, the stitches, and finally the scab—and you will have saved yourself perhaps dozens of couch hours and thousands of dollars. As a public service, I will jumpstart the process for you, our emotionally challenged red state legislators.

You weren’t that popular in high school. Cheerleaders shunned you and so did that cute girl in chorus. You married someone eventually, but there was no real connection, physical or otherwise. You were a virgin, more or less. She was not. Over time you came to understand there were others before you. You weren’t her best. Not even close. You knew it in the way she touched you and the way she didn’t.

You buried your hurt and found a niche. You sired a few kids. As a father, albeit an unaffectionate one, you enjoyed the shallow status that comes with loveless reverence. Moreover, those other guys never managed to get her pregnant. You think. You hope. You don’t really know. You may never know. Your daughters, now approaching womanhood, God forbid may become like their mother—sexual beings with minds of their own. Shunning someone much like you. You can’t stop it. But you can thwart it. You can use the law to control them and any woman with a lethal libido.

Deep down and not so deep down, this is already known to you and to the general public. You possess no unique sexual self-discipline, no special metaphysical insight, nor any admirable love for your fellow human being. Your legal advocacy for rapists and incestuous elders demonstrates these points beyond the shadow of a doubt. Ultimately, it is rapists and adult perpetrators of incest you identify with most. It is these sexual predators who seek to even some imagined score. It is these self-absorbed sadists who do with their hands and switchblades what you do with your sermons and legislation.

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