By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
An article appeared in The Dallas News in the week before the presidential election entitled “How you can be a pro-life Christian and still support Hillary Clinton.” The author is Jenifer Sarver, a businesswoman from Austin who heads a communications consulting firm that specializes, according to its website, in “media relations, crisis communications, speechwriting, coalition building, and media and presentation skills training.”
Sarver begins by assuring us that if “Donald Trump were not at the top of the Republican ticket, I would proudly support any number of” the Republicans who ran against him in the primary. No question; Trump’s character was a deal-breaker for many women. But the logic Sarver used to justify her vote for Trump goes beyond this past election. It is the logic Democrats have been using ever since abortion on demand became the law of the land to justify their vote for “pro-choice” candidates. No doubt, it will be used in future elections.
It is flawed logic. It needs to be challenged. I am not saying that voters who employ this logic are being deliberately intellectually dishonest. I can’t read their minds. Regardless, it is flawed logic.
Sarver assures us she “believes every life is precious and every human being is created in the image of God” and “that God has a plan and purpose for each life.” But she has friends and family members who have had abortions, and Sarver knows that “no one takes the decision to have an abortion lightly.” This makes her uncomfortable with “those on the right who have demonized women for having abortions.”
Beyond this, she was struck by the women she interviewed when writing a “grad school thesis” on the question of “pro-life feminists.” She found many of them “who would not personally choose abortion” but “did not want to make that decision for others.” Sarver tells us she “can understand” their point of view.
Her faith informs Sarver that it is important to “care and respect all people, born and unborn,” but she finds many pro-life conservatives who act otherwise, who do not display the “Christian value” of treating “immigrants (undocumented or otherwise), refugees, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus” as “created in God’s image.”
She finds it the “height of hypocrisy when we scream from the top of our lungs about protecting a baby in utero, yet neglect to provide basic resources for those children once born” with adequate welfare programs, drug addiction clinics, job training. “If their lives had worth when they were in the womb, shouldn’t their life have worth now?”
She contends that pro-lifers “are focused on the wrong problem. The problem isn’t abortion. The root of the problem is unintended pregnancies.” She argues, “Until we are willing and able to offer sex education that is scientifically sound and teaches more than abstinence (which data and common sense tell us don’t work); until birth control is widely available and health insurers are required to offer it,” abortions will not end. She ends by noting how “disheartened” she is by many “in the Christian industrial complex” who “yell and spew hate toward Democrats, immigrants, gays, and anyone else whose world view doesn’t comport with theirs.”
(“Christian industrial complex?” I hadn’t heard that one before. I wonder where Sarver picked it up?)
None of this makes sense. (Except for the dilemma that the Trump candidacy presented to many Christian women.) To begin with, there is no evidence that abortions have decreased in parts of the country with well-funded “sex ed” programs in their schools. Sarver tells us that most Americans with pro-life views harbor an antipathy for immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. What is her proof? That is a serious charge. She needs to document it. Christian charity does not require an acceptance of open borders. If it did, no nation on the planet would have a Christian perspective on the matter. The countries the illegal immigrants are trying to escape have strict border policies.
And where did she get the idea that pro-lifers want to “neglect children once they are born”? That’s a cheap shot. Those who criticize the massive welfare state created by liberal Democrats are looking for a way to help inner-city children escape from the broken homes and lives of dependency they now face. How does killing them in the womb make their lives better?
What can Sarver mean? That we cannot call for protection for the life of an unborn child unless we are willing to provide the child after he is born with a welfare state apparatus favored by Hillary Clinton, rather than one Ronald Reagan would prefer? I can’t interpret her words in any other way, even though it is a proposition that is indefensible.
Look: Americans who favored the approach toward poverty implemented during the Reagan administration did not take that position because they wanted to “hurt children.” They thought the good jobs generated by an expanding economy would do more for family life than the Democrats’ welfare state. When liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke of the benefits of a “period of benign neglect” for inner-city families, he was not seeking to hurt the poor. Sarver is entitled to disagree with those who agree with Reagan and Moynihan, and to argue that the expanding social programs favored by Democrats work better. But not to demean without supportive evidence the Christian convictions of those who disagree with her.
Sarver has created a classic false dilemma, the fallacy of presenting a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option. It is not as if in the last election we were faced only with the choice of voting for a pro-abortion candidate with policies designed to help the poor and the oppressed, and a pro-life candidate with no regard for the poor. Our choice was between a pro-life candidate with policies designed to help the poor that were different from those of the pro-abortion candidate he ran against. That’s a big difference.
And where does Sarver run across all the pro-life people who “demonize” women who have had abortions and “spew hate” against “immigrants, Muslims, and Jews”? She must run in curious circles. Another false dilemma. There may be people in the fever swamps on the right who act that way, but they are in no way representative of the pro-life movement in the United States.
Ironically, Sarver ends her article by scolding pro-lifers who “question” her faith because she voted for Hillary Clinton “while being personally pro-life.” She tells them: “You are not the judge and jury. You cannot peer into the soul of another human being.” It seems to not have occurred to her that she had just written over a thousand words doing just that about pro-life conservatives who disagree with her on the best path to social justice.
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