Letter to the editor - July 17

Where was support from Right to Life these past 50 years?

An interview came on the news recently, featuring several faith groups announcing all of the help they now wish to provide for women after the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade.

The interviewees, representing the Right to Life Movement, were promising to support women by providing affordable healthcare during their pregnancies, healthcare for their babies after birth, counseling during and after pregnancy, and affordable housing in safe neighborhoods for the women and their newborns.

This comes across as such a kind and needed gesture toward supporting life, in the womb and after.

It also raised the question in my mind, “Where were these gestures over the last 50 years?”

For the last 50 years, many of the same people who support such gestures now were voting against programs to provide new money for food stamps, affordable housing, universal healthcare, and mental health counseling. The thinking, as expressed to me, was, “It is too expensive” or “I should not have to support ‘those women and their babies.’”

Maybe, the Right to Life movement could have spent the last 50 years that Roe v. Wade was in place supporting programs to help women with unwanted pregnancies. Instead of murdering doctors who provided abortions and harassing women as they entered the clinics of abortion providers, the movement could have used its energy to support programs that support life.

If that had been the case, there may have been fewer abortions, and the term “Right to Life” would sound more meaningful.

While kind and needed, it seems a bit hypocritical to want to offer so much help to pregnant women and their babies now, after 50 years of harassing and blaming women seeking abortion.

— Geni Flores

Portales