The pro-life movement won’t change society if it restricts itself to moralizing and politics
By Carl Scharfe
The Interim
HEALTHCARE. Uppercase. Daunting. But is it really? Is not healthcare the destiny of the pro-life movement?
Pro-life crisis-pregnancy services, education and political lobbying. What’s missing? The human body, its entrance into and exit from this world and what happens to it while it’s here, is pro-life business. That’s healthcare. What’s missing within pro-life today is a way to outreach to everyone with what is pro-life service: traditional healthcare.
Coles (a student notes publisher) is now printing medical notes. The human genome project is completed and “personalized healthcare,” personal to a particular genome, is already being discussed. The net is loaded with medical information of the most highly-detailed and intimate sort, available to everyone. Para-medical care is everywhere. Private abortion clinics have existed under medicare for nearly 30 years.
Today, medical knowledge is a thing out there to be had. Medicare itself is no longer exclusive to the medical profession, or governments. Private healthcare, even do-it-yourself healthcare, is already here, not coming-down-the-pike. Where is pro-life today with this reality? Still hoping for the best, still clinging to the idea that it can influence society with crisis-pregnancy services and education? Still searching for the impossible-dream political solution?
The pro-life movement cannot change the culture of death simply via crisis-care, moralizing and politics. Even at this early point in high-tech care, only few pro-lifers thoroughly understand the rules of a dignified life-affirming healthcare. As technology rapidly decentralizes medicare, the vacuum will grow for that very necessary and attainable global role: pro-life as healthcare provider/admimistrator.
The real mission of pro-life, including crisis pregnancy services, changing the hearts and minds of the abortion-minded, and changing the law, must finally be to administer medicare. Pro-life must be there, to draw the line with regard to the pro-death technologies and philosophies available to healthcare technicians, provide the example and bring the medical profession and healthcare workers back to the dignity of life as an integral part of a universal life-affirming healthcare.
When pro-life gets down to it’s real business of changing hearts and minds one patient at a time via pro-life healthcare as its outreach, when pro-life will be available to the people who need it the most, society will experience the difference, and the law will change.
In a marketing sense, in a real sense, pro-life was beaten soundly by the pro-death forces in society a long time ago and has since behaved somewhat like Arizona Senator John McCain after he lost the big primaries. Maureen Dowd remarked, “Senator McCain said he was going to drop out of the presidential race, but he couldn’t quite get around to it. He clutched the microphone and waited for his closeup. He scuffled with W., trying to out-macho, out-patriot and out-moralize the man who beat him.”
Pro-life is not about to drop-out. But neither can it “out-moralize society,” or worse, expect politicians to be successful doing so. The hearts and minds of the people have to change first. There is an old saying, “If you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results.” Pro-life crisis-pregnancy services, education and politics do not and cannot on their own obtain social-effective pro-life goals. Crisis-pregnancy services are a band-aid (albeit a crucial one); pro-life education is ignored as morality; if the dream of pro-life legislation were to be realized tomorrow morning, it would be immediately crushed in the jaws of activist go-girl courts and summarily spit out by nightfall.
The appearance of integrity will not change society. Without the real tangible thing, without pro-life owned and operated hospitals and clinics, without a way to outreach to society within society, the movement persuades and stirs itself and nobody else. The real soul, the real mandate of pro-life has yet to be tackled: a global culture-of-life, pro-life healthcare system. Crisis-pregnancy services, pro-life education and politics appeal only to pro-lifers; but the pro-life movement must reach and influence everyone.
