The Deaths We Could Have Prevented

 

Vice President Harris: We now know that women have died because of Trump Abortion Bans. That includes a healthy 28-year-old woman in Georgia. Her name was Amber Nicole Thurman. She died of sepsis, and experts have determined that her death was preventable pic.twitter.com/loBJDsbY9Z

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024

I have seen on social media how angry some "pro-lifers" are at the idea that abortion care saves lives. You can't EVER terminate a pregnancy--it's MURDER!  These stories that humanize and normalize the procedure that can save women's lives appalls them, because they can't accept that the God they profess to love and believe in would make babies ("before you were in the womb I knew you") with gross congenital defects, tumors, or other difficulties "incompatible with life".

Something else other than the lack of abortion care "must have" killed these women. They took abortion drugs. They were sin-minded. This had to be their own fault. 

It wasn't. 

You, me and everyone else, according to religion, are incompatible with life. We just get our day at different times. We could live our four score and ten, dying under our fig tree and vine. We could go tomorrow--we know not our date.  But women, through Eve, to us the curse was given, "In pain and sorrow you shall bring forth children." 

Was this to mean our labor pains? Maybe. But also historically, high infant and maternal mortality. Epidurals didn't fix the problem of being human and giving birth to mortal children. For a good long while in history, women were most likely to die in childbed. Babies were born dead or died shortly after birth. We died from lack of health care Not sin--except the sin of OTHERS denying care to someone in need. Or simply not knowing enough about our bodies to help us. 

Many religionists are dead set against reproduction education, and the reason why is fearing that knowledge leads to doing wrong. But an education in anatomy and sexual ethics can be-faith-affirming. Knowing better means doing better. 

To my mind, to save the one who can be saved is simple. To give precedence to the one already born only makes sense. To deny reality and blame the dead for their deaths to save one's "faith" instead of recognizing the test of it and the challenge to see how to be more human and empathetic feels wrong to me. 

The longer I look at the question, the harder I find it to admire anything in the supposed pro-life position. Women who could have gotten care were denied because of another's hubris, another's desire to draw a line I don't think was theirs to draw.  On behalf of a life not yet lived and not to be. The response to the suggestion to empathize with the mother, the pregnant person, is met with in some cases vitriol. 

That tells me a lot.