Last week, after news leaked that the US Supreme Court would be de facto ready to cancel the constitutional right to abortion, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit shared the words of Dave Barnhart, pastor of a woman on Facebook. Methodist Church of Birmingham, Alabama:
“The unborn are a group of people who are comfortable to defend. They never ask you for anything; unlike prisoners, drug addicts or the poor, from a moral point of view they do not present any complications; they do not take offense at your condescension or complain if you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they do not need money, education or assistance; unlike foreigners, they don’t bring with them all that racial, cultural and religious baggage that you don’t like; allow you to feel good about yourself without having to make the effort to create or maintain relationships; and when they are born, you can forget them, because they stop being unborn.
It is almost as if, being born, they died for you. You can love the unborn and defend them without substantially questioning your wealth, your power or your privilege, without having to rethink social structures, without having to apologize or compensate anyone. They are, in a nutshell, the perfect people to love if you mean to love Jesus but don’t really love the people who breathe. Inmates? Migrants? Sick people? Poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups of people that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They are sacrificed in the name of the unborn ”. ◆