There have been several stories in the local news the last few months about young children who have died as the result of abuse by their parents. In December, an Albuquerque man was arrested for beating his infant son to death. Now there’s the tragic story of the young Hobbs woman who placed her newborn infant in a trash bin. Then there’s the litany of child shootings around the country, starting with Columbine then Sandy Hook, to the recent deaths of high school students in Oxford, MI. In our own backyard, we had the shooting of Bennie Hargrove, a 13-year-old boy at Washington Middle School. There are just too many unspeakable incidents to name them all.
Against this backdrop of the heartbreaking loss of children through violence is the revived focus to ban abortion. At first glance, this seems to make sense. We want to save our children. But is that really what we’re doing? Where has the public outrage been over the thousands of our children gunned down in our neighborhoods and schools? Have these deaths resulted in stricter background checks or gun laws? Did CYFD do enough to prevent the death of her infant son when Kira Milton of Los Lunas pleaded for help, knowing she was a danger to her baby?
In 2020, the ACLU looked into reports of immigrant women at an ICE detention center being forcibly sterilized. These women spoke no English, had no understanding of what was happening nor the ability to give consent. Many of the migrant children separated from their parents during Trump’s zero-tolerance policy have yet to be found or returned.
We talk a lot about the sanctity of life and saving the unborn. How do forced sterilizations and taking children from their parents square with those ideals? Is every life precious to us? Our concern as a society ends very quickly once a fetus becomes a child coming into the world.
In Albuquerque, over 3,000 children are homeless and over 100,000 children in our state are hungry. In almost every state there’s a similar crisis. For all those loudly raising their voices to overturn Roe v. Wade, for all those supporting unqualified candidates because they’re pro-life, I ask you, where truly is your support of our children? What if we took that same commitment to stopping abortions and focused our energies and monies on giving every child the opportunity to grow up in a safe environment, one where going to school wasn’t scary and dangerous, and not the only place for them to get a meal.
The hypocrisy of this rabid movement to ban all abortions is NOT that they chant “My Body, My Rights,” refuse to wear masks or get a vaccine. It’s that they’re not remotely concerned about the health and well-being of any child that’s not the same color, ethnicity, political party or socio-economic group. A fetus is valued and revered. The unborn are protected. Our children are not. They can be unvaccinated, homeless, hungry, murdered and abused, and we’ll look away while holding up our Right to Life and NRA signs.