McVea said she has been flabbergasted by the response from her mostly Hispanic patients, who have a strong cultural and religious aversion to abortion.

She said she can count on one hand the number of abortions she has been aware of over the past decade, adding that one of the clinic’s translators had never heard the Spanish word for “abortion” until the past two weeks.

“I just really underestimated how the loss of prenatal care would push so many people into doing something that ordinarily they would never, ever consider,” McVea said. “It’s a lot of fear. Uncertainty drives a lot of women to choose an abortion.”

She added that although the clinic is offering to help the women pay for prenatal services and reassures women that the government will pay for deliveries, the women don’t trust that information.

“We tell women, ‘It’s going to be covered, you don’t have to worry,’ ” McVea said. “But there’s a lot of fear because they’ve been turned down once.”

I’ve been in touch with OneWorld Community Health Center of Omaha, where McVea works, about earmarking donations for prenatal care at their clinic. I expect to hear back tomorrow. Please help if you can.

(crossposted to All Our Lives)

ETA: LAMom’s in!

Challenging the Abuse of the Consistent Life Ethic

On-line forums are a prime place to get across various aspects of the consistent life ethic. One current thread is at a large forum at www.prolifeamerica.com. This is the forum for Life Dynamics, whose August DVD LifeTalk show included an attack on the consistent life ethic as a ploy to water down the abortion issue. A message was posted with the subject “Challenging the Abuse of the Consistent Life Ethic.” The responses have started coming in quickly, and it’s a good spot for people who do know what the consistent life ethic really is to at least read through the thread, and hopefully to contribute cogent points. In this case, it’s not intended to bog down into arguments on war and death penalty, since that’s off-topic to the particular forum, but to help pro-lifers understand what the consistent life ethic is when it’s used well.

The forum is at
http://www.prolifeamerica.com/fusetalk/forum/categories.cfm?catid=7

If you want to post a response and have not already done so, you’ll need to register, but that’s easily done.

There are surely several other forums on the web where it would be good for us as a consistent-life community to be contributing to threads. Anyone who is aware of specific places, please send them in to allforlifeaction@swbell.net — this is part of what Action Alerts are for, allowing our community to respond quickly. We always had in mind community participation in coming up with needed actions.

Pro-Peace/Pro-Life Harmony Pilot Project

Do you know of groups in the same campus, denomination, or community that define themselves as either pro-peace or pro-life, but might be willing to dialog with each other? Consistent Life’s emphasis on how the issues are connected and on cooperation of violence-opposing groups gives us a prime opportunity to change the destructive right/left dynamics of these debates. We have a PowerPoint presentation designed for joint meetings of such groups to encourage discussion.

Before launching this as a program, complete with a manual with good advice on what experience has shown, we need to have experience to know what experience has shown. Anyone who might like to organize a session with appropriate local peace & life groups to help us develop this program, please contact project coordinator Rachel MacNair directly at drmacnair@hotmail.com.

Kathleen Parker explains why my desk is covered with dents from where I’ve banged my head on it:

There are certainly compelling secular arguments against abortion that one might be perfectly willing to hear. Then Randall Terry shows up.

Terry, the colorful founder of Operation Rescue, doesn’t represent the Republican Party [or most pro-life people --jr], but he is nevertheless the most familiar face of the antiabortion movement. When President Obama recently gave the commencement address at Notre Dame, who showed up to lead the protest but Terry and the equally odd carnival performer Alan Keyes?

Rather than persuading people to think differently about abortion, the Terry-Keyes act makes one want to write checks to Planned Parenthood.

My kid was in the car when I heard that, so all I could do was sputter, “What the … I … WHAT?”

What does it mean to approach Roe “as a woman”? I know what an abortion advocate would mean by that, but what is Yoest trying to say?

In fact, the remarkable thing about abortion is precisely how steady public opinion has been on it for many, many years. Perhaps this in and of itself is interesting — as Ross Douthat pointed out, there is some decent evidence that Gen Y’ers are less inclined to take the pro-choice position than Gen X’ers or Baby Boomers — although they are still more pro-choice than the voters they are gradually replacing in the voting pool, which are members of the Silent Generation. This is in spite of the fact that young Americans are considerably more liberal than their peers on issues like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, issues on which there is more tangible evidence of “momentum” in favor of the liberal position. There are evidently an increasing number of pro-life, pro-gay marriage Americans, particularly among Generation Yers, a position it would have been very unusual to encounter just a few years ago.

There’s some interesting discussion in the comments as to how this could be.