Apartment Fun Times

Today, my apartment-mates and I gathered around for a group reading of the pamphlets passed out on campus by our local Crisis Pregnancy Center. (And oh, did they have lots of pamphlets. I hate to think of the forests cut down to print this stuff.) I expected the cover of the tabloid-sized piece my friend was reading from to be something pink with babies, but instead it showed a homeless person, a child in Africa, an obviously battered woman... and said "You can stop injustice."

And then you turned the page, where it said, in big letters, "Starting in the womb." With that one picture of a fetus they always use.

And then I think I swore a lot. All of the ridiculous, medically false, emotionally manipulative claims my roommate had been reading from flew out of my head with pure fury at just how completely awful that title was. "The greatest injustice of our time," it said. As in, the way to fix homelessness or poverty or sexual trafficking or domestic violence or racism - all things mentioned on the cover - is not to pay any attention to the people currently in those situations, but to SAVE ALL THE BABIES.

I don't know about you, but I don't read that as a convincing argument for 'life'. If anything, it's a complete disregard for human life, to suggest that the proper way to fight injustice is to coerce women into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term, rather than actually addressing the problem itself, whatever it might happen to be.

(Fun side note, every page in the pamphlet was marked "advertising supplement," which I translated as "we're allowed to lie.")