I prayed for that 10-year-old child, raped and impregnated by a man who has confessed to the monstrous crime, a young girl who then had to travel from her home state to end that pregnancy.
Then, I prayed for America.
Just when you think things can’t get worse, that human nature couldn’t sink any lower, something happens to prove you wrong, to make you realize that the country is truly broken in ways that each day make the path to healing more difficult to imagine.
It is the case of the girl child who was quickly transformed from flesh and blood human being, used and abused by adults tasked to take care of her, to political cudgel, used and abused by a country that says it cares about its children most of all — and obviously doesn’t mean it.
If you cheered the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the constitutional protection for those seeking and providing abortions, this is the ultimate nightmare. It’s not the vision of a post-Roe world you want to present to the world, this story of a 10-year-old abandoned by the courts and the country’s health care system, a child many would have forced to bear a child conceived in violence, no matter the physical and emotional costs.
So, does that mean the most extreme foes of abortion rights have started to rethink the wisdom of their plans to enact ever harsher and stricter abortion bans in the states?
Of course not.
Instead, the narrative quickly shifted from stories of the indecisive giving birth and feeling vindicated by the choice forced upon them — to be sure, an occurrence that does happen — to a harsher alternative: Erase a 10-year-old, or worse, turn her into a weapon dreamed up by abortion rights activists and the party whose members overwhelmingly support that right.
For those with blinders on, softening an anti-abortion stance might require compromise, which equals hypocrisy if you sincerely believe life begins at conception — no exceptions allowed. But that kind of compromise simply makes room for the complexity that is real life.
