I was listening to an old episode of one of my favorite radio shows, Speaking of Faith, a while back, and heard this pithy and poignant statement of values from progressive Catholic leader Sister Joan Chittister:
We have 10 million babies, as you and I speak, without health insurance in this country. It's wrong. It's immoral. And the whole notion that private sexual morality is the definition of religious life in this country is a cute ploy. It gets our minds off of the sins that are really killing the greatest number of people. I'm not saying that those are also not important values. Of course they are. They define our character as a people and our ability to live within our relationships. But there's a big difference between being pro-life and pro-birth. It's easy to get a baby born. What I want to know is once that baby is born will you feed it and house it and educate it? All I see is that every day we reduce those figures in our national budget more and more. That's the morality and the religion that I'm talking about. And until we care about those things, we cannot, on either spectrum, left or right, call ourselves a religious people, I don't think.
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I can't not comment on this, being in the field I'm in of working with dysfunctional parents. Of course I agree with what she's saying. We see not only financial poverty in the families we work with, but emotional poverty as well. I've lost count of the number of parents we work with who have already had their rights terminated on children they can't parent and don't care about (one mother is up to her eighth taken away), yet they keep having more. I consider myself a pretty liberal, non-judgemental kind of person - but, honestly, when we have to go in and repair the emotional damage that poor attachment and poor parenting results in (and of course, we can't fix it), it's enough to turn me into a raving lunatic who wants to go around screaming, "Enough! Mandatory birth control for everyone!" Whew! Thanks! I feel better now.
Love,
Mom
PS - Better health care coverage to provide birth control and more money in the budgets of those providing social services would be a tremendous help!
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