Pro-choice, pro-life…

Many of us lead sheltered lives, sitting comfortably sipping coffee in front of our computers. It is so easy to sit here and proclaim we understand the word of God and insist that pro-life is the only choice of God. We have no clue how so many others in the world live and yet we are perfectly ecstatic in our ignorance.
I have done more than my share of volunteer work. From slums to leper colonies. In some of life’s extreme, what I’ve seen are haggard looking twenty-something year old women working in a stone quarry from sunrise to sunset. Each with five kids screaming and running on freshly quarried stones. The kids all have their bellies hanging out with worm infestations, their diarrhea running down their legs, their snots running down their faces, their skin color unrecognizable because of the grime on their bodies and their black hair bleached blond from the acids in the stone dust. Most of these children will not reach puberty.
Many of them get less than a meal a day. None of them know what it feels like to have a full stomach. They do not know how to cry because they have never seen happier times to compare with their misery. When they do get some food, it is the equivalent of few slices of dry bread. No milk, no vegetables, no fruits. And when they get sick, they just die because their bodies have nothing to fight the disease with. Is this the pro-life people are harping about? Do they have any idea how much these kids suffer? Many of them will jump up and say it is God’s will, but it is not, is it? When these pro-lifers die and face Him, the first question He will ask is – why didn’t you use the brain I gave you? You put your faith on a piece of paper and left the dignity of humanity behind.
These mothers do cry at the plight of their children but they are not pro-life. They would rush off to the abortion clinics in a second if they could because they love their children. But they can’t; they don’t get any weekly holidays. If they get sick and can’t work, they get no pay. Even if they were able to get to a clinic, they would not be able to afford the 4-5 US$ it costs (for medicines after discharge). That amount would pay for their food for a week. They do not have the choice of abstinence. When their husbands come home staggering drunk late at night, the only two choices these women have are either to surrender or to be beaten mercilessly.
I am not trying to make anyone feel guilty for having a better life. There’s nothing wrong with that. Those who do should be thankful to God that they do. What I am saying is that those children would have been better unborn. If people still think that pro-life is the answer for them then they are just being self-righteous with no empathy for the dignity of life. Even cockroaches have life but we humans differ in the dignity which must be attached to our lives for us to exist as human beings. It is not just about life but also about the dignity of that life. Just being biologically alive is not enough.
There cannot be two different types of Gods, one type for the comfortable and the other type for those who are not. If there is just one God then He would certainly understand.