According to Business Insider, every two weeks Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis from Texas fly a group of 20 low-income women to New Mexico for abortions. They claim it’s their faith that motivates them to ensure women have abortions — but in reality, they get to act as “saviors” to disadvantaged women without actually doing anything to help them.
“The resources they have to get access to what I consider a fundamental right, to terminate a pregnancy and control their bodies, is limited by their position in society, which is why this whole thing is a war on the poor,” Daniel Kanter, the senior minister and CEO of the First Unitarian Church of Dallas and board member of the Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Board of Trustees told Insider.
He organizes these abortion trips with help from other members of the clergy. For five years, he ran a multi-faith chaplaincy team that counseled women at an abortion business in Dallas. When Texas enacted the Heartbeat Act (SB8) in 2021, the group began flying women to New Mexico, where abortion is dangerously unrestricted.
“SB8 changed almost everything about the chaplaincy,” Kanter said. “Our patient load went from 100 patients a day to 30 patients a day, and 15 weren’t eligible for an abortion procedure because they were more than six weeks pregnant. So we pivoted to a travel program.”
Targeting low-income women
Kanter’s notion of pro-life laws being a “war on the poor” is misguided at best. The women he escorts to New Mexico to kill their babies can only qualify for the trip by being below a certain income level — which means it isn’t merely the Texas Heartbeat Act and a desire to help women that is behind the group’s efforts. It’s the age-old “poor women need abortion” mentality that is the motive. Pre-Roe, abortion advocates claimed legalized abortion would decrease poverty in the United States. The idea that killing children in the womb could solve the issue of poverty is grossly eugenic and unethical and it doesn’t benefit women at all — but it is also statistically untrue.
Today, women in the U.S. are 35% more likely than men to be poor — and single mothers are at the highest risk of living in poverty. It’s a trend called “the feminization of poverty.” Five million more women than men were poor in 2012. According to the USCCB’s Poverty and Abortion: A Vicious Cycle, research shows that widely available contraception and abortion have worked to increase out-of-wedlock births. In the past, an unexpected pregnancy led the man to propose marriage — now he proposes an abortion. The pregnancy is now her responsibility alone — and her problem. If she refuses abortion, he either kills her, or she is on her own as a single mother, a huge risk factor for poverty. Women aren’t choosing abortion freely — they are being pressured into it.
Less-advantaged women have long been targeted by the abortion industry and pro-abortion groups, and they repeatedly hear from the media that abortion is necessary for women who are considered poor. This is the war on the poor — killing off children because they will be born to low-income women. These women don’t necessarily want abortions but have been conditioned to believe that they have little other choice.
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Polling shows that only 30% of those in households making under $40,000 a year agree with on-demand abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, and abortion support levels rise as a person’s income increases.
“One in four economically vulnerable people want abortion banned altogether, while only one in 10 economically privileged people want the same,” columnist Charles Camosy explained. “In addition, in every circumstance in the same Gallup poll, people of color were more anti-abortion than were non-Hispanic whites.”
Kanter boasts of support for these poor women, but he is providing zero help. What these women need and want is not to kill their babies, but to be able to properly care for their babies. Already feeling the pressure to abort, when clergy members offer financial assistance for abortion but not for parenting, it makes abortion truly seem like the only option these women have.
Pro-abortion clergy are doing nothing more than backing abortion-vulnerable women into a corner. And once the abortion is over, the women are back on their own — still poor, still without resources, and now with the added pain of having sacrificed their child’s life.
Putting women in danger
The Insider complains that the day trip to New Mexico can take over 13 hours, which should come as no surprise since some of the women will require a surgical abortion. Twenty low-income women at a time are being flown into New Mexico for abortions. The flight from Dallas to Albuquerque is about two hours. Not factoring in time at the airport or travel to the abortion facility, that’s just eight to nine hours to commit 20 abortions plus any other abortions that may be scheduled that day. That works out to just about 15 minutes for each woman’s abortion.
In addition, these women are being flown back to Texas that same day. If any of these women experience complications, the abortionist responsible will not be the doctor tasked with helping her. That job will go to a physician who has no information about the procedure she had. If the woman is on Medicaid, taxpayers will be footing the medical bills for those injuries — which could include hemorrhaging, incomplete abortion, infection, perforated uterus, or perforated cervix.
Christianity does not support abortion
Katey Zeh, a reverend and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, erroneously claimed that Christians and Jews support abortion. She told the Insider, “It’s just that there’s a very vocal group of what we call white Christian nationalists that have made this the central issue of their political platform and they have used and weaponized Christianity, in particular, to make it seem like this is just an obvious thing, that if you are a Christian then you must be anti-abortion.”
She referred to the belief in the sanctity of life as “a very fringe belief.” But Christianity teaches that God creates life and that every human is created in His image. The act of abortion is a woman telling God ‘no’ when Christians should always be saying yes to God. This is not a fringe Christian belief.
But even if most Christians support abortion, Zeh’s argument is nothing more than a logical fallacy, relying on the idea that if something is popular, it must be right. She is essentially arguing that if all of your friends jump off a bridge, you should too.
According to a 2021 Knights of Columbus/Marist poll, 76% of Americans support limits on abortion — limits which Roe does not allow.
Judaism does not support abortion
A separate article from The Guardian claims that in Judaism, “abortion is usually seen as permissible and even required in cases where the patient’s life is at risk.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg told The Guardian, “There are very serious religious liberty questions here. If you ban abortion, when my religious tradition tells me that I am a) permitted and b) possibly required to access abortion care, you are limiting my free exercise of religion.”
However, Cecily Routman of the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation argues that pro-abortion Judaism is “fake Judaism.” She explained, “Exodus 21:22-25 does NOT prove that Judaism authorizes abortion. Mistranslation and false interpretation of these verses have been weaponized against unborn children and their mothers.”
In addition, abortion is never necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. Surgery for ectopic pregnancy, preterm delivery, and emergency C-sections are not abortions. An abortion occurs when an abortionist intentionally kills the preborn child prior to delivery. When time is of the essence to save a woman’s life, a C-section takes less than an hour while a later abortion can take up to four days.
Expanding the program
Ruth MacKenzie, a minister in residence at Kanter’s Dallas church, said when she moves back to Minnesota she will work to get women from North Dakota and South Dakota to Minnesota for abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
Likewise, the group Faith Choice Ohio is creating an abortion fund to cart women to other states for abortions. Executive director Elaina Ramsey said that pro-life Christians are “religious zealots, people who claim a faith tradition but do not speak for me as a Christian.” She added that people like to be told that having an abortion will not mean they are going to hell; this is understandable, as anyone doing something unethical would be happy to hear that the unethical act is somehow acceptable.
While no human can predict which persons will end up in hell, these clergy members are all leading people into serious sin.
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