Pro-lifers talk about building “a culture of life,” by which they mean a culture that supports more mothers conceiving and delivering their children and that makes abortion more and more unthinkable. I sometimes used to worry that when politicians were using this phrase, they did so as an excuse for not doing their part of the work.
For the past two decades, I’ve been part of a subculture that is a culture of life. It’s among the traditionalist Catholics who are devoted to the Latin Mass. We know about a half dozen couples who come to church with a small army of children: six, seven, or even ten kids. And for many of these families, the youngest of the children has a disability. And among our peers at our parish, we know three mothers who were pressured by their doctors to abort their children because of the adverse results of one scan or test. They were variously told that the children’s conditions were “incompatible with life.” One dear friend was basically told by her ob-gyn while she still had the ultrasound jelly on her abdomen. He had found telltale signs of trisomy 16. At her first hesitation to schedule an abortion, he invoked not just the futility of the condition that her child supposedly had, but the astronomical costs of NICU treatment. She was going to waste millions of dollars — her own or someone else’s — and it would still be futile. Told again that abortion wasn’t an option, he harrumphed, “What are you, religious?”
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