Reclaiming #WomensHealth

Were you to do a Google search for “International Day of Women’s Health,” as I just did, the first link you would find is from the Center for Reproductive Health. There you would learn that:

On May 28, the Center for Reproductive Rights joins health and women’s rights advocates from around the world in commemorating the International Day of Action for Women’s Health. The Center also calls on governments to ensure access to sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception, which is essential to improve women and adolescent girls’ health.

Sexual and reproductive health services. That’s one of those phrases abortion-rights activists use when they don’t want to say abortion. Which is why there should be no tears shed for the “women’s health” lobby when they complain that their day was “hijacked” by pro-life activists today.

Exercising free speech is “disgusting”?

Only if you worship at the church of the Insatiable New Intolerance. 

As many a pro-life tweeter today put it, abortion is not health care:

And don’t we want to be a people who cares for mother and child?

Pope Francis this weekend in the Holy Land talked about (as he does) the shame of the evils of Holocaust, the shame of abortion, the shame of destroying and casting aside human life.

There was what he said in Bethlehem about children and the unborn and the innocent. And here’s Haaretz’s write-up of his visit to Yad Vashem:

“Who convinced you that you were God? Not only did you torture and kill your brothers and sisters, but you sacrificed them to yourself, because you made yourself a god. Today, in this place, we hear once more the voice of God: Adam, where are you?” the pope posed in a speech he delivered in Italian.

 

“Here before the boundless tragedy of the Holocaust, That cry – ‘Where are you?’ – echoes like a faint voice in an unfathomable abyss,” he said. “A great evil has befallen us, such as never happened under the heavens. Now, Lord, hear our prayer, hear our plea, save us in your mercy. Save us from this horror.”

 

The pope continued: “Grant us the grace to be ashamed of what men have done, to be ashamed of this massive idolatry, of having despised and destroyed our own flesh which you formed from the earth, to which you gave life with your own breath of life. Never again, Lord, never again!”

 

As New York again is home to politicians who would expand abortion in a state of abysmally high abortion rates (and a governor who would like opposition to move to another state and get out of his way to please the abortion lobby on the road to a Democratic presidential primary), don’t we all want to do better? Expect men to be fathers to their children (encourage them! value them!). Help mothers be mothers. Let it be known there are families who are ready to love and raise the great gift of a child.

Today’s reclaiming of #WomensHealth on Twitter was just another small step toward making abortion unthinkable and life the preference always within reach.