The Most Compelling Abortion Argument That Neither Side Is Discussing: What Happens to the Unwanted and How Does that Impact Us All?
A Five Part Series
Photo credit: Global Village Space
Part One: The Children’s Institute
The sound of babies crying and cooing reverberated through the steely grey space that was the Children’s Institute. I followed the administrator past a heavy doorway, with a buzzer that automatically locked behind us as we entered. She led me to a small cubicle with a large crib filled with four newborn babies. She motioned for me to take a seat in a mud colored, beaten rocking chair with sunflower blue soiled cushions. Then she proceeded to place two tiny, bundled babies into each of my arms, and between communicating in Spanish on a walkie-talkie she instructed with east coast swagger, “Watch their wobbly heads and hold them close to each other and against your chest so that they could feel your body warmth and heartbeat. I’ll be back in 15 minutes to rotate you to the next cubical, ok?” I nodded as she pantomimed this act while walking away. They didn’t want anyone to stay longer than 15 minutes for fear of attachment: both the babies becoming attached to the caregiver and the caregiver attached to the babies. But they were so understaffed no one was there to regulate the 15 minutes.
I was there, because my papa was raised in an orphanage as a foster child who was never adopted. He spent his childhood and even young adult years longing for a forever family that would claim him as their own. His adulthood was spent searching for his birth parents. This desire to be wanted and to belong was so strong in him that it created an empathetic beat in my own heart. I was driven to match foster babies with forever families so that future generations would not have to suffer the fate my papa had of feeling unwanted.
To honor my papa’s story, I became a foster-adopt advocate and together with members of Women in Theatre, co-created, "The Cuddle Program" where we helped to recruit volunteers to hold babies in foster care shelters.
There are more than half a million children in the foster care system. Most of these children are ethnic minorities, or above the age of eight with medical and or emotional challenges and are very difficult to find forever homes for. Newborn babies in foster care are usually either siblings of other children recently removed from their home or the result of having been dropped off at a baby hatch, a box at fire stations, where parents can safely surrender newborn babies they are unable to provide for. These babies are immediately turned over to the foster care system.
At the time, there were so many infants in the foster care system and yet not enough qualified foster families in waiting or funding to pay for institutional caregivers to do any more than change their diapers and feed them. We know from research that these babies can die without human contact, specifically nurturing love and affection—they must be held in order to thrive. So, my performing peers and I volunteered to hold the babies who when not being fed or changed went largely huddled in cribs, untouched for hours, due to budget cuts for caregivers.
Since funding was of the utmost importance, those who had a tendency to donate, particularly anti-abortion, Bible Belt groups, would sometimes tour the facility to see how their money was being spent. Somewhere around the 30-minute mark of holding this collective 28 pounds—each baby around seven pounds, the same size of the holiday fruit cakes tossed aside each year, I heard the vacuum sealed weight of the security door open and close with a cackle laughter coming down the hallway and growing nearer. “Y’all come on now. I want to see these precious, little brown babies we saved.”
A plumpish, jaunty woman, in a floral print ensemble, laden with QVC costume jewelry, and wearing too much perfume, bent her head in the doorway of the cubicle I was seated in with the babies. By contrast, I was told to dress comfortably and wear my hair pulled back. She looked down at my plain black teeshirt and yoga pants with disapproval and touched my braids while asking, “Are they real?” I didn’t know if she meant my hair or the babies. I nodded “yes” and looked up at her with arms that were slightly trembling from having held these babies for so long in the same position. She walked in and circled around me like a vulture eyeing prey. Her face was so close to mine that I could see the sticky hair spray that formed in harden drops around her hair line. I could smell the sour mixture of secret puffs on cigarettes and instant coffee swirling in her breath.
With her face in my lap hovering over the babies the way Tom Cruise hovered over the floor in Mission Impossible, I couldn’t help noting the similarity of her well-coiffed backcombed hair to a bird’s nest sprouting from the crown of her head. I raised my right elbow, bent as a wing cradling these baby birds, as if to offer her two of the babies to hold—She gasped a bit and said, "Oh!” Startled, she recoiled. (Ssssss) Then she clasped her hands together and held them out for me to see her palms and said, "I can't take them,” She stammered. “I'm, I’m not wearing gloves."
I turned away from her and placed my focus back on the babies, now resting peacefully, as I searched for support to rest my elbows while my numbed arms began to fall asleep, and my spirit grew weary from suffocating hypocrisy siphoning the air out of the room. As I continued to softly rock and hum to these babies, I was intently focused on what would become of them.
The woman went on to tell me all about herself, “I’m Sheila, but my friends call me Shelly—Shelly-Belly.” As she tapped her stomach “This here is what you call a permanent burrito baby” she burst into laughter. She shared her political beliefs: pro-death penalty, her religious beliefs: Christian, and punctuated her diatribe by gesturing toward the babies she was too afraid to hold and exclaiming, “I helped save these babies from abortion." She whispered that last word, abortion.
The room tone changed to a weighted stillness. I stopped rocking in the chair. Even the babies seemed to pause their breathing as I looked up with sincere confusion and asked, "Why?"
It wasn't a political question; it was an ethical plea. “Why?” My question came from a deep longing to understand. These were babies that no one wanted. Not even the woman who claimed to save them was willing to hold them. Many of these babies were drug or alcohol addicted. Most unwanted children will stay in foster care and never be adopted until they age out of the foster care program; at which time they are given a garbage bag to hold all their worldly possessions and turned onto the streets. Historically speaking, most will be pushed into poverty without the support of family or higher education, end up homeless, often forced into a life of prostitution and drug dealing to survive, become addicted to substance abuse to cope with the harsh reality of their lives, fall victim to domestic violence, and turn to crime to support their habits. Unwanted pregnancies often equal unwanted children who can become unwanted adults in society. I’m sure there are exceptions who survive unscathed, but I’ve yet to meet one.
According to the National Foster Care Statistics: Each year, more than 600,000 children experience foster care in the United States. They live their entire lives largely unwanted, neglected, often abused only to enter the prison system and repeat the cycle of impregnating or becoming unwillingly impregnated themselves.
The federal government Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System states that from August 1999 - August 2019, — 9,073,607 American children were removed from their families and placed in foster homes. Allow that number to settle in your heart. Over nine million unwanted children in foster care. That’s roughly the population of the entire state of Michigan. Now that Roe V Wade has been overturned, that number is going to skyrocket exponentially; and who will take care of these children? How will federal and state governments pay for the care of these unwanted children? How will our social structure change to support these children—through our schools, hospitals, and welfare programs? And how will each of our lives, and American culture as a whole, be forever altered by this dramatic population growth of unwanted children?
In the book, Born Unwanted: Developmental Efforts of Denied Abortion, Henry Philip David and a team of researchers conducted a 35-year study of 220 children born to women who were twice refused abortions. Each unwanted child was paired with a wanted child to form the control group. It’s one the most comprehensive long-term studies we have on the effects of raising unwanted children, and several institutions were invested in its results.
What they found across the board is that unwanted children suffer more in every area of life including mentally, emotionally, physically, academically, and financially. They have more relationship problems and are more likely to engage in crime with an increased risk for negative psychosocial development.
My eyes filled with the tears of awareness of the life of suffering these babies in my arms were likely to face. “Why do we put dogs to sleep who have no one to care for them yet we expect human beings in the same situation to live at any cost? It's inhumane,” I said.
No child should be born unwanted, resented, unloved and relegated to a life of suffering. Imagine if we were discussing dogs, if a law went into place that no dog could be euthanized even if it was suffering or had no one to care for it. Instead, all dogs would remain in cages under governmental auspices with the least amount of care simply to keep them alive. The law would allow for them to be traded between fickle humans who couldn’t commit to keeping them or who abused them until they were taken back by state agencies. At which point, they would be put back into cages until the state agencies let them loose on the street when they became too old to care for. Once on the street these dogs may attack, bite, or harm others as acts of survival as they had not been taught any other way. Only then, would they be put out of their misery and euthanized through a legalized death penalty; a punishment for surviving life unwanted.
Sheila looked dumbfounded and stood over me with her mouth agape, as if it never occurred to her that the babies she “saved” would need care and resources for the next 18 years that no one in government or church was willing or able to take on.
According to the book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, When abortions became legal, the crime rate dropped 18 years later. This was attributed to the fact that there were less unwanted children who became unwanted adults due to the implementation of legal abortions. This claim came under fire and was accused of containing errors in its research. It forced the authors to argue and admit that while there were some statistical errors—that once corrected—made the link between abortion and crime weaker, it was still a statistically significant link. Therefore, it stands to reason that with banned abortions, there’s still a statistically significant chance that crime will rise; particularly if the majority of our prisons are made up of adults who were raised in foster care, brought into this world unwanted.
I looked away because I could feel the tears burning my cheeks and said, "You didn't save these babies. You prolonged their suffering. Had you taken the mothers in or promised that if they did not abort, you would raise their unborn, then, maybe you could argue that they were ‘saved.’ But what you did was bring unwanted fetuses into the world who are now unwanted babies, who will become unwanted children and adults. Statistically speaking, one of these four babies in my arms may grow up to be a rapist, a murderer, or commit a crime that you or someone you care about may be victim to. So, next time you stop a woman from having an abortion, be prepared to raise what will eventually be a child who was unwanted; or let her do what's best for herself and the unwanted fetus."
Visibly shaken, Shelia was left speechless and could only hurl a single word in my direction: “Murderer!” An evangelical conservative woman who believes in the death penalty is calling me, the one holding the unwanted babies in my arms without gloves—a murderer. Let’s explore this.
What is murder?
Murder is the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice. The word murder cannot justifiably be applied to abortion because a fetus is not a person and abortions are not performed with malice. So why is this concept of murder aligned with abortion? It comes from the as-yet-to-be-defined moment at which life begins and the unclear definition of what it means to be a “person,” in regard to a fetus.
This concludes Part One: The Children’s Institute
In Part Two of The Most Compelling Abortion Argument That Neither Side Is Discussing: What Happens to the Unwanted and How Does that Impact Us All?, the question of when life begins will be explored as well as what the Bible really says about abortion.
Sage Justice is intensely sincere. Balancing wisdom and humor she most often writes deeply personal solution based pieces about the enduring virtues that connect us all: love and healing. She is an award-winning playwright and critically acclaimed performing artist who has appeared on stages from Madison Square Garden in New York City, to The Comedy Store in Hollywood, California. Ms. Justice is the author of Sage Words FREEDOM Book One, an activist, a member of the Screen Actors Guild and an alumna Artist-In-Residence of Chateau Orquevaux, France. She is a co-founder of The Unity Project which fuses activism with art, to educate and inspire, with a special emphasis on community engagement to end homelessness. She has a series of short reels about living with the rare genetic disorder, Vascular Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that you can find in a highlight reel on her Instagram page @SageWords2027.
©Sage Justice 2022 SageWords.org This article includes excerpts from the book, Sage Words, Legacy, Book Seven, and the book, What Religion is God?
