Prolife, Who Cares?

You hear it said all the time that people who claim to be prolife don't care about "unwanted" children or women and girls in difficult pregnancy situations. Sometimes I wonder where the people who make this accusation get their information. 

When I think of what it means to be prolife:

I think of my beautiful daughter, Kelly, who was born when I was seventeen. I would never want her to feel that she should be grateful that we simply allowed her to be born, which was her right no less than any other baby's. The fact that her father and I chose life for her doesn't make us more righteous than anyone else, but it does make us blessed beyond measure. 

Kelly on her first birthday in 1973

Me and Kelly in 2012. It would take several posts to tell you what an amazing woman she is and why I'm so proud of her.

And I think of the people who helped and supported me along the way, including the ladies from my church who gave me a baby shower in an era when people might have expected them to turn away from me in judgment. I don't remember many gifts I received at that shower, but I remember that it made me feel unconditionally loved at a time when I was aware of a lot of gossip and rumor mongering among my peers.

I think of my adopted and adored granddaughter, Lucy, and her birth mother, a college student who chose the harder road of nine months of pregnancy, and a painstaking search and selection process to find parents she could feel at peace about placing her baby girl with.

My daughter, Erika, introducing me to newborn Lucy in 2008

And I think of the people who helped and supported Lucy's birth mother during and after her pregnancy including friends and family who showered her with love and gifts at a sort of "getting on with your life" party after she had recovered from childbirth.

I think of how my  daughter, Erika and her husband, Lucy's parents, opened their home to a young, poor unwed mother and her baby for several months until this young woman could get on her feet.


I think of all the Christians I know who volunteer at and donate money to pregnancy centers and homes that provide practical and material assistance to girls and women in crisis pregnancies. 

I think of the Seton home here in San Antonio:

http://www.setonhomesa.org/  

And Life Choices Pregnancy Care Center:

http://www.lifechoices-agape.org/ 

And the Ruth Harbor house in Erika's neighborhood in Des Moines:
 
 http://ruthharborhome.blogspot.com/
 

I think of Christian friends who care for foster children and have adopted children out of the foster care system.

I think of how Dr. Tony Evans preaches the importance of being "prolife from womb to tomb."

 While conservative on social issues, Dr. Evans said he reminds religious right groups that "protection for the unborn in the womb" must be matched by "justice to the tomb" - as in civil rights and attention to public education and health care.

By SAM HODGES and MARK NORRIS / The Dallas Morning News, August 15, 2009

 I don't mean to say that everyone who talks the pro-life talk also walks the walk.  But many do and are having a bigger, more positive impact than I think politicking ever will. 

And yes, we can do more, but I wish people would think twice before painting with such a broad brush as to say that pro-lifers don't care.

On Roe v Wade and Voting Republican

From time to time, I reflect back on my experience as a pregnant sixteen year old in 1972 and how I was offered an abortion twice in San Antonio before Roe v Wade was passed. At the time, abortion in Texas was prohibited, at least according to the letter of the law, except in cases of rape or endangerment of the life of the mother. Yet I heard about girls from school getting them and had talked to one who told me her parents made her get one.

The first "offer" was made at the "San Antonio Free Clinic," where I had gone for a pregnancy test, because this was years before do-it-yourself pregnancy tests were available at every drugstore. When the test returned positive, the counselor, who was probably in his 20s, asked if I knew what I was going to do. I said that no I didn't, but that my boyfriend and I would probably get married. He advised me that I didn't have to have a baby and that if I decided not to, they could help me "make the arrangements."

Wilford Hall USAF Hospital where I declined the offer of an abortion and later gave birth.

After I told my parents I was pregnant, my mother took me to Wilford Hall US Air Force hospital where I had another pregnancy test. When that one also came back positive, the Air Force doctor asked to speak to me alone. I suppose I looked pretty vulnerable at the age of  sixteen and I'm sure this doctor was sincerely trying to help me when he informed me that because I was a military dependent, the hospital could arrange an abortion if I wanted one.

It may be hard to believe today, but public funding of abortion at military facilities was available, albeit with some limitations, for military personnel and their dependents during much of the 1970s. Memoranda to the surgeons general of the military departments issued in 1970—three years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade—stated that, although no physician was required to perform an abortion if doing so would be against his or her religious, moral or ethical beliefs, abortions could be provided in military facilities "when medically indicated or for reasons involving mental health and subject to the availability of space and facilities and the capabilities of the medical staff." Moreover, these memoranda stated unequivocally that abortions could be provided without regard to state laws—significant because, at the time, 30 states and the District of Columbia prohibited abortion except in cases of life endangerment, and three states (Louisiana, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania) prohibited all abortions without exception.

Heather D. Boonstra,Guttmacher Policy Review

Summer 2010, Volume 13, Number 3

When I declined this offer, the doctor said that just in case the tests were wrong and my cycle was delayed, he would prescribe some pills for me to take for a week. To this day I don't know what those pills were, but I took them trustingly. Looking back, I often wondered if they were some type of abortifacient. If so, they didn't work, for which I thank God.

Me and my precious daughter, Kelly, born 2 months after I turned 17

Roe V Wade has been in place almost forty years now. If I could have had an abortion in Texas before Roe v Wade, I wonder how hard it would really be to obtain one if it ever is overturned after being in place for over 40 years.

 Some pro-lifers talk as if overturning Roe v Wade would make abortion illegal or unavailable in America, but of course it wouldn't. States would set their own laws like they did before 1973. Abortion would be legal in some states and not in others, severely restricted in some states and not restricted at all in others. For most people it just isn't very difficult to travel from one state to another.

I consider myself to be pro-life. I consider abortion to be the taking of a human life. But the hope of overturning Roe v Wade is not the sole factor in determining how I vote, at lease not anymore. In the forty years since Roe v Wade, five Republican presidents have held office, but I don’t think those five presidents managed to save many unborn babies or even made the issue a priority once they were in office.

Somewhere along the way, I became convinced that as a Christian who is morally opposed to abortion, I should always vote Republican in presidential elections in the hope that someday Republican presidents will appoint enough pro-life justices to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. 

I just can't do it anymore. For me, the quest to overturn Roe v Wade no longer trumps all other issues, some of which also involve life and death. I do not think Roe v Wade is going to be overturned, no matter how many Republican presidents are elected or how many conservative justices they appoint to the Supreme Court.

This doesn't mean that I've become a Democrat. I never was a Republican. The truth is that I've never felt at home ideologically with either political party and deciding how to vote always involves some compromise. 

I do believe that Christians are doing much and can do more to help prevent abortions more effectively than our emphasis on politics and laws. But that will be another post.

For a comprehensive view of the history of abortion
and Christianity, see
The Abortion Wars | Christianity Today

Lessons in Banking: Outsourcing Jobs Overseas

In 2006 and 2007, when I worked as a customer service representative for one of the largest banks in the country, they had already moved whole departments to India and the Philippines and maintained call centers in both countries.

My job involved talking with representatives in these countries and transferring customer calls to them on a daily basis. Most of these overseas employees spoke good English and were courteous, competent, and well educated. Unfortunately, they were subjected to more than their share of verbal abuse from customers and disrespect from fellow employees in the U.S.

I have worked for the past five years at one of the largest credit unions in America. They don't outsource jobs overseas and I don't think they ever will. I don't know of any credit unions who do.

But I also know that the global economy is a reality that is not going to go away. Big business is going to keep outsourcing jobs overseas and it's unrealistic to expect our government to stop them, although every election year, the rhetoric seems to suggest otherwise.

That said, I think issues of taxation and regulation of business should be considered on their own merit or lack thereof. I don't buy the assumption that if big businesses have more money to spend, they are going to spend it creating jobs for American workers.They may and then again, they may not.

Lessons in Banking: Personal and Political

My first series of posts, Lessons in Banking, has been written largely to help me articulate and process for myself the ways in which my short-lived career at a large bank impacted the way I think now about big business, the financial industry and government regulation. I had spent most of my adult life as a stay-at-home mom and spent many years helping my self-employed husband in his small business. 

I've worked for two other companies for longer than I worked at the one I've referred to TBTF (To Big To Fail) Bank. One of them was a true "small business" with about twenty employees. I've been working at one of the largest credit unions in the country for the past five years now. 

Nowhere else have I witnessed  the intense concentration of greed, deception, denial and lack of accountability l that I observed in less than two years working at a low level position in one small corner of one of the world's largest banks.

I never felt comfortable being associated with TBTF and had frequent little crisis of conscience while working there. In 2006 and 2007 my concerns about TBTF were limited to how their practices impacted their own customers and my own conscience. 

Headlines from fall of 2008

 

What was not on my radar at the time was how TBTF Bank and other huge banking corporations like them had the power to cripple the US and global economies, bring financial ruin to people and families far beyond their own customer base and to exert huge influence on our elections and elected officials. I still am far from astute in my understanding of business and economics, but I did come out of the experience with some personal and hopefully humble opinions. 

By the time the sub-prime mortgage crisis came to a head and the economy was in crisis, I had left TBTF Bank of my own accord and had been happily employed at the credit union for almost a year. As economic events unfolded in 2008 and beyond, I often looked back and tried to process what I observed at the bank in 2006 and 2007 in light of the bigger picture. 

As an American citizen, I think it's important to remember all businesses are not created equal. The words, business, government regulation, pro-business often seem to be thrown around rhetorically with no distinction between sizes and types of business. Some of the rhetoric would convince us that any government regulation of business is inherently wrong. In my opinion, businesses large enough to wield destructive power over our nation and the world had better be held accountable and there is no one to do that other than a government elected by the people and for the people.

October 2009

 


 I hear and agree with warnings against placing our faith in government, but is "In Big Business We Trust" a better option? People who trust in God should recognize both other alternatives as forms of idolatry. 

And as citizens of a democratic republic, we have more influence over our government than we do over multinational corporations, although even that is being diluted as their  influence in government grows. We do need healthy businesses unhampered by unnecessary regulation, but I have come to believe that some government regulation, especially of  large and powerful businesses, is absolutely necessary.

Lessons in Banking: Feeding Frenzies

When I worked at the TBTF (To Big To Fail) Bank customer service call center, mortgages were king in the couple years leading up to the economic meltdown in 2008. Customer service representatives were under pressure to convince callers to open and apply for all types of new accounts and loans with a big emphasis on mortgages and home equity loans. 

We earned commission for each new account we could convince a customer to open. After mortgage loans, checking accounts were especially profitable, probably because fees associated with them were a big source of revenue. Even if the customer never used that checking account and ended up closing it with a zero balance, the rep who convinced them to open it would have already received their commission. 

Nobody in management would have ever admitted that checking accounts were opened without a customer’s knowledge and consent, but I saw it every day. Part of my job was to call people who had brand new accounts and everyday I talked to people who had no recollection of opening a new checking account, but who had recently called customer service. 

In fairness, most of these new accounts had been opened with the customer's consent, but because there was so much pressure to sell checking accounts and so much money to be made doing it, reps used all kinds of tactics to sell them. 

In banking, there are two major types of fraud or  compromise that occur on checking accounts and they each need to be dealt with differently. The first involves the debit card. If a debit card is lost, stolen or compromised, that debit card number has to be closed and replaced with a new one as quickly as possible. As soon as the debit card is closed, there is no further risk to the account it is attached to.

Compromise of an actual checking account number as opposed to the debit card number is much more complicated and nothing short of closing the whole account and opening a new one will eliminate the risk.

Large scale debit/credit card compromises are fairly common when a retailer or payment processing company has a theft of data that includes debit and credit card numbers. When this happens, banks are notified that a large group of their customer's card numbers may have been stolen and need to be closed and replaced. In these situations, all that needs to be done for each customer affected is to replace their debit card with one with a new number. It's inconvenient, but not nearly as inconvenient as closing the whole checking account and transitioning to a new one, which involves switching direct deposits, automatic bill payments, ordering new checks, etc. 

Two such large-scale card compromises took place while I worked at TBTF Bank and both were high profile in the media, triggering panicked customers to call in even as the bank was sending letters and new cards to them. No one earned commission just for closing and replacing a debit card, so sure enough, customer service reps had a feeding frenzy advising customers to close their checking accounts and open new ones over the phone.

I heard this going on all around me, knowing full well that it was unnecessary and a terrible inconvenience to the customers. I don't necessarily think management was encouraging this and they may not have been aware of it, but they should have been. There just wasn't that much accountability.