Theology of the Body: The Case of the Abortion-Pill Roofie

Christian and American reports this morning on the Vatican's condemnation of President Obama's revocation of restrictions on the USA's international funding of abortions.

The story goes like this: in the 1980's, president Reagan put into action what is known as the Mexico City Policy. This policy enshrined the American people's reluctance to contribute their tax dollars to the Planned Parenthood empire and the building of abortion mills in the communities of the developing world; in other words, the United States decided simply that its international donations should be made in the form of food, clean water, sanitation services, education, vitamins, things that growing families really need in needy areas, rather than merely building facilities where impoverished women are sent to abuse their bodies, limit their growth, and terminate their infants. In short, the policy declares that any international non- profit that uses public funds for abortions cannot receive USA international donations. Our new president, who is firmly committed to the state's option to kill inconvenient unborn children, has decided otherwise, and he thus revoked the Mexico City policy on Friday afternoon.

As the president's second major step in office, this radical enactment closely preceeds the hotly contested Freedom of Choice Act, (FOCA) which is set to revoke all existing restrictions on abortions in the United States. In particular, FOCA will compromise the will of the people at the local and state levels, where both legislation and law have continually affirmed that American men and women tend to believe that human life, whether very young or very old, has a right to continue, at any stage of its development.

Edit: Consider further President Obama's January 24 statement that he “looks forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund...in the coming weeks... (because) it is time that we end the politicization of this (abortion) issue.”

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) claims that it is not pro-abortion. However, recall that starting in 1979, in the first five years of China’s draconian one-child policy, UNFPA gave the program $50 million. To accomplish this goal over the years, which is still ongoing, IUDs have been forced into the wombs of hundreds of millions of women against their will. Indeed, no coercive method is considered taboo, including forced abortion. It was for reasons like these that in 2002 the U.S. State Department blasted China for its affront to human rights.

On the whole, the one-child policy has abetted female infanticide, so much so that there has been a massive decrease in the female population—there are now an estimated 350 million girls missing from China. Other non-white areas of the world where UNFPA concentrates its efforts include Vietnam, Nigeria and Peru. But it can be multicultural: When the genocidal maniac from Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, wanted to tame his people, he invited UNFPA to help reduce the population of Kosovo; he wasn’t unhappy with the results, nor, of course, the means.

As Bill Donahue puts it: so here we have it. In the name of women’s rights, UNFPA undercuts women. In the name of eradicating poverty, it eradicates the poor.

Are these realities a contravention or an extension of the actual will of the American people with regards to our international policies? I'm thinking in particular of an interesting local case decided exactly a year ago in Wisconsin. A local businessman had taken his girlfriend out for a milkshake at a nearby Baskin-Robbins. Watching from the car, the woman, a Dr. Darshana Patel, could see inside the ice cream parlor as her boyfriend frantically stirred something into her smoothie. Suspicious, she swabbed the drink and sent it to a lab. The result? The tests confirmed that her boyfriend had stirred into her drink mifepristone (also known as RU-486, the abortion pill). When Darshana miscarried several days later, the courts ruled that her boyfriend stood convicted of the first degree murder... of an unborn child.

It is cases like these that showcase the will of the people. Let's pray that our president would turn away from the tyrannical mood of the age, and instead turn an ear to his national constituency as they turn their own ears to the Creator and Defender of all the world's little babies.