Pro-Life?

In a free market economy, if you can’t afford it you can’t have it. Oh, if you are on the margin, you can easily find a predatory lender who will give you an opportunity to mortgage yourself six feet under, but that won’t mean you have anything. That means you will never have anything. The market-driven corporate economy draws the bottom line. It applies to everything in the current right-wing conservative mindset except children. You have to have children — because life belongs to God. Unfortunately, health care belongs to the insurance companies, and that is why government can’t step in with any regulation or, their God forbid, a national health care system.
That is why we are reading this story in The New York Times today by Erik Echolm:

In Turnabout, Infant Deaths Climb in South
HOLLANDALE, Miss. ? For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states.
The setbacks have raised questions about the impact of cuts in welfare and Medicaid and of poor access to doctors, and, many doctors say, the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes and hypertension among potential mothers, some of whom tip the scales here at 300 to 400 pounds….
To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate ? defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births ? fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

The article notes that481 babies died in 2005, 65 more than in 2004.
There is more to being supportive of human life than just denying women elective abortions. Somewhere we have to find the means to take care of human beings who are already breathing.
The Neocon bubble-heads have subverted the American Dream of doing well to a corporate economy none of us wanted. Currently wealth distribution in the United States has the profile of a despotic third world country, not a civilized society in which life is actually valued.
Now if you are ready to say, “Well, if those people would just exercise more and eat less, they would be more healthy and their children would live,” take a walk through a grocery store and price your market basket with fresh produce, lean meat, and low-glycemic Ezekiel bread. Poor people can’t eat right, can’t afford a health club, and don’t have a doctor. Most of the poor don’t have lawns and gardens to tend for exercise. We don’t keep poor rural or urban neighborhoods safe for evening walks or jogging the way we do gated communities. So if you are ready to say “Well, if those people …” first wake up and take a look around you.
Pro-life for my money is pro national health care, pro safe neighborhoods, pro public education, and against saying “those people.”