Curing Ebola is healthcare--aborting a baby is not

About 15 years ago I left work early with a slight fever and a headache. I thought I had a 24-hour bug. When I arrived home, I took a nap on the couch and woke up in the early evening with a higher fever, a wet shirt, and an aching body—the flu. But in my delirium I began touching my face, wondering if I had Ebola.

At the time, such an idea was ridiculous. I must have been thinking of the 1995 movie Outbreak, where the infected bled from the eyes, nose, and mouth. For years afterward, my family and I laughed at that story. “Where would you have caught Ebola?” “I know! Crazy, right?” The story doesn’t seem as funny now. Ebola was a faraway and foreign disease. Now it’s crossed our borders. Why do our leaders seem reluctant to contain it?

Leave it to abortion advocates to seize the opportunity to promote abortion during this health crisis. In an opinion piece for the New York Observer, Nina Burleigh seems to criticize the global focus on Ebola. “While the world fixates on a single Ebola case,” reads the article’s subhead, “[Texas] abortion clinics are closing daily.” But she also expresses the opposite sentiment to the subhead. Referring to pro-life lawmakers in Texas as “the pack of cowboy-Taliban goons led by the absurd but dangerous Gov. Rick Perry,” Burleigh writes that while they occupied themselves with protecting unborn babies, “another actual public health crisis was blowing up in their faces. In Dallas, emergency room nurses and docs sent an Ebola-infected man home to barf up his deadly virus all over an apartment in the middle of the city for three days.”

Is she implying that Thomas Eric Duncan wouldn’t have died if Republicans weren’t so concerned about protecting unborn babies? Burleigh concludes with the kind of hyperbole that would make even the staunchest abortion supporter roll her eyes: “[M]ore Texas women will die during childbirth or from complications due to lack of basic reproductive health care than will ever die of the dreaded Ebola.”

Planned Parenthood tweeted and linked to Burleigh’s article, which apparently caused enough offense that the nation’s largest abortion provider responded, “We apologize if reposting this subheadline might have been offensive. Our hearts go out to those impacted by the tragic Ebola epidemic.”

Abortion advocates have somehow convinced themselves that pregnant women who don’t want their children are afflicted with a disease in need of a cure. Abortion is not, has never been, nor ever will be healthcare. How does the convenience-based dismemberment and removal of a human being in the womb preserve or improve a woman’s health? Abortion certainly doesn’t preserve or improve the baby’s health.

Throughout history, women have always found ways to kill their unwanted babies. It’s neither “reproductive justice” nor empowering that the killing now takes place inside a “safe” abortion center. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. Unlike Ebola, pregnancy is a life-nurturing and miraculous thing.