Baby Hope's Birth Mom Has a Name
This revelation came more than halfway through the speech Tuesday, and probably by accident, when President Trump told a story that was, at least nominally, about human kindness as a cure for the opioid epidemic. As Mr. Trump described it, a 27-year-old Albuquerque police officer, Ryan Holets, happened upon a pregnant woman who was homeless and was “preparing to inject heroin.” The president continued: “When Ryan told her she was going to harm her unborn child, she began to weep. She told him she did not know where to turn, but badly wanted a safe home for her baby.”
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You might have been wondering — I know I was — what happened to that homeless woman? Was she offered treatment? Was she given a chance to reunite with her newborn baby, which could have been a powerful incentive to get clean? Can she be part of the baby’s life? Where is she now? Is she O.K.?
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Think of the posters often brandished at anti-abortion marches and rallies, with the image of a fetus in utero, floating free, like an astronaut, with the umbilical cord, untethered, trailing off into the darkness. The spaceship — a woman — was, of course, nowhere to be seen, an important framing. With the woman literally out of the picture, abortion foes can advance the claim that a fertilized egg is just as much a unique human life, deserving of protection as a living, breathing, toddler.
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Once we put the woman back in the picture, once we insist on seeing her as a person, not a place or a thing, we’ve got to acknowledge what is, for abortion opponents, an inconvenient truth. A tiny baby can survive and thrive under the care of a biological parent, or an adoptive one, or even in a neonatal intensive care units, with no parents around. Her survival is not tied to a specific person any more than a patient in kidney failure depends upon a specific machine, or a diabetic’s life is tied to a specific batch of insulin.
It’s different for a “pre-born” baby, which does not just need care, or medicine, or machinery. That embryo requires the support, the partnership and the body, of one specific individual: the woman carrying it.
The way around that is for abortion opponents to simply take the woman out of the story, to erase her from the picture, or to characterize her as nothing more than the place that “pre-born baby” happens to reside.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/opinion/baby-hope-sotu.html
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