Use money for loving acts, not punishing acts

Recently, the president spoke to annual Road to Majority Conference of the Evangelical Christians’ Faith and Freedom Coalition. He gave significant time to strident anti-abortion rhetoric.

On the other hand, a commendable Montana legislator said at the end of the recent session that Montanans should give significant thoughtful discussion to the abortion issue.

Since I once had direct contact with the “abortion issue” (I , once, prevented an abortion,) I will chip in to the discussion. I was an enlisted man stationed in Germany, (fortunately it was after both WW II and the Korean War had ended). I was single and free-wheeling with no obligations, and I had significant surplus income because I was teaching classes for the University of Maryland for much more money than my army technician’s salary.

I became acquainted with a young woman who was working as a bar-girl in a bar that catered to GIs, mostly black but mixed. At one time, I must have told her that I had surplus money, because, one evening, she told me that she was pregnant, and asked if I would pay for an abortion. It wasn’t a thinking time of my life, and I rather liked her and, without thinking about it, I gave her an answer. I said, “No,” but I would do something else. The town she was working in was some distance from her home. I told her that if she would go home to live with her mother, I would, each month, send her money equivalent to her present earnings for the period of the pregnancy and one year after (The end of my term of service). She took me up on it and religiously wrote to me every month and sent pictures after her son was born. Unless something untoward has happened, I know there is a man in Germany who wouldn’t have been there. Mission accomplished.

Though I gave little thought to it at the time, I have thought a lot about that little incident in the many years since then, but not in the light of the negative commandments of Moses but in the light of the fulfilling and positive commandment of Jesus that we love one another. (Which, when it is followed, will, automatically, obey (fulfill: Jesus’ word) all of the commandments of Moses.)

What if our citizens used their money for loving acts rather than punishing acts. What if a young woman who has found herself in a bad situation could turn to a public agency that was funded to give her kindness, counseling, and the funds to provide one of the many alternatives to abortion?

Let us face the fact that despite providing hateful abortions, Planned Parenthood, through counseling about alternatives and financial aid, has prevented many abortions.

How much more successful it would be and how much cheaper (if we have to mention filthy lucre) if we used the money, emotion, effort now used to pass laws that threaten beleaguered young women and well-meaning physicians and used those funds and efforts to offer alternatives to young women and their unborn children. How much more likely that would be to bring us all together.

—Robert O’Neil

Kalispell