Military Abortion

Panhandle Truth Squad is proud to add another weekly column to our lineup. In addition to DemoPhoenix’s Monday column on the Texas Legislature, PazAmarillo, a local peace activist, will be writing a column every Wednesday. Due to Spring Break and snow, this week’s installment is a few days late. Please join us in welcoming PazAmarillo to Panhandle Truth Squad.

Military Abortion
by PazAmarillo

The unborn are being murdered.

The violence against them will not stop.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and National Catholic Reporter columnist has a name for this atrocity. She calls it "military abortion". And it can happen when American bombs explode in the gardens of Iraqi homes, when American machine guns indiscriminately spray buses, or when pregnant women are exposed to the mutating effects of depleted uranium dust from vaporized American munitions.

The violence of war will inevitably kill the unborn. And too many of those already breathing.

It is a question of "moral values". But we must be careful not to define moral values in too limited a sense. Here are some examples to expand the definition. It is not moral to attack wedding parties with Apache helicopters. It is not moral to drop 500 pound bombs, even smart ones, on houses filled with women, children and other innocents. It is not moral to pump seventeen bullets into a scared, lost 13-year old Palestinian girl, no matter where she is.

In my religious tradition we are taught "Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I vow to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life." I know you have something similar in your beliefs.

It's a moral value.

We need to practice it whenever we can, to the best of our ability. Not just in a concern for what passes between a woman, her doctor and her God, or who is sleeping with whom, but wherever there is suffering. And especially when that suffering is inflicted in our names.

I don't know the answer to the question "Who would Jesus bomb?" But I know what happens to tender bodies when the bomb explodes.

They are aborted.

PazAmarillo