Children should be sacrificed to not drain resources? Children ARE the resource

We all experience moments when falsehood slams against truth and just crumbles. Such a moment occurred not long ago at a United Nations conference.

At one point, an American diplomat, Laurie Shestack Phipps, spoke. She wondered how we could talk about family, but not be concerned about high birth rates in places like Africa. Don't we understand, she asked, that so many children put a strain on opportunities for women, on public services and on job creation? Why don't we address the need for family planning (meaning contraceptives) and reproductive health (code for abortion)?

Before I could say anything, another diplomat spoke up. She was Sarah Flood Beaubron, a UN representative from the tiny nation of St. Lucia. Here's what she said: "When I was growing up ... (our nation) was asked and pressured to reduce our rates of fertility. Over the last three years we have seen that we are now below replacement levels ... We have a population of 165,000 people approximately, and our resource is our people. We don't have gold, and we don't have oil, or anything like that. We are in a predicament, because we were asked and pressured and cajoled to decrease our fertility ... this is now a very urgent problem for our small country ... "

So there it was. The tired philosophy that children are a drain on resources, followed by the truth: children ARE the resource.

And because this startling viewpoint - that children are a burden on a world that would otherwise thrive - is so prevalent, we must be constantly vigilant. We must never waiver in our commitment to passionately, yet respectfully, engage those who say the answer to our world's problems is abortion.

(from Tom Minnery, Social Policy Team, Focus on the Family, October 2011)

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