Allow me to ruin your day.
Our middle kid is a human rights worker for an international organization. The idea of basic and universal human rights has been interpreted differently in various times and places. But those of us who believe in a Creator agree that the Creator gifts us with rights. These God-given liberties and freedoms are given at our conception; they are from God, not man.
Middle kid is working in Guatemala right now. In that country, two thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day. More than fifty per cent of children have their growth stunted by malnutrition. Those are statistics. Statistics are great for baseball. Statistics don’t tell us the pain a child feels in their gut when their organs are shutting down from hunger.
None of us reading this have known that pain; it is impossible to imagine. It is a horrible, excruciating way to die. Other Guatemalan children don’t die of starvation directly but succumb to ailments and infections that the bodies of healthy kids fend off easily. The suffering for those children on the road to death is no better.
One of my daughter’s tasks involved turning statistics into real people. She spent time talking with families who have lost a child to hunger, documenting them as a part of her work. As I talked to her about that, I could tell in her voice it was not easy. She got to know the mothers and heard the agony of losing a child in such a cruel manner, the mothers feeling so helpless.
Understandably it weighed on my daughter. By the end of our conversation, a small portion of her anxiety had seeped through the phone connection. I couldn’t help but carry some sadness around for a while. Do I have any idea what it would be like to lose a child to those circumstances? No. None of us does. Even trying to comprehend it hurt my head.
Some will read this far and breezily push through like I do most of time when I read something discomforting. A few of you might set on the thought of a child in Guatemala dying. A child, like your child or your grandchild. A child, not a statistic. Maybe I ruined your day.
I have called myself pro-life my entire life. I have donated, attended meetings, and supported candidates. Likely, most people reading this consider themselves to be pro-life. When we say “pro-life” we are usually referring to opposing abortion. I do believe strongly that children in the womb should be given life. But caring about children post-birth should fill the same space in our hearts.
If you aren’t sickened by the thought of those children in Central America my daughter has come to know, I wonder about your pro-lifeness. If you aren’t moved somewhere deep inside when you think of a child dying from lack of sustenance, “pro-life” might be a weak commitment, a watery broth.
There are many good people doing the work of supporting and caring about mothers and infants in trying circumstances. I give them great credit. Many more are working to create a culture where all babies are wanted and a world where they can thrive, where there is not an underclass that barely meets their needs. That should be all of us.
I wonder if sometimes pro-life becomes a label to affix to our public selves: a bumper sticker to make us feel good, maybe even make us feel like we’re better than someone else. As a political position pro-life has come to be bundled with all manner of things with only distant connection to children and mothers. Sort of like being for “freedom,” being “pro-life” can be an empty slogan.
So, what is someone to do about those children that my daughter has come to know of? Walking around depressed doesn’t help them.
We can give to organizations that can take some of our money and do good things. The San Lucas Mission Project that the New Ulm Diocese supports has been a success story in one small town in Guatemala. We give to Catholic Relief Services which has a strong rating as a charity. Middle kid recommended we donate to Doctors Without Borders or the World Food Program. There are many other good charities and giving is a worthwhile step.
If you want to understand what is happening (and we should), you can look up a current article in National Geographic that features some of my daughter’s work. “A Hunger Crisis Forces Guatemalans to Choose: Migration or Death.” It is a well-written piece with beautiful yet disturbing pictures. And, yes, as the title says, this crisis south of our border is having an impact on our border.
Our voting counts, and this gets complicated. Most of us aren’t going to go to the poor places on Earth and help out. But whether we see it or not, the politics and policies and interests of the U.S. have a real and direct impact on countries like Guatemala and children born there.
There is a history between the United States and Guatemala that most Americans don’t know. But if you are a Guatemalan, our involvement there has had a large impact on your life. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the freely elected president. After that, a decades-long Civil War tore apart the small Central American nation. Too often, the United States has stood with the small rich upper class who were behind the suffering and oppression.
More recently, the Trump administration supported a Guatemalan government that was on the wrong side of many human rights issues. If Trump had been reelected, work like my daughter’s would have been more difficult. Trump also cut the small amount of aid the United States sends there.
The Biden administration is not perfect, but a focus on assisting the poor instead of supporting the upper class has been reestablished. It is simply a fact that if you are a hungry child in Guatemala, you would prefer this president over the last.
It would be easy if pro-life was a single issue we could check off without mental effort. But, just as with all the complicated issues facing this small, impoverished, Central American country, it is not. We do a disservice to the movement to make it such.