Every Two Seconds, a Child Dies
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Yesterday, I was at a local eatery enjoying some pulled pork barbeque (in New England! imagine that). On the television was MTV’s live coverage of Live 8, the updated sequel to the Eighties’ Live Aid, coordinated to coincide with the G8 summit in Britain this week. They had a pretty catchy thing to get people aware of death from poverty: Every three seconds a child dies from extreme poverty, which I found striking and moving.
It also made me think of another, similar statistic that probably the MTV crowd doesn’t care about: The abortion rate per second. I did some research and crunched some numbers: A child dies by abortion every two seconds. One thousand one, one thousand two: A child just died. Could this death have been prevented?
Of course, the progressive crowd will argue that if abortions stopped worldwide, the number of deaths due to poverty — starvation, malnutrition, disease — would sharply increase, that these two statistics are inextricably intertwined. Perhaps so.
If the answer for one is awareness, so is the answer for the other. That, however, is rubbish designed to make the teenagers who watch MTV feel good without having made them do anything. The answer is action motivated by fraternal solidarity with all people. Create a culture of life that includes all the nations by bearing each other’s burdens.
How does it help, my brothers, when someone who has never done a single good act claims to have faith? Will that faith bring salvation? If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, “I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty,” without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that? In the same way faith, if good deeds do not go with it, is quite dead. James 2.14-17