The Good Samaritan was not “pro-life” like Paul Ryan

If you’re someone who labels yourself "pro-life", I beg you to read this to the end. If you are not, I hope that you will pass it along to others.  Thank you.

House Passes An Abortion Ban After Letting Children’s Health Program Expire

I get it. We might disagree sometimes on what "pro-life" should mean (though maybe you should read my manifesto about being both pro-choice and anti-abortion).  But this?  A move that the Trump administration says is supposed to "foster a culture of life"?  John Paul II must be spinning in his grave.

This position is not pro-life – it’s merely pro-birth. A nun said it far better than I:

I’ll freely admit that what Sister Chittister calls us to is far more difficult than simply being anti-abortion.  But nobody said taking a moral stand was going to be easy. If anything, these "Right-To-Life" chains and setting up displays outside of churches and demonstrating outside of the (few) clinics left that will perform abortions are seductively easy.  It’s not real ministry.

What would real ministry be like?  It’d be working to make sure that single parents can support their children on one income. It’d be protesting to make sure that healthcare is available to children, not taken away from them. It’d be helping those in need.

Instead we have folks either standing around feeling smug and superior or lawmakers actively making things harder for parents.

Jesus shocked his disciples by telling them how a heretical Samaritan was more deserving of eternal life than a priest or a Levite (politician), not because of what they preached or how they followed the Law, but because of how they acted towards those in need.

So tell me, you who want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus: Which character in that parable are these supposed "pro-life" politicians?

And tell me: whose example will you follow?