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By Tim Rohr

Troy Torres at Kandit News recently penned a post titled The Guam pro-life movement is biting off more than they can chew, and turning off supporters. (It's also here on Facebook.)

Troy's main point appears to be that by opposing Tom Fisher's "Doula" bill (318-37), the Catholic Pro-Life Committee has become "myopically anti-abortion," and in doing so, risks "putting off people like me and others who have not formed a full conviction on the matter of abortion on demand."

First, I would advise Troy (and others) to develop his convictions independent of what anyone else is doing. However, it appears that Troy already has a well developed conviction:

I am a pro-life advocate and have been since I was 16. My advocacy is based on a singular principle: that the non-natural termination of life at any stage of life (except in the defense of yours), is homicide. 

So I'm not sure why he says at the end of his post that he has "not formed a full conviction on the matter of abortion on demand."

Meanwhile, though, Troy highlights a real problem with the term "pro-life." I have consistently railed against this term, especially when it is preceded by the word "Catholic" - which I am. I have railed against it for the precise reason that Troy exploits here: 

Being "pro-life" cannot and should not stop at valuing life in the womb. The mother's life matters, too. 

He's right. And that's the problem. The Catholic Pro-Life Committee is in fact "myopically anti-abortion" because that is exactly what it was constituted to do. It is not, and should not, be focused on quality of life issues, war, or even the death penalty. Those matters are all secondary to life in the womb, which is life at its most helpless, most defenseless, and most vulnerable. 

Abortion, to use a term from Vatican II, has "pride of place" among all moral issues.  As St. Mother Teresa said:

 “We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other.”

In other words - as if this needs any explaining - abortion is the gateway to every other evil - if not to Hell itself. And this coming from a saint who spent most of her life picking up the dead and dying off the streets of Calcutta and founding communities across the globe to care for the sick, the impoverished, the marginalized. If there ever was a truly "pro-life" person it was St. Mother Teresa and she plastered abortion as the root of every other evil.

When a few friends and I started The Esperansa Project in 2008, we were sure not to use the words "pro-life," not only in the title of our organization, but also to define anything we did. We were unapologetically ANTI-ABORTION and over the course of the next 8 years we backed 12 legislative measures which sought to restrict abortion to the fullest extent allowable under Roe and Casey. 

Eight of those measures were enacted into law. Our aim was to make abortion so publicly "onerous," a term Troy uses, that no doctor would want to perform them. In 2018 the last abortionist shuttered his business and no other doctor, despite the vocal support of some and the current governor's best efforts, has wanted to take up this filthy business. 

During the legislative fight for these measures, our people were hammered and hammered and hammered again by the senatorial pro-aborts over the same thing Troy brings up: that by pushing these measures we were somehow more concerned for the babies than we were for the mothers or the the children's "quality of life" after birth. In other words we were allegedly NOT "pro-life" really. 

We won every round because we did not let them get away with that crap. Not only did we have many examples of the very people in front of them actively working to assist mothers and adopting babies, we forced the pro-aborts to confront the real cost of abortion in Guam which, given the abortion reports, was and still is the self-genocide of the CHamoru people. 

This was exactly the argument of the late Senator Elizabeth Arriola when she advanced the now much-embattled Public Law 20-134:

"Let me tell you, at the rate Guam Memorial Hospital is aborting children, between 400-600 a year, and most of them are not even reported. Where are the lives that we are going to protect and preserve? Here we go talking about indigenous rights and self-determination. What good is all that if we don't have our followers to follow and enjoy the fruits of our labor, of this generation's labor, of your labor and my labor to fix this island and have autonomous rights to govern our people?" - quoted in: Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, pg. 372, edited by Shirley Hume, Gail M. Nomura

So my advice - again - to the "Pro-Life Committee" is to fix your name. Call it the Catholic Anti-Abortion Committee or something more general like The Esperansa Project with anti-abortion specifically set forth in the mission statement.

But what of Troy's "The mother's life matters, too." The inference is that if you are strict anti-abortion that you prioritize the life of the child over the life of the mother. I can't speak for any individual but I can speak for the Catholic Church, or more specifically, I can let the Catholic Church speak for itself:

"Never and in no case has the Church taught that the life of the child must be preferred to that of the mother. It is erroneous to put the question with this alternative: either the life of the child or that of the mother. No, neither the life of the mother nor that of the child can be subjected to direct suppression. In the one case as in the other, there can be but one obligation: to make every effort to save the lives of both, of the mother and the child." (Pope Pius XII, Allocution to the Association of Large Families, AAS (1951), XLIII, p. 855.)

In fact, especially in cases where the mother's life is actually in danger due to an ectopic pregnancy or a diseased pregnant uterus, the Church allows, under the principle of "double effect" for the removal of the diseased portion of the woman's body even if it means the indirect killing of embryonic life. 

The key word is "indirect." Abortion is the direct, willful, and intentional killing of an unborn child. The removal of a diseased part of a woman's body is not the direct, willful, and intentional killing of an unborn child. Even medicine recognizes this by calling these procedures salpingostomy and hysterectomy and not abortions. (Go here to read more on this.)

Troy's real beef is the opposition to Senator Fisher's Bill 318-37 which seeks to fund the training of "doulas" through the Bureau of Women's Affairs. A doula is literally, a "female helper or maidservant." In the context of the bill a doula is a "non-medical" person who is trained to 'help women and persons who are or who become pregnant to have healthy pregnancies and deliver health babies."

Fisher prefaces his bill with a landslide of horrible facts about Guam's maternal, fetal, and infant mortality rate, which is, according to Fisher, five times higher than the rest of the country and its territories. That's pretty bad, so Fisher's bill sounds good. 

However, the "pro-life" people are opposing the bill because they believe the $400,000 appropriation to a bureau run by Jayne Flores will be used to train doulas to "assist women and persons who become pregnant" NOT "to have healthy pregnancies and deliver babies," but to kill them.

Troy argues that the word "abortion" doesn't appear in the bill. That's true, however, the name BIRTHWORKERS OF COLOR COLLECTIVE (BWOCC) does. It appears five times, and with a couple of clicks on its website it is quite clear that BWOCC trains doulas to assist women in killing their babies.

Troy admits this:

There is no nexus from a doula to an abortion, except for doulas who provide comfort and care to women who choose to get an abortion.

Troy goes on to castigate the bill's opponents as paranoid conspiracy theorists:

The political arena can turn the most wonderfully motivated people into paranoid conspiracy theorists unwilling to see people who disagree with them as people who may be on the same page on different issues. For instance, just because Tom Fisher is a pro-choice advocate and pro-choice champion Jayne Flores is the director of the BWA, some in the Guam pro-life community will sustain suspicion against anything those two do. And, thus in the minds of the paranoid pro-lifers, because Mr. Fisher introduced the doula funding bill to benefit Ms. Flores' agency, there must be a subliminal pro-abortion agenda at hand.

The problem is that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's a you know what. Fisher and Jayne are not just pro-choice advocates or champions, they are vigorous, relentless, and, at least in Fisher's case, even vicious pushers of abortion.

Fisher's Bill 162-37 is by the far the most viciously pro-abortion legislation ever introduced in Guam if not the entire country, and Jayne's "johnny one-note" agenda to make abortions happen in Guam is a well documented news item. What's not so well-documented is the paper trail showing Jayne's efforts to get Guam sued by the ACLU. (Read about it here.) So these two aren't your run of the mill pro-choicers. There are baby-blood-red flags every where on this deal. 

Troy promotes two co-signers, Sens. Chris Duenas and Jesse Lujan, as "the legislature's two most prolific pro-life proponents." Really, show me their anti-abortion legislation. I mean, I like them both, have voted for them both, and will vote for them again, but "prolific?" Not. 

However, it's not hard to see why Fisher recruited them to sign on to his nice-sounding bill. Fisher needed their names for exactly what is happening now: COVER. What Duenas and Lujan can do if they want to save the bill and still be "prolific" is amend the bill to prohibit any funds going to the training of "abortion doulas" - though that would need a very precise definition. 

Another thing Troy does is slam the pro-life committee for spending "energy and resources...to oppose this life-involving legislation," and argues that said "energy and resources "could be better spent on life advocacy from pre-natal care to postpartum assistance."

Well, exactly. So instead of spending $400k on training people who cannot provide medical pre-natal care and postpartum assistance, then why not spend that money on people (doctors, nurses) who can, not to mention some improvements at GMH - as Dr. Akimoto regularly and rightly shouts about. 

The real thing is this though. If Guam mothers and babies, in the womb or out, are dying at five times the national average then what the hell is really wrong and would giving "come-and-sue-us" Jayne $400k help?

If you think so, then you might as well go to the Birthworkers of Color Collective website and "click here to get started."