What’s “Pro-Family” Policy? The DNC and RNC Offered Radically Different Answers & Sr. Joan Chittister's 2004 quote on 'pro-life' versus 'pro-birth' goes viral 22AUG24 & 23MAI19

 THE gop / greed over people party is not ashamed of the "religious right's" hypocrisy in their "pro-family" policy. It is impossible to understand how Christians can support the pro-birth / anti-family republican policy of the drumpf / trump-vance campaign, there is nothing Christian about it. It is nothing more than the rejection of the basic teachings of Jesus Christ as in the Beatitudes and the adoption of the perversion of the "alt-jesus" created by the extreme political right wing "religious" and radical right wing social engineers. From Mother Jones and National Catholic Reporter.....

What’s “Pro-Family” Policy? The DNC and RNC Offered Radically Different Answers.

One political party wants women to have babies. The other wants to help families raise them.

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  Abby Vesoulis

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There’s currently a bill sitting in the US Senate’s hopper that—if enacted—would expand eligibility for a child tax credit to include low-income and working-class families and provide a bit extra to parents with children under the age of 6.

More than 40 US senators have signed onto the legislation, which was introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is intended to help offset the skyrocketing costs of raising a child in a middle-class family: which, according to inflation-adjusted estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, average to more than $300,000 per kid over the course of their first 18 years.

But Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is not among the long list of co-sponsors. No Republican senators are—despite a temporary version of the tax credit reducing child poverty by nearly half during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and 75 percent of the public supporting the benefit.

Top Republicans claim to be the standard-bearers of family values; Trump brags about appointing the Supreme Court justices who gleefully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Vance seems to have an unrelenting obsession with a potential increase in babies that would logically follow the Dobbs decision. Particularly, he is infatuated with the role of parents mothers to raise those children.

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs,” Vance tweeted in 2022, “you’ve been had.” Vance has also repeatedly said that women like vice president Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are “childless cat ladies” and “sociopaths” for not having biological kids.

As such, the fact that the junior Ohio senator doesn’t back a wildly popular program that provides parents some spare change to cover essentials like baby formula and burp cloths or braces and back-to-school supplies is, perhaps, perplexing.

“If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues.”

Or is it? At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week, lawmakers, delegates, and other attendees differentiated between the allegedly “pro-family” stances Vance and fellow Republicans support, versus the plans that the Democratic ticket endorses.

“So many health issues are pro-family. Education issues are pro-family. Job-training is pro-family. And I suggest somebody take a look at [Republicans’] voting record on these programs,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who sponsored the House version of the tax credit bill, tells Mother Jones. “If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues. It’s not just one issue.”

Nicole Wells Stallworth, an advocate for reproductive health and gender equity from Michigan, is deeply familiar with the concept of what it takes to raise a child. She became a mother at the age of 18.

As she was putting herself through college and graduate school, Wells Stallworth struggled to afford childcare. While working odd jobs to put food on the table, the single mom would normally have family members watch her daughter—unless her child was ill, in which case Wells Stallworth would bring her daughter to work and park her under a desk.

“I had to either bring her to work,” she tells me at a breakfast reception for Michigan Democrats on Wednesday, “or I would have to take time off and not be paid.”

“There’s a correlation between happy moms and successful children,” adds Wells Stallworth. “The Harris and the Biden administration’s family policies are policies that are truly supportive of the entire family, whereas the Trump-Vance policies—I’m just not sure how they benefit anyone. Other than [being] an ideological belief that is not shared by everyone.”

“They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

Monica Curls doesn’t have children of her own. But as an elected member of a school board in Kansas City, Missouri, she’s dedicated her professional life to kids’ educational journeys. “I get to advocate on behalf of thousands of children every day,” she says to me at the convention Tuesday night.

Curls mentions Republican opposition to legislation making childcare more affordable, the party’s desire to reduce expenditures on programs supplying nutritious food benefits to low-income families, and Trump’s desire to eliminate the US Department of Education. “How does that support the betterment of a child?” she asks, rhetorically. “They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

“It’s putting women in their place, and not giving them any other opportunities beyond that, because they don’t see us as valuable beyond that,” Curls says. “Our uterus is all we have to offer, according to them.”

Even then, factions of the party seem to have conditions around how those uteruses can be used to carry babies. For as much as Vance talks about his appreciation of motherhood and babies, he opposed a 2024 bill to enact protections of the fertility treatment IVF. (Some GOP state parties have also passed platforms stating they oppose the destruction of extra or abnormal embryos, which commonly result from IVF.)

During a brief prime-time DNC speech on Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq-war veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was struck by a rocket, explained her previous battle with infertility. The Illinois Democrat called the 10-year ordeal “more painful than any wound I earned on the battlefield.”

Duckworth has since had two children, but warned that a second Trump administration could risk other families’ access to reproductive technology. “If they win, Republicans will not stop at banning abortion. They will come for IVF next,” she said.

To DeLauro, IVF access is one important component of pro-family policy. She defines the term as anything that makes families “not only succeed, but thrive. Our job is to use the power of the federal government to provide opportunity and make help to transform people’s lives. That’s what we are about.”

On the Trump-Vance version of the term, DeLauro doesn’t mince words. “You want to cut a fruit and vegetable program, you don’t want to deal with a WIC shortfall, and you don’t want to increase the funding for childcare?” she says, concluding: “Hell, you’re not pro-family.”

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Sr. Joan Chittister's 2004 quote on 'pro-life' versus 'pro-birth' goes viral

A recent Instagram post earned supermodel Gigi Hadid nearly a half a million likes, but it wasn't a photo of herself or of the latest fashion trend. It was a quote from Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister on the importance of being more broadly pro-life, not just "pro-birth."

The quote — which Chittister confirmed she said during an interview with journalist Bill Moyers in 2004 — said:

"I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, a child educated, a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."

Chittister's quote has made the rounds on various social media outlets over the years and has resurfaced in recent weeks as several states have passed laws that severely restrict most or all abortions.

No one is more surprised that she has gone viral than Chittister herself, who thought the interview was something few people would watch. Yet she stands by her critique of a single-issue approach to abortion, which she still sees as "morally inconsistent."

"Do I still stand with that statement? You bet I do, probably stronger than ever, to be frank," Chittister told NCR on May 22.

While she describes herself as pro-life, Chittister questions why some who oppose abortion only seem to care about unborn babies as the sole "defenseless life" worth protecting. After babies are born, "they're ignored," she said.

"You have babies and pregnant mothers on the border. They're innocent and defenseless, but those babies are being separated and segregated," she said.

And many pro-life leaders do not consider defenseless casualties in war, she added.

"We're not worried about pregnant mothers in North Korea or Iran," Chittister said.

The comments that became a meme were part of a wide-ranging interview with Moyers in November 2004 in which he asked about the role of religion, the religious right and moral issues in the previous week's presidential election that re-elected President George W. Bush.

Chittister said the killing of innocent pregnant civilians was equivalent to "military abortion" and issued her call for a broader pro-life perspective. Her first statement, which is not part of the meme, was: "I'm opposed to abortion."

Have things changed since the 2004 interview? Only that anti-abortion activists are "absolutizing" the debate by "allowing no distinctions whatsoever" in laws that have no exceptions for rape or incest, for example, she said.

"It's hard to believe that there is never any medical reason whatsoever — ectopic pregnancies, for instance — that would not indicate that there are some moments when the moral nature of the act at least fits," she said.

Such "absolutizing" seems only to apply to policies that affect women, Chittister said.

"I frankly cannot understand why women's health issues or abortion is absolutely the only life issue that the church has not nuanced," she said.

"We nuance that men can kill for all sorts of reasons. Men can kill to defend themselves. They can kill to defend the state. They can punish by killing in the name of the state," she said. "But women, never — not even to save their own pregnant life. It seems to me to be morally confused. Certainly, it's morally inconsistent."