“I’m frankly embarrassed to be a member of a community
where 41 percent of pregnancies are terminated,” said
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York at an ecumenical news
conference with other church leaders at the Penn Club last
week.
As reported
by the New York Times, “The annual figure has averaged
90,000 in recent years, or about 40 percent of all pregnancies,
twice the national rate.”
Archbishop Dolan called these numbers “downright
chilling.” Indeed, African-Americans might find them especially
ominous since the 2009 data reveal “a rate close to 60 percent for
black women,” according to the Times.
The relevant statistics are to be found in the December
2010 report
of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene which,
as
described by the New York Post’s Andy Soltis (“NYers
twice as likely to abort”), “that of all viable pregnancies here,
87,272 were terminated, compared with 126,774 live
births.”
“New York does not deserve the gravestone ‘Abortion
capital of the world.’ Our boast is the Statue of Liberty, not the
Grim Reaper,” said the Archbishop. “I re-affirm [the late] Cardinal
John O’Connor’s promise of a quarter-century ago that every woman
facing a difficult pregnancy will be provided with free,
confidential help of the highest quality from the Archdiocese of
New York.”
“We are prepared to do everything in our power to help you
and your unborn baby to make absolutely certain that you need never
feel that you have no choice but an abortion,” said the
prelate.
This commitment to the people of New York City, and the
ongoing work of Catholic Charities, will be bolstered by a pledge
from Sean Fieler, an investment banker and philanthropist, and his
nonprofit Chiaroscuro Foundation to spend approximately $1 million
to open counseling centers and provide help to pregnant women in
need.
Mr. Fieler’s stark assessment of the recent New York
abortion statistics: “These numbers represent a failure,” he
said.
That they are. The progressive vision of making abortion
safe, legal, and rare seems to be falling short in the big Apple
and for most of the nation for that matter.
For those who love New York and New Yorkers, these
statistics bring a profound sense of sadness. It is a town one
normally associates with energy, opportunity and purposeful
striving. That Gotham is now destroying its young contradicts all
that New York means to the imagination of America and the whole
world. It is along way from Ellis Island to the
abattoir.
All of the usual suspects, of course, have raised the cry
for even more sex education and contraception without any sense of
irony that these value-free approaches to human sexuality merely
propel a self-defeating treadmill of more promiscuity, more
out-of-wedlock births, more social and marital breakdown, more
deaths of unborn children, more male irresponsibility, and the
denigration of women and mothers.
At last week’s press conference, Archbishop Dolan was
joined by Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn; the Rev. Michel
Faulkner, pastor of the New Horizon Church in Harlem; Rabbi David
Zwiebel, vice president of Agudath Israel of America, a national
Orthodox Jewish community service organization; and Leslie Diaz, a
spokeswoman for Democrats for Life of New York.
These church leaders, as well as Mr. Fieler are brave and
intrepid souls, patriots all, who continue to stand up for life,
liberty and America’s greatest city.
