Fordham Professor: Pro-Lifers Must Be Pro-Illegal Immigrant Children Too

A Fordham University associate professor in theology claims being “pro-life” means being pro-illegal immigrant children as well.

Being “pro-life” means “protecting children, including ones not yet born,” and “often requires protecting and supporting their mothers and families too,” wrote Charles Camosy in an op-ed at the New York Times.

In an all-too-familiar rant of liberal moral superiority, Camosy said the Trump administration has created a “crisis” by “separating children from undocumented parents.” The social ethicist asserted such a “crisis” is being ignored by “pro-life, pro-family” organizations.

Camosy failed to mention, however, that the Obama administration also separated illegal children from adults at the U.S.-Mexico border – since children are never housed in adult detention centers – using the same barriers, or “cages” as the Left calls them when the Trump administration is using them.

Like many on the Left who seek to minimize the unlawful actions of people who use children as a means to gain entry to the United States, Camosy employed the term “undocumented” instead of “illegal” in his column as he criticized pro-life organizations for not taking a stand on the portrayal of the illegal immigrant situation by the left-wing media.

“Given their support of the administration, and an unwillingness to speak critically about immigration policy, ‘pro-life, pro-family’ organizations now risk being tied to these and other horrific practices,” Camosy lectured in a sermon to pro-life conservatives.

“So why can’t the biggest pro-life organizations join these religious leaders in condemning the administration’s treatment of children?” he asked disapprovingly. “Where is National Right to Life? Where is the Susan B. Anthony List?”

In case Camosy’s tone of “moral superiority” had not been detected by this point in his column, he added:

If the traditional pro-life movement is to regain credibility as something other than a tool of the Trump administration, it must speak out clearly and forcefully against harming innocent children as a means of deterring undocumented immigration.

The pro-life Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List), responded to Camosy by questioning his claim that he himself is pro-life.

“Mr. Camosy claims to share SBA List’s view that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Yet, not only does he criticize those who are singularly focused upon restoring the first right, the right to live, he fails to pursue strategies in his party to correct the injustice of abortion. Then he exploits the abortion issue, the intentional taking of a human life by using it as a sub-argument in support of all other issues he believes to impugn human dignity.”

In fact, Camosy decided in February 2016 that Catholics could, in good conscience, vote for pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage Bernie Sanders, since attending to the needs of the poor – which, he argued, Sanders achieved better than the GOP candidates at the time – is, ultimately, the central teaching of the Church and trumps the protection of life in the womb.

Writing at American Thinker, Daniel John Sobieski also responded to Camosy’s condescension.

“Democrats have stooped to a new low by comparing the separation of children from their illegal alien parents as required by current law to the mass murder of the unborn, including the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts,” he observed and added:

First, these are not “immigrant” children. They are children of illegal alien parents. Second, no innocent children are being physically harmed in any way, certainly not killed in their mother’s womb. The Border Patrol is not Planned Parenthood. If illegal alien parents don’t want to be separated from their children, how about not crossing the border illegally with them? This comparison is obscene and slanderous. Abortion and Planned Parenthood separate more kids from their families and mothers than the Border Patrol which, by the way, doesn’t kill them in the womb. Liberals such as Camosy, whom I assume supports sanctuary cities, offer no sanctuary for the unborn who also seek to avoid violence and murder in what should be the safest “safe space” in the world — their mother’s womb.

Pro-life individuals, Sobieski argued, can certainly be anti-open borders in an effort to protect U.S. children and their families from MS-13 gangs and the unaccompanied illegal minors whom they recruit.

“How is opposing a system that lets MS-13 butchers, rapists, and murders into this country not pro-life?” he asked.