Allow me to state my story. I was the sixth of seven children, all of whom were born out of wedlock, all to different (absent) fathers. Catholic Charities was personally involved in my mother's choice to keep me. When I was nine, my mother's new boyfriend decided that he wanted to start beating me; he did so until I attempted to hang myself. I was placed into "residential treatment".

In state-provided protective custody, there is a bid for contracts to see who would be the "first responder", that is to say, first place that children will go to upon being placed into state custody. Catholic Charities uses the coffers of the Catholic Church to supplement its bids against other, more secular non-profits--and therefore wins the bid every time.

Many times, these facilities are retrofitted orphanages of the previous century or earlier. Other providers of care to at-risk children, who have more modern accommodations--and more modern philosophies of child care--are prevented by this process from providing care to children until after the CC's facility is full. In my lifetime, several have closed due to funding cuts.

The reason for this competition on the part of the Catholic Church and other religious organizations is that these at-risk children, without a visible means of support or role models to look up to, are easily made to feel that what in others would be kindness without ulterior motive is "God's grace" through the instrument of the one true faith. Treatment centers, for displaced children as well as drug addicts, are veal-crates of evangelism.

I was given candy to learn Bible verses, and excused from chores to attend religious services--in effect, bribed to become Christian. I cannot help but feel that this exploitation of tragedy is the primary reason behind the Church's institutional support of the so-called 'pro-life' movement. It also accounts for the fact that as the child grows to independent age, he or she becomes less susceptible to conversion, less "innocent", as the saying goes. Hence, these religious types lose interest in the child's welfare after it ceases to concomitantly serve their religious interest.

One of the effects of this dogma is that, for the purposes of evangelism, all children are considered 'equal'. Children from broken homes are put in the same facility as juvenile sex offenders, child psychopaths who are capable of unpredictable violence, the children of non-Christian immigrants who have fallen on hard times (but who are nonetheless solicited through being a captive audience away from the faiths of their parents through being a captive audience).

Additionally, many of the staff of these institutions are religious idealists who are taken in by the supposed "innocence" of all children, and quickly burn out when faced with the reality. This means that there is a high turnover rate in staffing, and that many children, lacking any consistent care provider, go on to develop attachment disorders and many other social problems as a result of this "God will provide" belief system and its attendant poor planning.

Pro-lifers, have you seen a developmentally disabled child burst into tears because his parents terminated their parental rights while he was in the care of these places? Have you seen a child who has been institutionalized for over seven years because no parents were found for him and has seen his ability to relate to others atrophy? Have you seen headlice and other contagions race through a ward due to it being overcrowded, or the mess that special healthcare problems present in an understaffed environment? How about the heavy handed ways in which emotional difficulties are handled when people have insufficient training for dealing with them, where restraints are used to incapacitate a child for misbehavior, some of which were determined to be abuse only after a child had DIED from them? Look it up.

I think that by far the worst was seeing children who were sent back to abusive homes, literally pried off of the legs of the staff, because they needed to make room for another 'soul' to save. The fact that they bid for children's lives is beyond sickening; 'priceless' indeed....

The fact that you truncate the discussion of abortion to babies and forcing mothers to carry children to term is evidence of not only selfishness but overt cruelty in order to sustain your viewpoint. That you are also willing to kill for it speaks to a lack of sanity as well. Seriously--think of the children.