Sometimes, I have a hard time stopping myself from arguing with memes on Facebook. An XKCD comic where a guy is staying up late writing on his computer because someone is wrong on the Internet

Yeah, I’m that guy. The ones that bother me the most are the ones that paint one political party/one view as completely villainous, when the issue is debatable and well-meaning people on both sides disagree.

Lately, I’ve seen many memes that reduce the pro-life/conservative position to this: Pro-lifers care about life and people only until birth, but not afterwards. There are a lot of these, but the basic idea is captured in this political cartoon from a few years ago:

A cartoon comparing people's supposed attitudes before birth with those after it (source Nick Anderson)

It’s always hard to stop myself from arguing with this idea when I see it because I think it’s a blatant distortion of the attitude that most of the pro-lifers I know actually have towards helping people. We do want to care for people, including after they are born, and many of us are actively involved in doing so. We just don’t think it should necessarily be done by big government programs.

It’s hard to know the best way to help people in need

Today, I want to relate a bit of my experience through my church in Louisiana to illustrate this point. There, I was pretty involved in what my church called its “benevolence” ministry. Particularly, since the city and neighborhood had a lot of people who were really struggling financially, we’d get a lot of calls from people who couldn’t pay their bills to keep their electricity on (and those Louisiana summers can be brutal), or couldn’t buy food, or in general were in some kind of dire situation. The church had a rule that we would never give them money, but we’d often pay bills for them, bring them food, etc. Part of my role was to follow up on requests we got for help, and ensure we helped address any needs in the best way we could.

I loved doing this, and I also learned a tremendous amount in the process. If we had a dozen people who called in because they couldn’t pay their electricity bill, there might be at least half a dozen different reasons. One person might have had a sudden death in the family or an unexpected job loss, so even though they were normally able to pay the bills, they couldn’t manage this one. Another perhaps had an unexpected expense like a car repair which ate up their money for the utility bills, and now the electricity had been shut off. We’d pay those bills, pray for them, share the gospel with them, and hope the help would be enough to get them back on their feet. Another might have simply made a series of financial blunders which led them to this state; those we might help by not only paying the bill, but sitting down to work through some basics of budgeting and financial planning with them. Still another might have decided that a great way to make sure their bills were paid was simply to call around to all the area churches every month and ask for money to pay bills; in such a case, we tended NOT to pay but instead to urge the person to hunt for a job, change their situation, etc. Instead of building a community based on handouts, we wanted to help people get back on their feet.

This process required interacting with people and finding out what was going on in their lives, what they truly needed, and how best to help them. There was no one-size-fits-all solution, and it was tough – tough to know what would help them the most, tough to know that no matter what we did it might not be enough and they might end up right back in the same place again, tough to see people struggling. But we wanted to help and did our best to do so – whether it meant paying bills, buying food, or helping them look for jobs.

One particular incident stuck with me because it illustrated how complex the underlying issues can be. We got a call from a single mom who was having trouble feeding her family, so I went over to check things out and get her some food. When I got there, though, I found that she had a very nicely furnished place – a large screen TV, the latest smartphone, fancy Christmas decorations, and so on. Basically, she had more than I did in all these areas. It became obvious that either her financial situation resorted from poor planning and poor financial management, or she was just trying to take advantage of the church’s generosity. I wasn’t able to find out which it was as I talked with her, so ultimately I concluded the best thing to do was to offer help with financial planning and then get them some food.

After my stop there, I headed to the store. My observations affected my shopping to some extent. I had a fixed budget from the church for food (though I could add my own funds to it if I wanted), so I focused on getting the kind of things I would buy to get the most bang for my buck if I were in a similar situation – big bags of rice and beans that could feed a family for a long time, some cans of tuna, a bit of pasta and pasta sauce, and some fresh fruits and veggies. I stayed away from more expensive stuff that one might enjoy but which wouldn’t stretch as far, like steak, etc. My thought process was that I could feed a family (mine, if necessary) for a week or so on the amount of beans, rice, etc., that I could buy with what I’d spend on a single steak dinner. I also figured that, if this was someone who was just looking for handouts rather than truly in need, they’d be unenthusiastic about being handed such basic food and it’d probably dissuade them from coming back – but if they were truly in need they’d be grateful.

In any case, I eventually returned with the food, and the mom expressed her appreciation. I also offered help with financial planning, and so on. I gave her my contact info, but I never heard back. I followed up a couple of times by phone to see if she had further needs and left some messages but received no response. I never learned whether she was someone truly in need – or just someone trying to benefit from some free food. However, I suspect that if her needs had been real and ongoing, she would have answered some of my repeated inquiries.

Another man we got to know came with financial needs, but it turned into a long term relationship. He got involved in the church, then needed help finding work and avoiding falling back into substance abuse problems. Later, he got cancer and needed someone to take him to medical appointments and cancer treatment as well as help with medical bills. Eventually, he needed someone to sit and share and pray with him as the treatments failed and he headed into the next life. Because of his past history, he was essentially alone – cut off from family, etc. – so having support from the church family was critical. One of my friends spent countless hours with this man through this process and they grew extremely close before he died. No program could have done all that my friend did; it was based on a deep relationship.

What am I saying with all this? Well, first, truly helping people is hard. But, second, truly helping people involves understanding their needs. These were people who the existing support systems were failing in some way, but no one-size-fits-all solution would work for them in general. Sure, we could have just given them all money if they met certain criteria – but that would have actually hurt some of them, encouraging them not to seek the kind of help they really needed. Some truly needed help with substance abuse problems, or with budgeting, or with finding work. Others, if simply given the money, would have made good use of it. Because these were people in our community, we could take the time to go over, find out what was actually going on, and then work together to try and meet their real needs. It was hard, but we loved doing it.

We think helping works best when it’s tailored to individuals and their specific problems

Most of the pro-life, small-government folks I know are enthusiastic about helping people and protecting life – both before birth and afterwards – but care deeply about truly helping, not just throwing money at the problem. As I noted above, in Louisiana, we would have made some problems worse by simply providing money or a one-size-fits-all solution. We tend to believe that many solutions provided from the federal level end up actually not serving that well when they meet the reality on the ground at the state, local, and regional level. In contrast, when we’re working locally with neighbors and people in our community, we’re able to find out what their real needs are and actually tailor our assistance to meet these real needs. Two people facing the exact same financial situation might have very different real needs. One might need help downsizing and planning his finances more carefully, while another might need help finding a different job.

I can’t think of anyone I know personally on the pro-life/conservative side who actually just wants to let people fend for themselves. No, the pro-lifers I know care deeply about helping people. The disagreement is about how to best help people and at what level; they tend to prefer state and local control and in some cases volunteerism.

So, the debate is over HOW we should help, not WHETHER we should help. Yes, the memes say the pro-lifers stop caring about life at birth, and want to take away everyone’s health insurance so they’ll just die from poor treatment options. But the reality is far from that. The disagreement is over the mechanism for helping.

Talk is cheap – do pro-lifers actually help?

Well, talk is cheap, you might say – it’s easy to say we care about helping people, but do we actually do anything to help people? Well, at the personal level I can say “yes” – in general the pro-lifers I know are highly committed to helping different charitable organizations, volunteering, adopting, fostering, etc. Perhaps that’s just the swath of people I know. However, this analysis looks broadly at charitable giving and concludes that those with religious affiliations (e.g. pro-lifers) give far more than those without, in essentially all areas – of their time, of their money, etc., and giving even to secular organizations is higher. Here’s an interesting bit:

An even more inclusive 2016 study by Georgetown University economist Brian Grim calculated the economic value of all U.S. religious activity. Its midrange estimate was that religion annually contributes $1.2 trillion of socioeconomic value to the U.S. economy. This estimate includes not only the fair market value of activity connected to churches (like $91 billion of religious schooling and daycare), and by non-church religious institutions (faith-based charities, hospitals, and colleges), but also activity by faith-related commercial organizations. That $1.2 trillion is more than the combined revenue of America’s ten biggest tech giants. It is bigger than the total economy of all but 14 entire nations.

But that’s at the big picture level. What are individuals doing to help those around them? The other day, I noticed someone on my Science twitter feed (which I use only for work) pointing to this Twitter thread as one of the most encouraging things they read that day. It begins with the question:

Dear Pro-Life friends: what have you personally done to support lower income single mothers?

And it relates a large number (several thousand) individual anecdotes of how people are supporting the needy in this area.

I’ll also relate an anecdote from a pro-lifer I know personally. He found he didn’t need his stimulus funding this spring, so he stashed it away in case someone in need came along. He later ran into an extended family member who had lost part of their income and offered to donate the stimulus check. The family member didn’t end up needing the money but was touched because no one else from their circle of friends and family (which was generally very socially liberal/pro-choice) had offered any help at all. While people in this circle were busy advocating for new stimulus funding to provide additional help to those in need, they weren’t providing help at the personal level where it might be needed. This isn’t to say that the pro-life camp is better in any way; it’s just a different perspective on how to help. One group tends to look more to official programs and advocate for them; the other may be more likely to give at a personal level.

That, I think, captures the debate in a nutshell. Both groups care about people, but they’re expressing it in very different ways. It’s simply not accurate to say that pro-lifers only care about people before birth.

Someday, I will stop arguing with memes on the internet. However, today is not that day.