Perspective: What the child in the womb and the child in the suitcase have in common
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What do you do when you fear you can’t live up to the promises you’ve made? The response is similar in two of America’s most contentious issues: immigration and abortion.
The United States is legally bound to accept refugees who cannot live safely in their own country. Asylum seekers have a right to ask for refuge, even if they must cross the border illegally to present their case.
President Donald Trump openly flouted this obligation, and President Joe Biden has treated the commitment as a paper promise. When we make a promise we may not be prepared to keep, it’s easy to grow to hate or fear the person we are failing. If we see them, we are reminded of our own insufficiency.
In May, in the last days before Biden’s restrictive new rules went into effect, replacing Title 42, there was a surge of attempted border crossings. One migrant crossing the Rio Grande was an illustration of poet Warshan Shire’s reminder in “Home” that “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.” He made the river crossing with no boat to buoy him. He held a baby nestled in blankets in a suitcase over his head as he waded through the water.
The man walking through the water and the baby he holds are more alike than different. Whether a refugee is walking through Mexico or a baby is cradled in a suitcase — or, before then, in her mother’s womb — someone is on the way. Someone whose name we may not yet know, someone whose particular personality is yet to be revealed to us. Someone we know primarily through their need — they cannot survive unless we open the door to them and make them welcome.
Within our own borders, politicians hide from another kind of abject need — not the baby in the suitcase, but the baby in the womb. On abortion, the parties’ rhetoric reverses. It’s the abortion-rights activists within the Democratic Party who describe a baby in the womb as a kind of parasite, a foreign invader with no just claim to shelter. It’s abortion opponents within the GOP who speak movingly about the dignity of the weak, but whose party fails to deliver substantial material support for refugees.
The baby carried through the river depends on the man with the suitcase. He knows that he may not be able to live up to what that child needs. Step by dangerous step, he makes his attempt. He, in turn, depends on America, beckoned by the promise under Lady Liberty, “send these the homeless tempest-tost to me.”
It’s hard to break that promise face to face. A border guard wouldn’t tip the child out of the suitcase, into the water. But we engineer deaths at a more bloodless distance by criminalizing leaving water in the desert and by forcing migrants to wait in deadly, dangerous conditions for their turn for artificially limited slots at ports of entry.
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Some politicians try to make the vulnerable stranger go away, if not out of animus, then out of shame that we may not be equal to what they require. Biden’s new policies presumed border crossers ineligible for asylum unless they could prove they’d sought formal refugee status in another country prior to reaching the United States. Biden didn’t pledge to “build the wall,” but his administration has erected a tangle of bureaucratic hurdles aimed at keeping migrants from placing a foot on our soil.
The child in the womb, like the child in the suitcase, is in the greatest danger when we succeed at pushing him or her out of sight. The aborted child is dismissed as a trickster, someone who, in the words of an abortion doula, “will look like a baby” but shouldn’t be treated as one. The child who makes it across the border might be ignored in their continuing need, until they turn up, blood-splattered, as an underage worker in the graveyard shift of a slaughterhouse. They will look like a child, but in this case, every shift manager made the choice to not see them as one.
We have to begin by looking at each individual, recognizing their dignity and their need before we ask if we will succeed at meeting the need. In 1992, Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey tried to secure a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention to oppose enshrining support for abortion as part of the national platform. In his undelivered remarks, he intended to say, “Our party always has been the voice of the powerless and the voiceless. They have been our natural constituency.”
A child in the womb is voiceless by nature; a child at the border is voiceless because we plug our ears. In both cases, choosing to see and to listen allows us to better understand and advocate for their need. When the Biden administration allowed ordinary citizens to sponsor people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the outpouring of volunteers was so large that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services chose sponsors by lottery, unable to keep up.
We have a greater capacity to say yes to need than we might expect. But eliciting it requires making the ask explicit. Some of the need can be met by private charity and sponsorship —pregnancy resource centers often offer up to a year of help with diapers and clothes. But the tremendous need of a child in the womb or a refugee at the gates requires a structural response, too.
At the border, the most basic requirement is simply that refugees be heard. There are not enough judges to adjudicate refugee status, leaving migrants waiting years to plead their case. The government needs to fund courts to hear and weigh each individual story, and refuse to treat the people at the border as a pulsing mass.
For mothers and children, cash aid is essential, allowing parents to have more stability at the most vulnerable time of their life. But there is a parallel need to see the individual in danger, as in abortion. We cannot dismiss a distinct human being as an agglomeration of individual cells, pulsing in a rhythm that we can’t bear to call a heartbeat.
Each lub-dub of the heart’s chambers, each step through the Darién Gap, is an act of faith that the ache of need would be met with love, not contempt. Most of us know that charity is what need requires of us — if we knew we could deny the stranger face to face, we wouldn’t have to hide when we hear them approach.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of “Arriving at Amen” and “Building the Benedict Option.” She runs the substack Other Feminisms, focused on the dignity of interdependence.
