We can do better

Let’s do have that conversation about the preciousness of life.

For real. Let’s talk about how we make policies and build a culture of life in our communities that honors every person’s humanity.

I’ve been thinking these last weeks about how abortion legislation is no substitute for safeguarding the sanctity of life. It doesn’t even skim the surface.

We don’t get to declare life begins at conception and then tap out when that life begins to have real needs, wants and desires.

We don’t get to declare the sacredness of human souls on the one hand and uphold a culture of human disposability and invisibility on the other. Because that is disingenuous at best and morally abhorrent at worst.

Protecting, preserving and promoting life is more than a bumper-sticker identity. It’s a practice and daily commission that calls us into relationship with the people in our own backyards.

I so desperately wish for a time and place that allows us to get real with one another about how we support life and how we diminish it. There is life all around us and we can’t seem to muster the political or social will to uphold it.

The truth is we live in a time when one in three children know poverty, in a state that won’t expand Medicaid and is losing rural hospitals at the highest rate in the country.

We live in a country where women are 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth than their own mothers, in a state where the average lifespan is declining, not increasing.

We live in a culture that tolerates extreme wealth disparities, especially within majority non-white communities, in a state that actively suppresses these same voters.

We live in a moment where firearms are the second biggest cause of death among young people, in a state that has some of the most expansive gun-rights legislation on the books.

There is clear incongruity here between our values (life is precious) and our policies (some lives are precious).

If we are going to talk about the preciousness of life, we can’t afford to be single-issue people. We have to look at everything, from how we vote to how we invest to how we serve in our own communities.

The daily practice of serving the lives around us should be our proving ground for legislation that not only preserves lives but improves them.

Loads of data and anecdotes consistently point us toward measurable conclusions about how we build a culture of life:

Invest heavily in the arts, public education and people-centered systems. Expand, don’t restrict, healthcare services, especially women’s healthcare because women are the change agents in communities.

Address homelessness and housing disparities with public and private investment. Invest in rehabilitation not incarceration. Create green spaces and pedestrian-friendly communities.

Support emerging leaders. Cultivate diverse voices, perspectives and potential. Shop locally. Volunteer regularly. A good friend of mine would also say foster a child. Become a CASA advocate.

We have the tools, the maturity and the wisdom to address the dissonance between political rhetoric and lived-experience. We don’t have to live in the contradictions teed-up by our state legislatures. Our commission is bigger and clearer than that. We can do better.

Whitney Kimball Coe is an Athens resident who serves as coordinator of the National Rural Assembly and director of national programs for the Center for Rural Strategies. She can be reached at whitneykcoe@gmail.com