They’re Killing the Mockingbirds. What Are We Doing About It?
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
In Harper Lee’s novel, mockingbirds are a symbol of the innocent–thoughtlessly killed by those who ignore their value. The story centers around a trial where Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. It’s clear that Robinson is not guilty. Mayella was beaten by someone who led with his left hand–Robinson’s left hand is crippled, but her abusive father, Bob Ewell, is left-handed. The facts–medical and circumstantial–point to Robinson’s innocence. But the all-white-male jury is determined to see him as less of a person than Mayella because of his skin color. The prosecutor uses Mayella’s tears to feed the jury’s racist bias. Robinson is an easy scapegoat for the problems of a tragically broken family.
But they don’t actually care about helping Mayella. They ignored her actual abuser and convicted the innocent man because society had already deemed him less than human.
We sit in the same spot as the jury. To borrow Atticus’ phrasing, there is not medical evidence to prove that an unborn baby is not human. Abortion advocates can point all they want to women in difficult situations and find an easy scapegoat–the innocent baby who committed no crime except to be born into a society that considers him or her less than human. But destroying the baby doesn’t help the woman escape an abusive relationship. It doesn’t punish her rapist, it just removes the evidence of his crime. This is the fight we face, and it’s just as important as the one that Atticus (and the civil rights movement) fought.
I grew up in an actively conservative household where collecting for Change for Life, volunteering for pregnancy centers, and attending pro-life marches was routine. It wasn’t a cause I was particularly passionate about–it was obvious, like going to church on Sundays and praying before meals. It was more interesting to focus on topics that my parents’ generation hadn’t substantively addressed — LGBTQ issues, ethical consumer choices, the industrialized food industry.
Those are each important topics that deserve attention. But God forgive me for wanting to be involved in something “different” simply because the greater human rights issue happened to be something I’d heard about all my life. One hundred years passed between the end of slavery and the Civil Rights Act. The fight for civil rights was probably old news to the white American Christians. But that didn’t make it less important to the people forced to attend different schools because of their skin color.
Fighting abortion might not feel revolutionary. But the alternative is to sit silently, to go about our comfortable lives, or even to focus on trendier (but less urgent) social justice issues. Meanwhile, thousands of children are killed simply for being conceived in tragic or inconvenient circumstances.
To my fellow children of pro-life parents who’ve spent many hours in the back of a mini-van driving to pro-life events: defending human rights is never clíche. Our feelings about a cause don’t matter if we know that it’s true and important.
To my friends who argue “My body! My choice!”: just because the mockingbirds are on your property doesn’t mean you can choose to torture them. No matter how awful the situation, it’s not the child’s fault. Like Robinson, the children are simply the scapegoats for other problems in a broken culture. Let’s help women by protecting them from the Bob Ewells, not by punishing the innocent whom society has silenced by calling them inhuman.
