Kelly Rosati is a regular ERLC contributor, speaker, and National Association Of Evangelicals board member. A Focus On The Family alum and former member of the March For Life’s board of national directors, she’s a frequent speaker at pro-life events and would not be caught dead at an abortion abolitionist rally.
Speaking at NAE’s “Flourish” conference last year, Rosati calls pro-life Christians’ opposition to state-run welfare “useless,” “un-scriptural,” and “madness, ” explaining that “I just want to plant a flag and say: Let us be people that never advocate for abortion restrictions without an accompanying paid family leave support.”
Earlier in the talk, Rosati appears to imply you are guilty of “negligent killing” of children across the world if you aren’t donating to World Vision and they happen to die of starvation.
At the conclusion of her speech, Rosati claims that pro-aborts are sometimes telling the truth about women being denied treatment because of abortion bans (even though the laws on the books specifically exempt ectopic pregnancy, D+C on miscarriages, etc.).
Then I want to get into the public sphere. It’s wonderful, as a pregnancy center, as a church, it is essential to do what is being done. But all of those people will tell you, they’ll be the first to tell you, it is not enough. When a pregnant, scared, poor woman and girl is experiencing an unexpected pregnancy, what does she need? She needs what we all need. She needs a place to live. She needs healthcare. She needs transportation. And folks, this cannot all be done through the church.
So the old line from the 1980s of, ‘this is all just the church’s responsibility, not the government’s’, is so old school. It’s so binary. It’s so useless. It’s so unscriptural. I don’t know where we got it from, that acts like it’s the Trinity or something.It’s madness! There’s nothing in the Bible that says we can’t be people who support healthcare for those who don’t have it. Folks, people without healthcare suffer and die prematurely. Isn’t that a pro -life issue? Now, you don’t have to like the way I think it should be accomplished, and I don’t have to like the way you think it should be accomplished, and we can debate single payer and high -risk pools and all the rest, but the bottom line is, people being able to get that care is a core sanctity of life issue.
She continues:
So let me tell you the good news. In red states where they’re going to come up with very restrictive laws on abortion, where they’re going to provide legal protection for unborn children as they deserve, those states are the worst in also providing the necessary support for the moms and the babies. So for those of us in those states and with those influences and with those relationships, we can be the people who say ‘we are for protecting that child and supporting that mom and that baby.’
And so for me, I want to just plant a flag and say ‘let us be people that never advocate for abortion restrictions without an accompanying paid family leave support’. Again, we can tinker around the edges with how you want it to look and what it should look like, but folks, can’t we agree that we should be the people who don’t send a mama back to work from her baby two weeks after that baby’s been born? It’s barbaric. Let’s just be honest.
And so let’s be the people who champion that. Let’s have the world see that that is what the love of Jesus can look like. So paid family leave and healthcare, those are two cores for me. The NAE has been so great on advocating for child tax credit, and so these are some things where we can be people who stand and support unapologetically the right of that child to live and not be killed, and the people who lead the charge to say ‘we’re not gonna just be pro -life with our mouths. We are going to put our lives and our feet and everything else in it as well.’ That’s who we wanna be. Thank you.
h/t to WokePreacherTV for the video, title, and the intro.
