In the age of the iPhone, there’s an app for everything. That’s not even hyperbole — there is literally an app for just about everything you can imagine. And if it isn’t in the app store yet, it’s being developed.
Sure, social media, unhealthily addicting games, restaurant catalogs and anything that allows you to more conveniently view baby animals make sense. Instagram and Candy Crush have become commonplace. Some may argue that apps like these induce iPhone separation anxiety, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Today, we’re talking about abortion. Yes, within this editorial focused on electronic applications downloadable for your phone, tablet, etc., we are talking about the expulsion of human fetuses from the uterus.
How do these two things fit together? Well, thanks to a bunch of anti-abortion techies, there is now an app for that # an app for abortion.
The anti-abortion activist app, Online for Life, tracks women seeking abortions in the United States and asks its users for their prayers. To date, the app claims responsibility for saving 1,448 babies.
The main page of Online for Life shows a feed displaying updates for every person who contacts a Pregnancy Resource Center and is “considering an abortion.” The updates seem to come only from big cities, so who knows where the information is actually coming from. This information, not surprisingly, is not conveniently available.
After scrolling down the page a bit, one update reads: “Someone considering an abortion in Tampa, Florida just contacted a PRC.”
App users merely have to swipe their finger over the update to reveal an orange banner that says “Prayed!” Wow, who knew saving babies was so easy!
In exploring the app (of course we downloaded it … for research) we accidentally swiped a bit too frivolously over a few updates. Hopefully this does not skew the app’s numbers in terms of how many abortions it actually prevents.
Once users have “prayed” for the poor souls who have contacted a PRC (which doesn’t actually mean they’re considering an abortion, by the way) they are asked to invite friends to pray as well, via Facebook, Twitter or good ol’ fashioned email.
Oh, what a wonderful digital world we live in! By merely swiping our fingers over a cell phone screen, we can save lives! Not even Jesus can do that. (Well, maybe he can; the Bible hasn’t been updated since the iPhone was created.)
In a sidebar, the app shows updates of women who have decided to keep growing their fetuses or who have kept their appointments (you know, for an abortion). One updates reads, “Woman in California keeps her baby, check out the photo!”
First of all, those are two separate sentences, so there should be a period after the word baby (yes, proper punctuation is on the same caliber of importance to us writers as abortion). But even more perplexing, the photo of the said “saved baby” is clearly a stock photo of a blue-eyed blonde-haired baby model who is way too cute to actually exist in real life. The woman who kept her baby in Oklahoma apparently had its identical twin. So, not only does Online for Life save babies, it makes them beautiful. Ah, so many miracles! Technology is truly good!
OK, just to get things straight, this editorial is not downplaying the power of prayer, nor is it presenting a biased view on abortion. To each their own, do what you do, have your baby, don’t have your baby, blah, blah, blah, it’s cool either way. But an abortion app? Seriously?
Isn’t the app itself sort of feeding into what’s wrong with modern Christianity? The fact that people think they’ve changed someone’s life — even saved a life — just because they swiped their finger across a screen is an actual travesty.
Obviously, the app works on an honors system of sorts (Did you spend at least 30 seconds asking the Good Lord Baby Jesus to save all his baby friends? OK, add this one to our list of saviors!), but if someone is so lazy that they downloaded an app to fight abortion, just as they would to pick a restaurant for dinner tonight, do you really think they’re praying? Do you really think they care that much? And is it OK that we’re letting young people believe this is activism?
Online for Life is simply another way for our already self-entitled generation to feel good about themselves without having to lift a finger. Well, technically they do have to lift one finger, but not very high.
editor@crowsneststpete.com
