Identity Theft

I now have a mustache. I also have a charge on my Sears card for a vacuum cleaner purchased in California. I am male and my name is Javier. I'm not bad looking. But if you know anything about me, you know I live in Texas and just survived menopause. Put this all together? Identity Theft. It happened to me. I discovered it when my bank sent my debit card with Javier's photo on it. My name, but Javier's picture. He had stolen by social security number, opened several bank accounts and charged $150 at Sears.

I was incensed when I called the bank branch in California and they told me I had to prove who I was, that the social security number belonged to me and not Javier. I contacted the credit agencies and answered questions about my life- when and where I was born, if I was married, how long I'd lived at my present address. I felt violated. Someone had used my life to recreate their own. Javier didn't care about me, what he was doing to my life, my credit history, my future. Javier only cared about Javier.

Identity Theft is a crime. I had to fight to protect myself against it. But what about those who are too small and weak to fight a crime perpetrated against them? When an unborn child experiences an elective abortion, his identity is ruthlessly stolen. His right to personhood is taken in the most brutal way. Our society is saying we don't care about this child, what pain he experiences as his body is sliced into removable pieces, his right to be born, his right to a future. We don't care about his identity, we only care about our own.

But this child's identity is intimately linked to us. Edward Albee, American playwright and a three time Pulitzer prize winner for Drama (Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolff, Three Tall Women, A Delicate Balance), was often asked what his plays were about. One time he had this answer:





"You know, if anybody wants me to say it, in one sentence, what my plays are about, they're about the nature of identity," Albee finally says. "Who we are, how we permit ourselves to be viewed, how we permit ourselves to view ourselves, how we practice identity or lack of identity."

Albee says identity is not just how I see myself, it's also how I permit myself to see myself. In other words, I might conveniently blind myself to something I know is there, but don't want to admit to.

As a society, we also have an identity. And we also conveniently blind ourselves. We are a nation with laws that protect and give rights to the masses. But what about the most basic human right- the right to be born? We cannot admit we approve laws that allow a child to be killed as it sleeps in the warmth of the womb.

If we perceive the unborn as a mass of cells with no identity, then what might this say about the way we treat human life in general? Could this contempt for our earliest beginnings be reflected in the increasing suicide, murder, child abuse, spousal abuse, abuse of the elderly, alcoholism, drug abuse rates occurring in this country? I think yes. A respect for the identity of the unborn is connected like an umbilical cord to the identity of all human beings. Only it is the unborn that protects humanity. Without the desire to protect the unborn, our society is defenseless against all evil.

I was able to prove who I was to my bank, but the child in the womb cannot prove he is human. He is completely dependent upon us to speak for him. If we as a society do not stand for the right to be born, we have stolen not only the child's identity, but our own as well.