Did God ‘punish’ Elmhurst?

“Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.”

—Paulo Coelho

By Alex P. Vidal

“DO you know why there were so many New Yorkers killed recently by coronavirus in Elmhurst?”

Thus was the opening remark made by Robert Aguirre, a 58-year-old devotee of Saint Sebastian Roman Catholic Church, a Roman Catholic parish church located at Woodside, Queens, New York City, when he called me up April 4 evening.

“In the last novena I attended a week before the lockdown, the priest had warned and lamented that Elmhurst has the most number of abortion clinics in New York City,” narrated Aguirre, a former Kodak assistant manager who came to the Big Apple from California in 1997.   

“When Mayor (Bill) de Blasio and Gov. (Andrew) Cuomo legalized abortion in New York City seven years ago, those who clapped their hands in support of the legalization were women from Elmhurst.”

ROBERT AGUIRRE

Aguirre said he wouldn’t anymore elaborate if Elmhurst, which became the epicenter of novel COVID-19 cases in New York, “was being punished or not.”

The people are intelligent and they understand what the priest was trying to convey.

Quoting the priest he didn’t identify, Aguirre considers Elmhurst as “notorious” in terms of abortions cases. 

There have been so many instances where the church led the holding of prayer rallies outside the abortion clinics mostly in Elmhurst.

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“When I learned that abortion in New York City had been legalized, I immediately called tita Loida (Nicolas-Lewis) and she was so outraged saying what’s happening was already a work of the devil.”  

Three years before the Supreme Court decided the Roe vs Wade, abortion was legalized in the state of New York in 1970.

Aguirre could be referring to the Reproductive Health Act, a New York statute which was enacted on January 22, 2019 that expanded abortion rights and eliminated several restrictions on abortion in the state. The law received national media attention.

Considered a crime in most other states, abortion became a crime in New York with major exceptions. 

Still regulated in the criminal code, it is reportedly a crime in New York if an abortion is performed after a woman is 24 weeks pregnant, unless the mother’s life is in immediate jeopardy. 

She would have to go elsewhere to have an abortion even though the

the baby in her womb would not be able to live outside of it.

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There had been attempts from politicians for nearly a decade to pass a law called the Reproductive Health Act, which would remove abortion from New York’s criminal code and codify the protections of Roe v. Wade, which affirms a woman’s right to an abortion, with limits, in state law. 

The R.H.A. had been approved multiple times by the Democrat-controlled state assembly, but it had never passed the state senate, which was controlled by Republicans.

In 1970, when New York first legalized abortion, it was one of only four states where the practice was legal. New York’s law was the most liberal of the four, as it had no residency requirement. 

It was learned that roughly three hundred and fifty thousand out-of-state abortion patients came to New York between July of 1970 and January of 1973.

In the first two years after the state law passed, sixty per cent of women who had abortions in New York came from out of state, it was learned further.

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Dr. Ben McVane, an emergency medicine doctor at Elmhurst Hospital Center, said New York City’s public hospital system serves more than a million New Yorkers each year, regardless of their ability to pay. 

“Beyond the undocumented and uninsured, Elmhurst Hospital serves other vulnerable populations neglected by the private medical system: prisoners, the homeless, the drug-addicted and the mentally ill, McVane said. “Public hospitals are where the police bring those too mentally ill and violent for the shelter system, where desperate families bring demented older relatives whom they can no longer properly care for.”

He admitted that the Elmhurst neighborhood has been called the “epicenter of the epicenter” of coronavirus infections in the United States. 

McVane said: “While our hospital staff and the broader medical community scramble to bolster our resources and respond to the pandemic, we should pause to consider why it has so heavily hit Elmhurst, and Queens at large.”

The people living around Elmhurst Hospital, he said, are both vulnerable and neglected: largely immigrants, poor, uninsured and dependent on a public hospital system that is already overstretched and underfunded. Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona are the neighborhoods with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in New York City, coming from seemingly every corner of the world.

“Over the past seven years I have developed a deep affection for Elmhurst and its surrounding neighborhoods. It pains me to watch this community decimated by Covid-19,” disclosed the doctor.

McVane said Queens represents what the world imagines New York City to be, a cultural melting pot where grit and ambition can still get you ahead. Walking to work I pass women selling tamales from grocery carts, the smell of strong Colombian coffee, the sounds of bachata and bhangra music emanating from storefronts.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)