Abortion in America

In light of the recent anniversary, I thought our readers might be interested in this article from Human Life Review. George McKenna tracks the attitudes taken towards abortion by the major American political parties, and asks the perplexing question: how did the Democrats become America’s pro-abortion party? As McKenna points out, it’s not what one might have expected in the 1960’s, when the Democrats counted the great majority of Catholics among their voters, and trumpeted the defense of the weak as their primary agenda. Republicans, the historically anti-Catholic and pro-middle class party, flirted with abortion at a time when a young Ted Kennedy was declaring it morally repugnant. And yet, just a few years later, the Democrats were adding a plank to their platform declaring a “universal right” for women to procure an abortion, while Republicans were recasting themselves as the defenders of life. What happened?

I won’t summarize the whole article for you, and really (as necessarily happens when an author paints in such broad strokes) that question isn’t answered in fully satisfactory detail. The real focal point of the piece is the American bishops, and their response when the Democratic party – the party that they liked to identify as their own – turned into the party of death. While the bishops put up appreciable resistance in the 1970’s when the abortion issue was still in flux among the Democrats, the sad truth is that they more or less broke down when their objections were overruled. Obviously, they never formally agreed that abortion was okay. But they downplayed the issue by talking about the “seamless garment of life” and preaching the party’s other virtues. As we see, the damage was heavy and is not easily reversed. Probably all of us know Catholics who disagree with the Church’s position on abortion, and somehow think that it’s no big deal.

Interestingly, as Iosephus pointed out, McKenna doesn’t make clear what he thinks about the wider agenda of the left to which liberal Catholics were so attached. The Democratic Party is sometimes held up as an embodiment of the ideas and values laid out in Rerum Novarum, and as a mirror of Catholic social teaching. I’ll admit that I haven’t read that encyclical and hence don’t have any very deep thoughts about it. I have a knee-jerk reaction against references to Catholic social teaching because most of the people I’ve known to get excited about it have been wildly heretical in other ways. But I don’t have any hard and fast views about, say, wealth redistribution – none so strong, at least, that I’d be willing to disregard other explicit moral teachings in order to maintain my support for them.

And that’s really the tough question that I find myself asking at the end of an article like this. How much involvement in politics is healthy or appropriate for the Church? We see John Paul II standing up against communism and we’re all ready to cheer, but here is a case where political activism has seriously compromised the integrity of Church authorities in America. How can we stay relevant without risking more fiascos like this one?

Sometimes Church authorites need to be cautious about recognizing when a political issue involves prudential questions that they are not well-equipped to address. But also, I think we need to ponder carefully the ends that are being achieved with any given political initiative, because our priorities should not necessarily mirror the rest of the world's. I do have some views about war and welfare and labor laws, but in the end, these sorts of political issues are largely concerned to make earthly life safer, healthier and pleasanter. It’s not wrong to take some care for such things, but we must remember that, ultimately, these earthly joys and sorrows are just the backdrop against which a more important battle is fought, for the souls of men. It’s very hard to know how particular political circumstances will affect that drama. There’s no particular reason to think that the man who dies fat and happy at the age of ninety-three is more likely to achieve salvation than the soldier who falls on the battlefield, or the child who dies of typhoid, or the peasant who works himself to death by the age of fifty-one. If anything, we might give the edge to the soldier, the child or the peasant.

Understand, I’m not saying that we should be indifferent to the suffering of others; quite the contrary, concrete acts of love and compassion are absolutely essential to the Christian life. But there is a reason for the injunction that we should “do no evil that good may come of it.” Only God knows whether good will come from any merely earthly event, and no amount of merely earthly good can outweigh the evil of sin. If concerns about poverty and war begin to incline us to turn a blind eye to the deliberate murder of millions of unborn children within our own borders, it’s clear that we need to rethink some things.

Anyway, give the article a read; it's pretty interesting.
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