Abortion is tearing our country
apart.
Few people see abortion as a positive
good. That includes many of the women who choose to have an abortion. Yet our
politics have forced us into two camps. Both sides of the issue are to blame.
Those of us who are Catholic
Democrats do not see abortion as a good thing. The issue is not whether
abortion is wrong, but whether it is a good thing for the state to make it
illegal. It is possible to argue that
some behaviors are evil but that getting the state to punish them creates more
problems than we wish to accept.
There are countries that make
prostitution legal. There are countries that make use of any kind of drug
legal. There are excellent arguments on both sides of those issues, but
countries have made the decision that the lesser evil is on the side of
permissiveness.
Our own country experimented with
making alcohol use illegal. Few people saw alcohol addiction as good, but
eventually the country decided that the lesser evil was to permit alcohol use.
We have gradually developed ways of dealing with alcoholism better than making
alcohol use illegal.
There are better ways of dealing with
problem pregnancies than making abortion illegal. We can support women, and
men, who find themselves pregnant. We can support them socially and
financially. Many groups such as
Birthright have been doing heroic work in support of such people. But when a
problem is so massive that private initiative cannot effectively deal with it,
we use government support, no matter what it costs. We do that with floods and
fires and hurricanes, and now with Ukraine. We need to do it with our own
people who are pregnant. Whether the pregnancy is their own fault or not is not
the issue. They and their unborn children are ours, and we take care of our
own.
We are not heartless people who care
only for fetuses but not about women after their children are born. We are not
heartless people who see fetuses as a form of maternal disease. We are people
who have gotten ourselves into polarized camps by leaders who are too willing
to fight rather than to talk. We need to talk, and talk some more, and
recognize that our opponents are human just like us, moral people just like us,
and not as cocksure about their rightness as our leaders are trying to make us
believe.
