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ROE V DOBBS
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This article is designed to make everyone angry with me… This is a collection of random thoughts and ideas in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
It has been a long time since I’ve seen the amount of smug self-righteousness on Facebook (on both sides of the issue).
“My body, my choice” is in the long run narcissistic and mistaken. In the first place, abortion is more fundamentally about someone else’s body (though yes, the woman’s body is involved). In the second place, Christians realize that we are NOT our own (“…you are not your own… For you have been purchased [by the Lord] at a price”—I Corinthians 6:19b-20).
There is a radical difference between abortions for convenience and terrible emergencies, and to make one or the other the absolute touchstone for decisions of policy is mistaken. I have known students who have said (and I have heard this first-hand), “I do whatever I want, and if I get pregnant, I'll just have an abortion.” And I have also known 14-year-olds who were impregnated by their fathers. These cases cannot ever be considered as equal. The teaching of the Catholic Church is that in some cases an effective abortion is permitted (if not directly intended): a pregnant mother with uterine cancer; a woman with an ectopic pregnancy. These are not models to be celebrated but tragedies to be lamented—the least terrible of two terrible choices.
In the case of incest and rape, I do have a thought about how to prevent that happening again, and it involves a specific kind of surgery for the male (no anesthesia required!)…
Some other religions do not believe that personhood as we acknowledge it begins at conception, even if a genetically distinct human life does. Preventing their choice is tantamount to imposing religious beliefs on them. Perhaps we don’t remember (but can research) a similar attempt in the 1920s—prohibition…
The problem for a president—he/she must be president of the whole country’s people.
The majority of Americans believes abortion is wrong except in special cases (rape, incest, health of the woman). They also believe that third-trimester abortions are wrong and unnecessary (and almost every qualified Ob-Gyn would agree). If only pro-choice and pro-life proponents could have agreed here from the get-go and worked to reduce abortions instead of advocating for total elimination or total permission…
To be fully pro-life (and PTL the Catholic Church really tries in this), we must support women and children, fight to hold males accountable, and see human dignity also in prisoners, refugees, migrants, the mentally or physically challenged, the terminally ill, and the elderly (perhaps suffering from dementia). We are ALL children of God and therefore have value as human beings. Roe was a disaster; Dobbs wants to correct it. But it’s only step one. The biggest challenge now is to educate Catholics to embrace a lifestyle that rejects abortion as an answer. Fr Guido Sarducci’s “Five Minute University” course in economics is important here: “Supply and demand.” If we can eliminate (at least for Catholics) the demand, the supply will wither up. A “culture of life” has less to do with legislation and much more to do with internal convictions and attitudes. Here’s where the work of the pro-life movement really needs to focus.