All Posts Tagged With: "pro-life"

Writing for Slate’s Human Nature blog, William Saletan posits that “the late-breaking frontrunner for dumbest policy idea of 2008: defunding Planned Parenthood in the name of fighting abortion.”

The campaign to defund Planned Parenthood is really about abortions. [The Family Research Council] would like to see fewer of them. So would I. And that’s the crux of the idiocy: The single best thing you can spend money on to reduce the number of abortions, not just in this country but around the world, is Planned Parenthood.

I’ll say that again: If you define pro-life as preventing abortions, Planned Parenthood is the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world. No, it doesn’t give teenagers the idea of having sex. That idea comes to them quite naturally, thank you very much. What Planned Parenthood does, more comprehensively than anyone else, is to distribute the means and knowledge to control your risk of getting pregnant when you don’t want to be pregnant. And those two things, combined with pressure to exercise that control assiduously, are the surest way to prevent abortions. If you wait till women are already unhappily pregnant, you’re too late.

“The answer — upon even a moment’s reflection — is unequivocally yes.”

So says Douglas Kmiec. He holds the endowed chair in Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University. Prior to that, he was dean and St. Thomas More Professor of Law at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He also served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Here’s more from a letter he authored for a ProLife - ProObama website recently created by the Mathew 25 Network.

Barack Obama’s life has been one dedicated in service to the needs of others.

We are all called to build a culture of life - but there’s more to it than just hoping that the next Supreme Court justice somehow deals with Roe v. Wade. A bad economy is threatening to human life. Women facing the moral tragedy of abortion - are facing it, now, today - and they need a supportive community and tangible help, not condemnation.

As Ronald Reagan’s legal counsel and as a dean and professor at Catholic University and Notre Dame, I have worked to put the law on the side of life where it belongs.

But after 35 years, a new approach is needed. Too many unborn lives are being lost as we wait for judges to get it right. Barack Obama’s strengthening of support for prenatal care, health care, maternity leave, and adoption will make the difference. Studies confirm it.

We are but a few weeks away from a new beginning in America.

I am inspired by what Senator Obama calls “the promise of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation in the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper. That’s the promise we need to keep.”

It is because of the hope of this promise, that I have written Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama. While especially aimed at Catholic citizens, the book and the material here are devoted to opening every heart and mind to the prospect of transcending the partisanship on these difficult issues.

That is the change we need right now. And it is within our grasp.

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This just plain irritates me. Jesus is not a Republican (or a Democrat). I believe with all my heart that He cares about more than just the abortion issue and the gay marriage issue.

Indeed, Jesus is pro-life, but pro-life is more than just about pregnancy and birth; pro-life extends beyond the womb and encompasses all the life issues each and every individual all around the world faces, including extreme poverty and obscene disparity of wealth, famine and hunger, genocide and war.

Jesus certainly cares about the sanctity of marriage, but that extends beyond the issue of a union between homosexual couples and encompasses the union and marriages of heterosexual couples, including fidelity and marriage “until death do us part.” Why do the divorce rates within the Christian Church so closely mirror that of divorce rates outside the Church? If fundamentalist Christians, like the gentleman in the video, care so much about the sanctity of marriage, why doesn’t he focus on the truest threat to the “traditional marriage” — rampant divorce rates among heterosexual couples who even occupy our church pews?

Do I condemn those who have been divorced? Absolutely not. I simply want the same standard of “sanctity” to apply to heterosexual couples as these Christianists want it to apply to non-heterosexual couples. I do not oppose civil unions between two adults, heterosexual or homosexual. Marriage is an institution that should remain within the religious context, and it can be defined by the respective religious institution.

What irritates and frustrates me most are that Christianists like this gentleman continue to reduce every election down to these two issues. And how successful has that proven to be. They’ve had eight years of a pro-Christianist presidency with control of at least two branches of government for the first six years. Look at where it has gotten us.

Has there been significant improvement in our nation and in the world with these two issues? Has the Christianist agenda really worked?

There are more issues than just these two that devoted followers of Christ should consider when voting this November. Failing to consider the other bigger issues — poverty, hunger, war, the Gospel message of faith, hope and agape love — is ignoring the larger messages of Jesus and the Bible.

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[Stepping down from my soapbox now.]