For almost as long as I can remember, voters who understand the vital importance of the pro-life cause have had their consciences held captive by politics. Every election year, pro-lifers have been bullied, and have bullied each other, into voting for one candidate and shunning the other, with their very souls allegedly on the line.
People who more or less held the same views were invited or outright commanded to denounce each other as the enemy. But now that’s over. It’s done. We’re free.
Oh, folks on both sides are still arguing that it’s crystal clear we absolutely must vote this way or that way if we want to call ourselves pro-life. But now, neither party is willing to even fake an interest in actually being pro-life. The masks have come off entirely.
“But Simcha,” you may say. “I thought Trump and the Republicans were the pro-life party? Sure, Trump isn’t perfect but we’re looking for a politician, not a saint, and he’s clearly the only one who is willing to stand up to protect the unborn. At least compared to the alternative.”
Except that he just said into a reporter’s microphone that six weeks is “too short; there has to be more time … I want more weeks”; ie, the law should give women more time to decide whether or not to get an abortion (or, as often happens, more time to get pressured or coerced into an abortion). He said he would vote for just that in the upcoming Florida election.
Then, when people got upset, his campaign said he didn’t really mean it or really say anything and we’re just dumb for thinking he said anything.
He also said that, if he’s elected, his government will cover the cost of IVF for anyone who wants it, because “we want more babies.” IVF is intrinsically immoral because it replaces a sacred, creative act of love with a mechanised act of production in a lab. But even if that doesn’t bother you, IVF means millions of extra embryos are made, and then either imprisoned in a freezer indefinitely, or thrown away.
There is no IVF that is untainted by this wholesale murder of tiny humans. Babies are good; but cranking out babies like widgets and then throwing most of them away? That’s wrong.
This same Republican party absolutely lost their minds a few years ago when President Barack Obama said he was going to require Catholic employers to include contraception in their insurance coverage for employees. We were told this was a direct violation of religious freedom, and we must vote for Trump so he can liberate us from a government that would spend our tax dollars on the culture of death.
And now here we are. Maybe you will reply, “Well, this is all a shame, but you have to admit, he appointed judges to the supreme court who did what he promised, and they overturned Roe v Wade! Hard to argue with that as a pro-life win!”
Except that since this happened, the numbers of abortions have gone up. Yes, really. Why? My guess is this…
Read the rest of my latest (which I wrote before the debate, but nothing has changed) at The Catholic Weekly.
Image: James Boast Creative Commons
I loved the essay, but this comment section is really rather depressing…
I’m sorry to be so depressing, but it’s hard not to be given the lack of a genuine pro-life candidate to vote for.
I was going to vote for Kamala Harris anyway lol. You don’t have to convince me that the Republican Party was never really pro-life, I never thought they were.
If the vote had still between Trump and Biden, in all honesty I would’ve simply not voted. The horrors that Biden is enabling against Palestine are just too inexcusable.
I have always been a pro-life Catholic. Women can (and will) do whatever they want with their bodies but their babies bodies are not theirs to destroy! Yet I am also a woman of color who has seen how comfortably racist the Republican Party can be and therefore I steer clear of them and anyone who identifies as one.
All we can do is pray and hope for things to change.
At a certain (egregiously belated) point, I determined that Joe Biden is guilty of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. He should be indicted by the International Criminal Court.
I’d still vote for Biden if he were running, though. I’d still go out and canvass for him every Saturday just as I do for Kamala here in New Hampshire. Well, maybe if I still lived in Massachusetts I might vote a third party candidate (not a Kennedy), but I hope I would drive up here to New Hampshire to do the canvassing.
If Joe Biden is guilty of genocide, so am I. I won’t say that’s not disturbing – even infuriating. I’m disturbed and infuriated because I think the US (WE) could do a lot more to stop the genocide and defend Palestinians while still defending some version of a Jewish State between the river and the sea.
Palestinians are human persons and even if we couldn’t do more to protect them, we shouldn’t enable one of our traumatized and corrupted client state to destroy their water and sewage infrastructures, deny them food and medicine, blast away hospitals, clinics, and ambulances, level schools, universities, and residences while also murdering journalists, aid workers, women, and children with a death count estimated by The Lancet to be upward of 300,000.
A human fetus may or may not be a person, but it has the potential to be one (with all the good and ill that human persons are capable of). I am dismayed when pro-lifers sometimes try to minimize this, and I annoy and disappoint some of them when I sometimes insist upon it. I understand when people are infuriated and disturbed by the number of pregnancies that were terminated under the Roe regime and which have continued to increase since Roe was overturned.
But in the end I am more disturbed and infuriated by most attempts to regulate or enforce pregnancies with the idea that adoption offers an option that some justifies such intrusive regulations and cruel enforcements. Though I think an embryo or a fetus has the potential to become a human person, I would almost certainly *rush* to help an underaged daughter terminate a pregnancy however it was conceived. I also know that most abortions are demanded by women who already are struggling to raise a number of other children. And furthermore, I know that additional necessary structures to support “at risk” women and girls while they bring dangerous pregnancies to term so their babies could be adopted will be abused in all kinds of nefarious ways, but we should still try to institute such structures along with others that help us all be more careful about conceiving, rearing, and educating new humans.
I am disturbed (and often infuriated) by our two party system. I wish it were more responsive to human needs and less distorted by corporate money — and also by the laziness and complacency of citizens like me. I hope most people will not be ‘single issue’ voters. I wish we could all pay more attention to how structures of power and money affect the disappointing choices we don’t tend to consider much except in the few weeks between Labor and Election Day.
Thank you Simcha. I am so disgusted with both parties. They both had four years to get their acts together and come up with a decent candidate, and they both blew it.