Yesterday I made the case for why pro-life people have, not merely moral permission in light of the Catholic faith to vote Democrat but, I think, a moral obligation to do so.
A reader replies to my remark that you can either vote Dem and reduce abortion rates or vote GOP and raise them with this chestnut, constantly used by “prolife” advocates of making the Perfect the enemy of the Good:
“Would you be OK with slavery still being legal on the books in our country as long as it was virtually eliminated by focusing on the social ’causes?'”
That all depends on our country having a hope of abolishing slavery or not. If we lived in a country where there was (as there is with abortion) zero hope of magicking slavery away, then the prudent thing–and in fact the thing both Jesus and the apostles did, is to attack root social causes and try to lessen the evil of slavery where possible. (And by the way, it says everything about the utter failure of the “pro-life” movement that you sarcastically put “causes” in scare quotes.)
Slavery, in apostolic times, was the room temperature fact of The Way Things Are everywhere humans lived. It had been so since time immemorial. The early Church, being a tiny sect in the Roman Empire, was no more equipped to abolish slavery than the modern Church is to Outlaw War. So Paul, writing to Philemon, uses moral suasion to appeal to him to free Onesimus. Slavery did, in fact, like all things in this world, have causes, not “causes” and the Church, like the Jewish tradition before it, both knew in its bones that it was an evil and had not developed anything like the intellectual and philosophical equipment to articulate why, nor the political and technological heft to do anything about it if it had. You can see the revulsion in, for instance, this passage (clearly written from the perspective of the enslaved who composed a big chunk of the early Church). The identification of the entire institution of slavery with the evil cosmic system symbolized by the Whore of Babylon is one of the most powerful and poetic indictments of slavery in the whole of Scripture and, indeed, of ancient literature:
And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and were wanton with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning; they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say,
“Alas! alas! you great city,
you mighty city, Babylon!
In one hour has your judgment come.”
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls. (Revelation 18:9-13)
As the Christian tradition starts to discover/invent ideas like “personhood”, Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, will argue that slavery is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel. But again, the vast majority of his neighbors, Christian and pagan, will respond to him with, “Yeah, but since it’s impossible to abolish slavery, we’re not going to spend too much time on such pipe dreams.” Like Paul, they will say, “If you can get your freedom, great. But if not, oh well. Serve God where you are.” The Church will hail Ransoming the Captive as one of the fourteen great Works of Mercy. And through the Middle Ages, slavery will go into decline with the rise of feudalism and through a grassroots increase in the awareness that slavery was somehow wrong, fed by the biblical tradition of the Exodus (which is, after a huge celebration of liberation from slavery) and by the gospel insistence that Christ came to proclaim “liberty for the captive”.
As the second Millennium dawns, the Church will start to invent the idea of “human rights” which we, standing the shoulders of those giants, take for granted. That will fuel more revolutionary thinking and lay the groundwork for the slow–but quickening–pace of the gospel impacting the world.
But then, slavery got a huge shot in the arm after that long period of decline due to the trifecta of a) conflict with Islam (which had no problem with slavery and which took Christians for slaves as war booty, inspiring Christians to find new excuses for doing likewise), b) the rise of nationalism, and c) the rise of New World colonialism.
The original stance of Christians toward slavery had been, as the New Testament attests, the perspective of the slave. It was evil. If you could get your freedom, great. If not, serve Jesus where you are and remember that he took the place of a slave too. So don’t let them tell you that you are dirt if you can’t get your freedom. You are a child of the living God.
But in the revived slave economy, the old patience with an evil about which the powerless could do little morphed into a system for trying to rationalize the oppression of the slaveholder. There were voices in the Catholic world like Bartolme de las Casas who, relying entirely on medieval Catholic theology, would again, like Gregory of Nyssa, insist that slavery could not be squared with the gospel. But the economic reality was overwhelmingly that the tech did not exist to replace slavery as the cheap option for labor and humans, in the aggregate, seldom tend to put the gospel over the bottom line.
Also, humans are and always have been slow on the moral and spiritual uptake. So even when the tech that could replace the work of slaves that had always been the basis of human economies for untold millennia began to proliferate, humans were typically slow to break with “But we’ve always done it this way!” And it was still only in lands touched by the gospel that people were even beginning to think “Y’know, slavery just might be a moral problem we have to address.” Slaves, of course, had other views, but who cared what they thought?
So it’s not till the 17th and 18th centuries that the philosophical, theological, economic and technological conditions for abolition of slavery finally start to hove into view. Till then, those opposed to slavery had to focus on lessening evil because abolition–if it even occurred to them, simply was not possible any more than abolition of war is now.
(If you get a chance, read Tom Holland’s fascinating account of the rise of abolitionism in his great work, DOMINION. https://amzn.to/47xoUiL).
All that said, the thing about the “prolife” movement today is that it consistently argues, “If we can’t magick abortion away entirely, then we refuse to support the party that lessens it.” Indeed, some prolifers actually argue that it’s more important to outlaw abortion than to reduce its occurrence, even going so far as to argue that it does not matter if outlawing abortion causes more abortions to occur, as studies have shown they do. The important thing is that, as with Prohibition, law be ideologically pure, not effective or addressed to reality. And, by no coincidence, they also consistently argue that we should do nothing about any evil the GOP loves until abortion is outlawed first. Sure, Democrats have enjoyed repeated and big success in reducing abortion rates by attacking the causes (not “causes”) of abortion, but what really matters is doctrinaire ideological purity, even if it kills actual unborn children.
Such Puritan thinking reminds me of one of the great jokes to emerge from the Soviet Union (a factory for dark humor). A fanatical Communist apparatchik who was presented with a plan for reform that brilliantly solved their supply and demand problems, ended famine, liberated the talents and gifts of Russian people, ensured economic growth and prosperity, and dramatically reduced Cold War tensions. Tested repeatedly on a small scale, the trials had proven a dazzling success and the apparatchik was urged by his experts and counselors to institute the reforms on a wide scale.
His reply: “Yes the plan works in reality. But will it work in theory?”
Jesus, with his customary gift for the hyperbolic wisecrack, called this sort of blind performative dogmatism “straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.”
“The letter of the law matters more than the result of the law” is performative piety accelerated to madness. Especially when the “prolife” monomaniac then supports the MAGA Cult that actively increases abortion rates while also hiding behind empty “prolife” blabber in order to also rob, oppress, starve, rape, and murder all sorts of other human beings, including pregnant women in their concentration camps, places they want to bomb, and states where they want to destroy reproductive care and increase maternal death rates. It’s things like this that make it hard to avoid the impression that the “prolife” movement is, in large measure, a scheme for salving conservative bloodguilt for refusing to create a social structure that cares for the poor. To paraphrase, St. John, “If you do not love the poor whom you have seen, you cannot love their unborn child whom you have not seen.”
The “pro-life” movement itself periodically accidently admits this when, during election years, they dial back their now unapologetically racist MAGA rhetoric and deploy the fact that black women have x5 times the abortion rate than the general population and Hispanic women x3 in order to accuse Dems of attempting “abortion genocide” against them. Of course, the reason is that blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poorer and therefore under much more intense economic pressure to abort. And the reason for that is that the “prolife” GOP, again and again, enacts economic policies that punish blacks and Latinos disproportionately. That’s what causes more abortions, and that’s why Dems consistently succeed in lowering the abortion rate: their policies ease that pressure. In short, the “genocidal Dems” lie is, yet again, a disgusting use of the unborn as human shields for GOP cruelty that is the real driver of abortion rates. It is also yet another example of GOP scapegoating others for their sins and using accusation as their most beloved satanic parody of the sacrament of confession.
So we are back to the inexorable logic I sketched out yesterday: You will never ever ever magick abortion away. It’s not happening. So do what you can to lessen it by helping to decrease the poverty that drives abortion rates. That will require creating a social structure that raises your taxes. But if so, so be it, right? After all, as the prolife movement never tires of saying, it’s the #1 Priority, right? So your liberality can be counted upon, right?
At the mention of the ominous word “liberality” in connection with money, the “prolife” movement then tends to get in touch with its Inner Scrooge and pivot to another argument to wriggle out of the crushing grip of logic with the preposterous claim that the consistent pattern of abortion rates falling under Democrats and rising under the GOP is just “coincidence”. It’s got nothing to do with their policies.
No. It is not “coincidence”. It is a causal relationship. Democrat policies relieve economic stress on the poor. Less economic stress reduces pressure to abort. GOP policies–and none more than those of “The Most Pro-life President of All Time”–sharply and even sadistically increase that pressure.
However, all that aside, let us grant this desperate, stupid, lying premise. If you truly believe this hogwash about “coincidence”, then you are saying it makes no difference which party is in power since, by your own word, their policies have nothing to do with raising or lowering abortion rates. So there is no reason left not to vote Dem. They will, according to you, have zero effect on the abortion rate, nor will Republicans. We can eliminate abortion from our moral calculus, according to you.
But that leaves all the other policies of the GOP under the corrupt, incompetent imbecile Trump, which are catastrophic on a host of other fronts and will only be eliminated by Democrats, the only party with a prayer of defeating the MAGA Cult. So your dumb argument destroys itself. Good job!
It is customary at this point to try to salvage this incredibly stupid argument with some form of a “Heads, my Cult wins/Tails, the Democrats lose” lie which claims that while Dems have no effect on lowering abortion rates, the GOP somehow magically prevents abortion, even though abortion rates always go up under their rule.
To this I reply to the “pro-life” MAGA liar in the words of George Orwell: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
And the sole reply of the Cult at that point is, “LOOK! TRANS ATHLETES! SMEAR THE QUEERS, BOYS!”
If you want to lower abortion rates, vote Dem.
If you want to actively do evil and raise abortion rates, vote GOP.
If you want to actively do maximum evil, vote GOP, raise abortion rates, and blaspheme God among the Gentiles by boasting you are a “pro-life” Christian.
And if you are a coward who wants to passively do evil, bury your talent in the ground by either staying home or voting third party and refuse to help the only party capable of defeating MAGA and the only party whose policies have consistently lowered the abortion rate.
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