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Roe and Casey Down

 You don’t need the breaking news; let me get right to the point: “Liberal” Christian, you are more than free to say that some group of politicians doesn’t have a complete view of the world, or even doesn’t actually care about truth or justice, but the only way this decision “has nothing to do with truth or justice” is by excluding the act of aborting a young human from the consideration of what counts as “truth and justice.”

In fact, now we can get back to arguing in justice about what human dignity deserves and requires, especially with respect to an elected government, because the emotional blackmail of poisoning the well in service to child murder has been (largely) removed.

And understand that the pro-life cause as a political movement has sought exactly this, because laws forbid and create barriers to something undesirable. The hardships faced by women seeking abortion in the process of seeking one are part of the point: a merely symbolic law doesn’t function as a law. That’s why the alleged harms of abortion laws don’t move many pro-life advocates, because precious few people even register the harm and murder of the unborn child as a harm.

In the end, the question still lingers, when looking at a fetus, or at least thinking about them: “What is this?” And, “What do we owe this living being?” We owe them at least the right not to be killed on a whim, or as an inconvenience. We owe them a lot more, in my view, but I am astonished at some people, willing to moralize, whilst standing on the weakest possible ground. How hollow is universal health care, when a huge number of its putative recipients will never see the light of day? And I have been dismayed by the prevalence of political violence and outright genocide over decades, but what of this one?

Until you have considered it, and answered correctly, you and I will be at an impasse. Human dignity grants no cover, no room for self-satisfied posturing. Yet the truth is that we have “un-personed” perhaps hundreds of millions of people, because we were unwilling to face the demands of their dignity upon us. People deserve better than to be lost under a blizzard of euphemisms. And certainly they deserve to live. 

I rejoice today, still knowing the work isn’t done. It may never be, but truth and justice do have a small beachhead today.

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