Sunset for the Culture of Life

Dr. Paul Kengor

by Dr. Paul Kengor on November 12, 2012 · 55 comments

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The battle to end legal abortion in America is over. The election and reelection of Barack Obama has made Roe v. Wade a permanent part of American life, with tens to hundreds of millions of unborn babies the coming casualties. Barack Obama got two Supreme Court picks in his first term and will get more in his second.

But it’s worse than that. All of us will now be handmaidens in this destruction. In the not-so-distant past, abortion advocates didn’t demand that all of us forcibly pay for their abortions—and for Planned Parenthood, contraception, and embryo destruction. They weren’t demanding that taxpayer-funded contraception become a new “entitlement.” That, too, has changed under Barack Obama, and we will not be able to conscientiously object as faithful Catholics.

This is a devastating defeat. The heights of abortion absurdity will be thrust to once unimaginable depths.

On November 6, 2012, we witnessed the sunset for the Culture of Life in America.

And who’s to blame? The answer is Roman Catholics, or, I should say, self-identified Catholics. They make up a quarter of the electorate, and they went for Barack Obama big-time in 2008 and by 50-48 percent in 2012, mirroring and molding the popular vote.

To be sure, the numbers for 2012 are deceiving. The self-identified Catholics who voted for Obama include millions who rarely go to Mass. To the contrary, Catholics who attend Mass weekly voted for the pro-life Mitt Romney by a strong margin, 57-42 percent. White Catholics supported Romney by 59-40 percent. Sadly, they weren’t enough.

There were two groups of Catholics who elected Obama: apathetic Catholics and Hispanic Catholics. Hispanics went for Obama by an amazing 71-27 percent margin, and they were 10 percent of the electorate.

But that doesn’t let Catholics en masse off the hook. There were literally millions of Catholics who attend Mass weekly and voted for Barack Obama. In so doing, they also voted—whether they realize it or not—for the sunset of the Culture of Life in America.

For Catholic Exchange dot com and Ave Maria Radio, I’m Paul Kengor.

Dr. Paul Kengor

By Dr. Paul Kengor

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” and “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.”

Tagged as: abortion, Barack Obama

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  • Tarses

    Are you trying to say that an embryo is not human? What is it, a giraffe? A cheetah? An “it”? If that’s your position, it’s ludicrous on its face. Life begins at conception. That was true for you. It was true for me. It’s true for everyone including the pre-born today. They are human. They have a human mother and father and they have human DNA. They are the offspring of a human. They are human. Aborting a fetus means you are killing a human being.

    Choice, your big issue seems to be that (and I’m paraphrasing here) “you don’t believe a baby has the right to use its mother’s body in the womb without the mother’s permission. Therefore, if the mother so chooses, she can abort the baby.” Am I getting that correct? If so, let me ask you this question to see if I understand your line of thinking.

    Let’s say there are conjoined twins, Sarah and Leslie. Due to how they are conjoined, Sarah is reliant on some of the bodily functions that Sarah provides but not the other way around. Without those bodily functions, Leslie would die. One day, Sarah decides that she doesn’t like the fact that Leslie is using her body without her permission and decides that she is going to terminate her. Of course, she’ll do this in a medical facility with trained professionals so they can cut out Leslie and dispose of her body humanely afterwards and it will definitely be safer for Sarah instead of trying to do perform the procedure in an unsafe setting. So here is the question, since Leslie is using Sarah’s body without her permission, does Sarah have the right to kill her?

    By the way, I hope you had a merry Christmas, Choiceone. I’ve been praying for you.

  • choiceone

    Tarses,

    I do not consider life to begin from conception, and I don’t need to, because I am not a Catholic. For me, life already exists and the lives of new human beings derive from that life. Although a zygote has its own life, because it can survive outside the woman, e.g., in a petri dish, that life is very short. Once a blastocyst implants in a woman, that blastocyst and the embryo it becomes derive life from the woman and would die without doing so. For me, they are not yet human beings because they are stages in the construction of a human being. Until they are constructed so as to survive outside of the woman, they are part of the woman and not individuals.

    I am not interested in being challenged by a “unique DNA” argument because DNA is not all there is to being a human being. A considerable portion of our human being-ness from our construction while inside of, biologically attached to, and part of the women.

    I certainly respect your individual right to think otherwise, even if to me your view is false, and to control you own individual body in accord with what you think. But I do not think you have any right to impose what you think on other people or to control their individual bodies in accord with what you think.

    That is the main difference between us. I do not seek to control other individual human beings’ bodies in accord with what I think, but rather seek to defend the right of all individual human beings to control their own individual bodies in accord with what they individually think. And I will go right on doing this because I believe it is completely and utterly immoral to try to control the bodies of other individual human beings against their will, conscience, and freedom of religion.

  • Tarses

    Happy new year, Choice. I’ve continue to pray for you. Let’s get right to it, shall we?

    First off, I don’t “believe” that life starts at conception because of the Catholic Church. I know it because science teaches it. You can take any high school biology course and they will tell you, when cells divide, it’s a sign of life. Pick any text book you want and they’ll all tell you the same thing: life begins at conception. Now, you are certainly free to have your own belief system but why on earth should we be enshrining your belief system into law? Shouldn’t we be relying on the facts that science teaches? You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

    I noticed you didn’t answer the question about conjoined twins. Let’s move on to another. Should a pregnant woman be able to do whatever she wants while pregnant? In other words, should she be allowed to smoke as many cigarettes as she wants? Drink as much alcohol as she wants? It’s her body, right? And since, according to you, a fetus is not human, there should be no ill effects to worry about for another person, right? If the answer is “no”, why not?

  • sharon mccoy

    I do not know what a Catholic would think, since I am not one. But as a confirmed Protestant Christian, I justify voting for Obama because he is concerned about helping the poor and those who were forced to come to the US as illegal immigrants, among other things.

    Jesus Christ was unequivocal in telling people to feed the hungry and heal the sick. As a Jew, he supported the Torah (“not one jot or tittle of the law will fail”), and the idea of being kind to those who are strangers was basic to Judaism because Jews were to remember that they, too, had been strangers.

    Meanwhile, Jesus’s two key commands regarding children were, “if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into sea,” and, “anyone who receives one of these children.” The first cannot refer to the unborn because they have no capacity for belief or disbelief, and the latter cannot do so because, when it was said, Jesus took as an example a born child rather than pointing to a woman’s belly.

    In contrast, there is not a single straight statement attributed to Jesus that condemns abortion, even though the knowledge of how to induce abortion existed throughout the Middle East, including in Jewish culture, in his day.

    So if I am going to choose between the two imperfect political parties we have, I am going to vote for those who definitely do some of the things Jesus Christ told his followers to do when the other even goes so far as to refuse to do those things on principle.

    For Protestants, the issue is not what priests say. The issue is what Jesus Christ actually said.

  • sharon mccoy

    Happy New Year, Tarses.

    High school biology is a pretty simplistic version of biology. Most high school textbooks teach simplified versions of all scientific and other academic disciplines, versions that do not deal with any of the philosophical and theoretical problems the disciplines recognize at higher levels. Go to grad school in any scientific discipline and discover all the weaknesses in a theory, all the problems in a philosophical perspective in that discipline – and go to all sorts of cutting edge research to see all the ways in which scientists in that discipline are pushing the envelope.

    Science is not designed to provide statements of absolute truth outside of theoretical frameworks which limit the meaning and truth of the statements. It is a vehicle by means of which we can move closer to truth, and as such it expects its theories and knowledge to change over time. A serious scientist expects that, say, 200 years from now, many things claimed as “true” in science today will be looked upon as highly primitive, misleading, or downright wrongheaded conceptions corrected by the work of the intervening 200 years.

    Any scientist will tell you that, when one cell undergoes division, it is indeed a sign of life, and that, until that division is complete, there are not two cells. I apply to the pregnant woman the same standard as the one applied to the cell undergoing division – until the woman and embryo/fetus are completely separated biologically, we cannot speak of two completely biologically separate entities. Yes, the zygote/morula/blastocyst can be shown separate biologically because it can be grown in a petri dish in complete separation from the woman. But scientific means do not allow us to keep it alive beyond a doubling of its natural life span, no more than 20 days. In contrast, embryo/fetus is a function of the blastocyst having implanted in the woman’s body and thus having become part of it. It grows only as part of her body, and it has to be completely separated from that body, to be fully divided from that body, to be a separate, second body of a human being.

    Sorry not to have answered about the conjoined twins. With conjoined twins, there is usually no basis on which to decide that the single body belongs to one of the twins and not to the other equally. And in any case, born conjoined twins all can separately breathe and eat, because we do not consider there to be two of them if there are not two faces, with separate noses and mouths. The only cases I know of that are even remotely comparable to the situation of pregnancy are those in which a parasitic twin lives completely inside of and biologically attached to the other twin. The one inside cannot breathe or eat, but receives oxygen and nutrients via biological attachment to the other twin. On discovery, usually not long after birth, such a parasitic twin is routinely surgically removed and cannot survive. No one calls it abortion, however.

    Next question. Should a pregnant woman be able to do whatever she wants while pregnant? For me, this depends. If she wants to continue the pregnancy to term, no, she should not, because, if she continues that pregnancy, her behavior will affect the quality of life of the future human being that will be born. That responsibility is, in fact, one of the reasons I think a woman should have a right to choose not to continue the pregnancy. If a woman decides to continue a pregnancy to term, she should make even extreme efforts to insure that the child she will give birth to will have as good a quality of life as possible. If, in the process of gestation, she thinks that that quality of life will fall short of her own standards, she should have the right to stop the process in order to start all over and hopefully achieve a quality of life for it that will be better.

    A morally responsible person will not impose a terrible quality of life on a future person or, for that matter, terrible burdens on existing people. I do not think that the fetus has a right to become a person and that terminating a pregnancy destroys the possibility of the future person because I do not think that the future person depends on having a particular DNA combination. If the DNA combination of a particular zygote would not give the future person a good quality of life, that would be one good reason not to continue a pregnancy unless medicine had figured out how to change the combination so as to fix the problem.

    The Bible tells us that, in relation to women, children are “fruit” and that a woman is judged by her fruit. Hence, she should have the right to produce only fruit that meets her own standards. Just as we all have the right to stop performing any act that we believe is wrong, I think we should all have the right stop performing the development of fruit that we believe is wrong. That would be the case, in my view, if a fetus clearly lacks a brain and carrying it to term would result in the birth of an anencephalic child.

    We have no idea whether such a birth may trap a soul in a mindless body, which would be a very cruel thing to do to a soul. If the woman has other children, the fact that she would have to ignore them in order to give 24/7 care to the anencephalic one would harm the quality of their life. If she has no economic capacity to care for such a child, such a birth would force the whole society to take on the responsibility. I cannot even imagine doing such an irresponsible, selfish thing as to give birth to an anencephalic child.

    But it would be far worse to force a woman to do that against her will and conscience, because she alone will be judged by God for continuing that pregnancy to term, and the people forcing her are actually the culprits. That would be just one more injustice being foisted upon the universe by thoughtless human beings who speak and act as if they know what God knows – whereas anyone who knows even a tiny bit of what God knows stops judging others and starts trying to correct the injustices.

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