Where Are Life Issues Now?

Father Pavone of Priests for Life is remarkably sanguine about the results of the election Tuesday. In an article on his website he notes that Democrats had to play to the middle to take the House and that not only did no Democrat run and win on a pro-abort position, one Democratic winner, Casey of Pennsylvania, is pro-life.

So, according to Fr. Pavone, Democrats not only did not win by trumpeting abortion rights, they could not have, because "the American public has never supported" their party's position on the issue.

So much for the winners; what about the other side?

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, STL, president of Human Life International, said that Republicans lost precisely because they lost focus on life issues: "The most vulnerable seats in both houses were those held by politicians who had abandoned the pro-life and the pro-marriage principles that first brought them to power."

These may be rather subtle nuances given an election in which a number of pro-life ballot initiatives were defeated, embryonic stem-cell research was embraced in one state, and a prosecutor investigating Planned Parenthood's complicity in sex-crimes against minors lost his reelection bid.

For pro-lifers, or for anyone concerned about an issue pertaining to the common good, a political party is not a team that you root for in a game called an election. A party is a tool for the accomplishment of an end, and the end is not merely winning. Which is not the same as saying that winning does not matter.

Republican victories are the reason that we have the Roberts court and that we had, before the disaster-ridden second term of George Bush and last Tuesday's subsequent change in power, the possibility of another pro-life appointment to the Supreme Court. Republican victories were why we had an administration making the case this week before the Supreme Court for the upholding of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban.

Republican victories were why funding for abortion-promoting programs in the United Nations and through other international programs have been cut back and funds directed toward abstinence-based and abstinence-including programs oversees.

Not merely because they were Republican victories, of course, but because those victories came with an explicit understanding that the election winners owed something to pro-life and pro-family voters. Despite what Fathers Pavone and Euteneuer say, I find it troubling to realize that no one in public office after this election will feel compelled by political necessity to place life issues at the top of the agenda.

Fr. Pavone wants to point out, however, that the culture is moving to our side, that pro-lifers have the momentum. "Every trend continues to move in our direction," he asserts, and then offers a list of indicators to back it up, from opinion polls to abortion mills shutting down, to evidence from science, medicine, and even the social sciences that abortion indeed kills a developing human being, harms women and damages society.

Having the culture, however slowly, trending our way, if indeed it is, is no small matter. That may explain why voters in Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin all adopted amendments to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman only. But the reins of political power right now have been passed to those whose anti-life agenda has been rolling along for years. We'd better hope the culture is trending pro-life, because for the foreseeable future it may be the only arena pro-lifers can operate in.

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