Pro-life Democrats?
At the National Catholic Reporter ... Is there still room for pro-life Democrats?
This article by Michael Sean Winters is a good example of what I feel Catholics just don't understand about the subject of reproductive rights, which is so very important to the Democratic party and to women. I think it's important to point this out, because this lack of understanding by otherwise liberal Catholics just leads to arguments that can never be resolved.
Here's part of the article ...
[...] Some of us understand abortion rights differently. We see it as part of a narrative that Pope Francis has labeled the "globalization of indifference."
Just as liberalism was blind to the evil of eugenics in the early 20th century, pro-life Democrats see abortion rights as a kind of indifference to the moral significance of the unborn child. We can easily identify with the plight of a woman facing an unexpected or crisis pregnancy. We all know someone who has had an abortion and know those persons as good people, decent people, caring people. But we cannot simply set aside the moral fact that a choice, an exercise of freedom, which entails the destruction of human life, or potential human life, is at the very least morally problematic.
For Catholics, freedom is complicated, one of several principal goals of civic society. We do not root our understanding of freedom in Lockean ideas about a social contract, still less in contemporary libertarian ideas that see any infringement on personal choice as impermissible. For Catholics, freedom, even religious freedom, is rooted in human dignity and the necessity of searching for the truth ....
Freedom is not ambivalent, but neither is it the only value in civic life. Human dignity and the common good also make claims on the body politic. We Catholics support labor rights because the dignity of workers demands it, even if the freedom of corporations is thereby impinged. We Catholics support the rights of migrants to succor and shelter because their human dignity demands it, even if the host country must allocate resources to address their needs. We Catholics support a just distribution of societal resources because the common good demands it, even if taxes are, by nature, confiscatory. We support action to confront climate change because the common good and concern for human life demand it, even if such a confrontation will impose significant changes on our common life. On all these issues, Democrats eschew the libertarian position. On abortion, they embrace it ...
The problem with trying to reason this out is that Catholic pro-life people are not starting in the same place as pro-choice people. Catholic begin with what they believe are facts, but which are instead religious teachings/beliefs .... that from the time of conception, a fetus is a person with all the rights thereof.
Most pro-choice people do not believe an egg, an embryo, an early fetus is yet a person, and they base this belief on science and on a particular understanding of personhood (see video below).
So yes, Democrats are for the rights of persons ... we are not "indifferent", we don't put "freedom" ahead of the rights of persons, we care about the common good, we are not libertarians on this one issue. In fact, we pro-choice Democrats are totally consistent: we do not see the rights of fetuses as equal to the rights of women, because most of us do not believe fetuses are persons in the same way women are. So women's rights prevail.
As long as pro-life people refuse to acknowledge that difference in the most basic beliefs, they will keep misrepresenting the argument, and they will keep losing that argument.
Winters ends with this ...
It is still possible for pro-life Democrats to vote for Harris this autumn in good conscience, especially given the alternative, but I fear the time is coming when conscience will demand leaving the party. Or acknowledging it has left us.
Yes, there is a place in the Democratic party for people who are pro-life ... some of the leading Democrats in the party, like Joe Biden, are pro-life.
But ...
Pro-life people cannot expect the Democratic party to be pro-life in policy. We are not a theocracy and we don't base our political policies on particular religious beliefs. The Catholic church would love to force the whole world to live by its teachings, but we are centuries past that. That's Project 2025 stuff.
This article by Michael Sean Winters is a good example of what I feel Catholics just don't understand about the subject of reproductive rights, which is so very important to the Democratic party and to women. I think it's important to point this out, because this lack of understanding by otherwise liberal Catholics just leads to arguments that can never be resolved.
Here's part of the article ...
[...] Some of us understand abortion rights differently. We see it as part of a narrative that Pope Francis has labeled the "globalization of indifference."
Just as liberalism was blind to the evil of eugenics in the early 20th century, pro-life Democrats see abortion rights as a kind of indifference to the moral significance of the unborn child. We can easily identify with the plight of a woman facing an unexpected or crisis pregnancy. We all know someone who has had an abortion and know those persons as good people, decent people, caring people. But we cannot simply set aside the moral fact that a choice, an exercise of freedom, which entails the destruction of human life, or potential human life, is at the very least morally problematic.
For Catholics, freedom is complicated, one of several principal goals of civic society. We do not root our understanding of freedom in Lockean ideas about a social contract, still less in contemporary libertarian ideas that see any infringement on personal choice as impermissible. For Catholics, freedom, even religious freedom, is rooted in human dignity and the necessity of searching for the truth ....
Freedom is not ambivalent, but neither is it the only value in civic life. Human dignity and the common good also make claims on the body politic. We Catholics support labor rights because the dignity of workers demands it, even if the freedom of corporations is thereby impinged. We Catholics support the rights of migrants to succor and shelter because their human dignity demands it, even if the host country must allocate resources to address their needs. We Catholics support a just distribution of societal resources because the common good demands it, even if taxes are, by nature, confiscatory. We support action to confront climate change because the common good and concern for human life demand it, even if such a confrontation will impose significant changes on our common life. On all these issues, Democrats eschew the libertarian position. On abortion, they embrace it ...
The problem with trying to reason this out is that Catholic pro-life people are not starting in the same place as pro-choice people. Catholic begin with what they believe are facts, but which are instead religious teachings/beliefs .... that from the time of conception, a fetus is a person with all the rights thereof.
Most pro-choice people do not believe an egg, an embryo, an early fetus is yet a person, and they base this belief on science and on a particular understanding of personhood (see video below).
So yes, Democrats are for the rights of persons ... we are not "indifferent", we don't put "freedom" ahead of the rights of persons, we care about the common good, we are not libertarians on this one issue. In fact, we pro-choice Democrats are totally consistent: we do not see the rights of fetuses as equal to the rights of women, because most of us do not believe fetuses are persons in the same way women are. So women's rights prevail.
As long as pro-life people refuse to acknowledge that difference in the most basic beliefs, they will keep misrepresenting the argument, and they will keep losing that argument.
Winters ends with this ...
It is still possible for pro-life Democrats to vote for Harris this autumn in good conscience, especially given the alternative, but I fear the time is coming when conscience will demand leaving the party. Or acknowledging it has left us.
Yes, there is a place in the Democratic party for people who are pro-life ... some of the leading Democrats in the party, like Joe Biden, are pro-life.
But ...
Pro-life people cannot expect the Democratic party to be pro-life in policy. We are not a theocracy and we don't base our political policies on particular religious beliefs. The Catholic church would love to force the whole world to live by its teachings, but we are centuries past that. That's Project 2025 stuff.
posted by crystal | 2:04 PM
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