For twisted logic, nothing beats a convinced Catholic reducing a complicated moral issue to simpleminded dogma. I’ll refute Scalia’s various equations with abortion one by one in the order presented.
War=Abortion
Scalia’s analogy between war and abortion is patently absurd. Her pretension that Catholic morality or ethics stand in opposition to war insults history.
War is not a moral absolute. War is either moral or immoral depending upon the cause. War in a just cause is moral. Not taking up arms in defense of justice and the innocent is immoral.
Catholic opposition to America’s wars does the Catholics little credit. Not opposition to the current war in the Middle East nor to previous wars. Recall that Roman Catholics in large numbers opposed the American government and the broad will of the American people in three of the nation’s bloodiest conflicts.
Irish Catholic opposition to the Union in the Civil War was expressed by the seditious rising of seventeen thousand Irish Catholics in New York. The organized rioters perpetrated the worst racial incident in the nation’s history. Irish Catholics raised confederate flags in the most important city in the north. Irishmen beat, tortured and lynched Black Americans. The outrages inflicted on the hanging, bloody Black corpses by their drunken, depraved colleens could fill another chapter in Kraft-Ebbing. Last but not least, the Irish Catholics killed and mutilated the bodies of recent Union survivors of Gettysburg sent to quell the insurrection.
German and Irish Catholics opposed America’s entrance into WWI, Germans for loyalty to Germany and the Irish for their self-righteous hatred of the English. Before WWII the Germans formed bunds favoring Hitler and the Nazis. In proper fascist patriotic manner, German American Catholics and their Father-Coughlin-inspired Irish American fellow travelers wrapped themselves in American flags while raising Swastikas and zieg heiling Hitler and German victory. Pat Buchanan still sings their traitor’s song.
In the opinion of George Orwell, the most determinedly honest intellectual of the Twentieth Century, the Vatican supported Nazi and Fascist war aims from the Spanish Civil War through WWII.
The Death Penalty=Abortion
Murder proved by legitimate witness in open court should be punishable by legal execution in the most humane way possible. That errors are made and innocent people executed is an administrative shortcoming pointing up the need for vigilance. It is not germane to the moral question.
Capital punishment is just and moral. Nothing less insures justice for the victim and moral order for society.
In any event, the church’s equation of abortion to murder raises a curious question. Why in all the Church’s history have we never heard condemnation of routine infant killing by midwives? That midwives filter the species, and have from its beginnings, is an open secret. Midwives have suffocated unwanted newborns in their swaddling since before Pharaoh’s commandment to the Egyptian midwives in Exodus. Midwives have snuffed millions of odd or troublesome newborns in every generation with never a whisper of protest from the Church.
The ancient Romans exposed their unwanted offspring. Rejected newborns were dropped off on a hill designated for the purpose and left to die. It didn’t deter the Romans from expressing moral outrage at the Carthaginians for sacrificing their children to Baal. Given the Church’s history of cruelty and bloodshed, its moral outrage over medical abortions rings equally hollow.
Poverty=Abortion
George Orwell called the Church “a parasite on the poor.” The Church’s prohibitions, abortion first among them, fall most heavily on the poor and ignorant. Those least informed about sex, pregnancy and contraception. Those least able to afford medical advice and treatment. Those without the means to travel abroad if abortion is their choice and is prohibited at home.
Racism=Abortion
Sexism not racism is what abortion is overwhelmingly used to enforce, especially in China. Females are the least desirable offspring and are most often aborted or suffocated.
The Church’s opposition to racism is several hundred years late. As the Church did not raise a single protest to the Nazi slaughter of Jews in Europe in the last century, so it never raised a protest to the enslavement of Africans (and Native Americans) in America. The church belatedly wringing its hands over African Americans unborn is hypocritical and exploitive.
Capitalism…Abortion Scalia’s assertion that legal abortion opens women up to exploitation or injury by greedy, unscrupulous and unlicensed practitioners is laughable. Ms. Scalia’s strange brief seems to be that prohibiting abortion will benefit women by protecting them from dangerous medical quacks.
Finally Ms. Scalia sails way over the top. The evil of abortion, she concludes. supersedes the evils of war, torture, poverty, racism and capitalism.
Ms. Scalia needs to ask herself a question. If preventing abortion is so plainly beneficial, why is does she have so much difficulty making a case for it? Making a case for preventing war, torture, poverty or racism wouldn’t require Ms. Scalia to tie herself into rhetorical knots.
Next time she feels the urge to defend Church dogma, Ms Scalia ought to try making a case for a national prohibition on contraceptives. It is hugely probable that large numbers of people who support a national prohibition on abortion use contraceptives. They’re comfortable in their opposition to abortion because they know they’ll never need one. For Protestants that may be perfectly okay. But for Catholics, it is morally inconsistent and profoundly hypocritical.
Abortion is a troubling medical procedure and makes no one comfortable. But it is, in the final event, an issue between patient and doctor. Priests and politicians need to butt out.
