Abortion
For his issue-opening Public Square column in the most recent issue of First Things, editor Joseph Bottum takes on the perennial calls for Republicans to de-emphasize the pro-lifers in their midst. “There’s a good-sized section of the conservative commenting classes that seems to blame the pro-lifers if the Republicans lose, and dismiss the pro-life vote…
Remember that executive order that supposedly gave pro-life Democrats cover to vote for Obamacare? Oh well: [House Republican Leader John] Boehner [of Ohio] and other Republicans point to reports that the Health and Human Services Department is giving Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new high-risk insurance pool that will cover any abortion that…
I’ve liked a good deal of what I’ve read and heard from Republican Congressional Candidate William Clegg, so it’s regrettable to find him taking the same horrible position as his primary competition (and Republican nominee) Mark Zaccaria. Here’s Clegg: While my own beliefs are pro-life, I do not believe that the government should be intervening…
In Oklahoma, even a gubernatorial veto couldn’t prevent the state legislature from making this law: It requires women to undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting an abortion. The person who performs the ultrasound must describe the dimensions of the fetus, whether arms, legs and internal organs are…
The March issue of First Things was an anniversary issue reprinting various pieces from past iterations, and a 1994 article by Russell Hittinger reconsidering the state of the political battlefield prior to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision sheds some light on the process of progressives implementation of policies with which the American people…
Any attempt to mitigate this scene, from an Economist article, is necessarily founded in either evil or self-delusion: XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes, “when we heard a moan…
Sandra Lavin, writing about coming to grips with having an abortion, makes an important point: If I had to say why I had an abortion it would all begin with the decision to begin that illicit relationship and then all of the nets of sin that suffocate you without you even knowing it. One sin…
Among the magnificent effects of the Internet is that people in dramatically different cultural environments can interact in real time, offering proclamations of principle that may or may not require adjustment. Mark Shea, for example, expresses what is likely a common gripe among pro-lifers across the country about local reactions to the Scott Brown victory:…
A new poll finds that “56% of all Americans and 58% of those 18-29 years old say abortion ‘morally wrong’.” “Millennials” (those 18-29) consider abortion to be “morally wrong” even more (58%) than Baby Boomers (those 45-64) (51%). Generation X (those 30-44) are similar to Millennials (60% see abortion as “morally wrong”). More than 6…
Joseph Bottum places two anecdotes side by side: It’s hard to keep up the illusion of abortion as a positive good when the ugly reality of it is always lurking just behind the abstract idea. The wall of illusion came crashing down for Abby Johnson when, after working for Planned Parenthood in Texas for eight…