Too many Catholics have collapsed their responsibilities to evangelism to a focus on getting a Supreme Court who will overturn
Roe v. Wade and Casey v.
Planned Parenthood.
The problem is that that’s a single-strategy approach that so far, has not worked and is not likely to work in the next 50 years. The electoral strategy to has failed, because from the beginning, it was poorly planned and poorly conceived. Yet those who say that Catholics can’t vote for a Democrat also say that all Catholics have to believe in their strategy, which as I said before, is a poorly conceived strategy, and in my heart of hearts believe that
it will not work.
In a quote attributed (possibly incorrectly) to Albert Einstein, we hear the motto: “The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting the different results.”
Here’s the bottom line.
First, if you look at states who consistently vote Democratic, if you sum up California, New York, and a few others, you very quickly see that overturning Roe v. Wade will not affect the legal status of a majority of abortions in the U.S. Historically, once New York legalized abortion, interstate travel for abortion skyrocketed before Roe v. Wade. If a bunch of “red” states outlaw abortion, there will still be plenty of opportunity for legal abortion by traveling out of state.
Second, Cytotec (miprosotol) is widely used throughout Latin America in nations where it is abortion is illegal to perform self-administered abortions. A black market for Cytotec, which is also prescribed for gastrointestinal problems, is already flourishing in Texas in the wake of state-level restrictions there. Just look at this story on El Salvador, and you can predict what will happen in the U.S. if Roe is overturned without regard for other policies:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3557184/
Third, if you look at the peer-reviewed publications from the 1920s and 1930s, you will see reports on abortion that tell you the same thing that CDC statistics tell you today: that most abortions take place among women who are young and/or economically vulnerable.
The constant harping of some Catholics on the need to get behind their failed and helplessly flawed strategy of “elect politicians who will nominate pro-life judges” seems deaf to all these concerns.
Want to end abortion? Do it one person at a time. Spread the Kingdom of God. Yes, that’s slow, but it’s the only way it will ever work. Mentor a kid in a neighborhood where 90% of kids grow up in mother-only households. Visit a prison where small-time drug offenders are released with no nope of getting a job, and end up as “unmarriageable men” (W.J. Wilson). Say a rosary at 2:00 AM outside the the bars that are closing down in cities across the nation and people are making really bad choices.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s true. The organized pro-life movement in this country has been a failure, and cannot help but be a failure if it persists in its single-strategy idolization of the Supreme Court. The movement didn’t get started until states began abortion legalization in the late 1960s, so it’s always been focused on the legal aspect. But as Pope Francis told us in his America Magazine article,
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We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.
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Or, to quote another great thinker in a very different time, Henry David Thoreau:
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Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
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Repubs just are doing better than the Dems. The popular vote means nothing if it doesn’t transfer to wins.
