You see, I have a problem with people who believe that overturning Roe v. Wade will do the trick… I don’t believe it will, and I can’t see any point in waiting around to see if it will ever happen… Every child saved by helping the mother is a “Victory” all in its own.
Nor, i.m.o., is Roe v. Wade the sum and summit of all/most of the moral degradation and confusion in the developed world, including the U.S. Some of us are just as passionate as the posters with oversized and neon ‘pro-life’ signatures; it’s just that our passion may be broader because we see the root cause as having a different and more generically influential base. Quoting religious figures within those signatures (JP2, Bishop Sheen, Mother Teresa, yadayada) does not “prove” that Roe v. Wade was the cause and catalyst and singular “evil” that it has been compartmentalized to stand for. Rather, U.S. society as a whole, and in a less complicit but almost as passive way, the Catholic Church, participated by default in letting the entire matter of reproductive and bioethical issues become an amoral, non-navigated train with a direction & momentum of its own. Thirty, forty years ago was the time to begin the put the brakes on science and to agree as a nation – guided by an alliance of scientists and bioethicists – that there would be a secular board to govern and restrain the application of technology and to recommend legal limits. This is beyond religion, but religious groups would have had the opportunity to influence, persuade, based on their own ethical viewpoints. I believe this is the kind of cooperation that could have prevented the divisive, destructive, and nonproductive “pro” and “con” positions on reproductive issues and life issues in general that we now face as a nation.
Secular ethical boards and bodies are not new. Healthy governments and institutions make use of them proactively. But our nation, in love as it has been for over 50 years with scientific & technological progress, and further intoxicated as it has become with the pursuit of affluence and the activities/opportunities resulting from affluence, has been asleep at the wheel. Roe v. Wade is a symptom, not a cause. It is a symptom of a society being governed passively by scientific possibilities, by the pursuit of personal pleasure, and by the triumph of “I” over “We, the People.” (Never mind God.)
We reap what we sow. When I was growing up, test-tube babies were being discussed. Some people rang alarm bells, but the Church’s voice in this was timid and largely silent. Later, to my horror, actual sperm banks sprang up virtually overnight. Still no hue and cry about the
creation of life and “parenthood” apart from a particular union of a man and a woman – a major and significant foundation of Catholic moral theology. Still the church was asleep at the wheel. It may be convenient to blame “Roe,” and you may pat yourselves on the back all you want, but I think you deceive yourselves to package the problem there.
The Catholic Church lost its moment at a time when it was far more universally popular and respected than it is now. Around 1965 was the time to lobby our nation for a national board of secular ethicists with regional branches, to come up with guidelines both permanent and ongoing, concurrent with all technology affecting life stages. It could have become law at that point, that legislatures would make no “life” laws without public presentations, hearings to include those board recommendations & rationales. It wouldn’t have had jurisdictional “power” on its own, as if a 4th branch of gov’t, but it would have had presumptive power in the sense of a nationally accepted moral code.
Catholics do not own the moral high ground. In fact, an awful lot of very decent Americans who do live by moral codes have little respect for the moral credibility of a church that would allow clerical pedophilia to thrive for about 60 years, largely unpunished. Additionally, fanatic Catholic & other Christian pro-lifers are not going to convert an entire nation on religious grounds, particularly with mostly religious arguments that the majority sees as often irrational and emotional. However, a secular ethical board agreeing on a baseline of “life” definitions could have a great deal of credibility. Those baseline definitions would not correspond 100% to Catholic definitions, but they would come one heck of a lot closer than to the absent guidelines and the conflicting polemics which now governs an unresolvable debate. For example, a ethical board would not necessarily agree on conception as the moment of human life, but they might agree on implantation or differentiation as that moment-- in other words, much earlier than extra-utero viability.
Nor, naturally, would it have meant, or does it mean, that religious members would not be religiously bound by their own religious teachings. It’s not too late to have an influence over the direction of a nation – by suggesting secular boards. It’s just too late to “have it your way,” and one-note advocates are spinning a lot of wheels to continue to deceive yourselves in that direction. Secular voices will continue to dominate sectarian voices in the making of laws and in court decisions. You need to go beyond sectarianism and the lost hope that in the 21st century we’ll suddenly become a ‘religious nation’ if you want to start making a difference in the moral direction of a country.
