The pro-life movement’s fruitless seduction by the Republican Party has resulted in cognitive bias to prevent a feeling of guilt about not caring about other issues. The Republican Party is backed by industries whose profit is tied into NOT addressing climate change. These same industries have spent enormous sums of money politicizing the basic science of climatology, with many of the memes generated by the industry’s PR firms and lobbyists reiterated in this thread. This politicization of science has played on the normal (fallen) human tendency toward confirmation bias by providing a pseudoscience narrative to single-issue pro-life voters to justify their voting against protection of the environment.
By painting a picture of government as a nigh-socialist secularist behemoth set on destroying free enterprise and promoting abortion, the single-issue pro-life voter has set aside the need to consider the devastation that issues like climate change can pose to the poor (e.g., the residents of the Irawaddy Delta in South Asia). All without the need to actually consider science. Instead, the narrative rules – government by Democrats is evil and brings on the Antichrist. The single-issue voter tells himself that only by electing pro-life legislators and presidents (who will appoint pro-life judges) will the holocaust of abortion be ended and the world be saved from the secularist nanny state set on establishing forced abortion as the next major way to save the planet from the scourge of population growth. That is, of course, unless the Second Coming comes along to destroy the Abomination of Desolation that is the secularist, environmentalist, feminist, liberal state in which we now live (Obamacare is really the Mark of the Beast, if you believe the internet!).
And it’s not just the environment. The ostensibly pro-life political gang (laughably) quoted Just War Doctrine in 2004 to justify the Iraq War, while insisting that abortion was a “non-negotiable” issue to consider in the election. Pro-life organizations warn about allowing poor women to have more money, because they might be able to afford abortions.
Yet when it comes down to it, most abortions will take place whether or not it’s legal. A greater percentage of pregnancies end in abortion in Latin America, where it’s generally illegal, than in the U.S., where it’s generally legal. Peer-reviewed estimates of abortion rates before Roe v. Wade are imprecise, so that on a per capita basis, the abortion rate from 1965 could be equal to today’s. And today, you can buy the abortifacient Cytotec on the black market, here in the U.S., or anywhere in the world. All of these stand as stark evidence that abortion’s legal status only dictates how it happens, not whether it does.
Unless we as a culture learn to value children as more than just commodities or props to our demographic future, we’ll never eliminate abortion. The rate of pediatric homicide by parents fell significantly after Roe v. Wade. Today, children born to mothers who report that the pregnancies that bore them were unintended receive less financial and emotional support from their parents. That’s a cultural sickness that originated at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and will continue unless we Catholics take up the tough job of evangelization, which can never be married to partisan politics. It’s that same culture that causes climate change! Commodification of everything, low cost everything, erosion of all ties other than monetary ties.
