I despise Barack Obama for a lot of reasons, but his support for the right to get an abortion is not among them (though I don’t think tax dollars should go to fund abortion or any other medical procedure).
The Town Hall columnist Laura Hollis is upset that Obama will speak at Notre Dame’s graduation ceremony in May. So is Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput.
But, while such critics scream and moan, the one thing they do not do is demonstrate that a fertilized egg (through the fetal stage) is a person. The argument against abortion boils down to the claim that God allegedly declares it a sin.
So I again point to the paper written by Diana Hsieh and me demonstrating that a fertilized egg is not a person, and that personhood begins at birth. (I will not post any comments here that do not seriously grapple with the arguments in that paper.)
Chaput forthrightly declares abortion to be a matter of religious faith. But he does offer a bit of good news, reports the Colorado Independent:
Some Catholics in both political parties are deeply troubled by these issues [ e.g., abortion and stem-cell research]. But too many Catholics just don’t really care. That’s the truth of it. If they cared, our political environment would be different. If 65 million Catholics… really understood their faith, we wouldn’t need to waste each other’s time arguing about whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow “balanced out” or excused by other good social policies.
Surveys back up Chaput’s claim that many Catholics “just don’t really care” about banning abortion on grounds of religious faith. And thank God for that.
I wonder, though, what other “good social policies” Chaput has in mind.