I’d like to highlight a particular section of the article cited by Kari in an earlier post, about how many pro-life Catholics, by opposing health care reform on the principle of opposition to “socialism,” are actually making it more likely that the final bill will fund abortions. At one point, the article quotes Professor Stephen Schneck, director of the Life Cycle Institute here at CUA:
The American bishops have demonstrated what being pro-life really entails: fulsome and open-handed support for the complex needs of life in all its stages…Would that the rest of the pro-life movement had the moral compass of the Catholic bishops. More than 45 million Americans are without health care and nearly 30 million of those are children. The moral imperative of being pro-life brooks no excuses for avoiding the desperate needs of these least of our brethren. And, yes, it’s high time to call to accounts those so-called pro-life leaders who dodge, who equivocate, who lack courage, or — most tragically — who oppose all policy efforts to address the life needs of these many Americans.
This, really, is the bottom line, much more so than the strategic error that many pro-lifers are making. I do not, obviously, suggest that all pro-life Catholics have an obligation to support the Democrats’ health care plan. However, I think it is wholly legitimate to argue that we do have an obligation to recognize that the American health care system in its current form is dysfunctional, indeed downright evil. After all, to be blunt, we already have “death panels” in the form of insurance companies whose relentless pursuit of profit above care literally kills people every day (many of them cover abortions, too). How we address this problem is truly a matter of prudential judgment on which people can disagree in good faith. However, as a matter of principle, if you are not just as incensed (yes, incensed, outraged, mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore) by these facts and numbers cited by Professor Schneck as you are about the evils of perceived “socialism,” then I don’t think you have the right to call yourself pro-life, and I don’t think you are approaching the argument in good faith. I don’t think a pro-life worldview in a truly Catholic and catholic sense is compatible with the belief that the evils of government trump the evil of cancer patients dying because they cannot afford health care, that allowing families to fall into bankruptcy because of illness is a worthy price to pay for the preservation of the free market. I’m all for banding together to ensure that abortion funding is explicitly excluded from any final health care plan, but I will not stay silent when a principled opposition to abortion is shackled to an anti-government extremism that opposes any meaningful health care reform.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In