Cloudy
My mood has been murky today as I turn this article and its reaction in the Catholic blogosphere over in my mind. I am a political moderate but a registered Democrat as of this past spring, for the sake of voting in the 2008 presidential primary. Pro-life Democrats are rare now, and not particularly vocal.
I think sometimes that the faith isn’t particularly compatible with democracy, and the nature of our political system. I prefer when government stays out of my life, and I say that as a government employee.
The horse has, unfortunately, left the barn, and I don’t think that banning abortion wholesale would have much of an effect other than pushing women to illegal clinics. I oppose the expansion of available abortion and new government funding for it, but I think that the greater priority, given the current culture and political climate of America, is prayer and working to change the culture.
Yet some people tell me that so much as casting a vote for a Democrat is a grave sin.
A curious comparison
Since August, I’ve worked on Sunday afternoons. I really like this job and value the experience, but it keeps me from attending my favored masses at 11:00 or 12:00 (different parishes and different cities.) Now that it’s summer, my job is over, so I’m enjoying my last day of getting paid to sit and read the Sunday New York Times.
Poking through the Times today, I noticed articles in two different sections of the paper that fit together beautifully, even if the editors might not admit that they did.
First, “Modern Love: My First Lesson in Motherhood” tells the story of a couple who adopted a baby girl in China, discovered some potentially serious health problems, and were offered the opportunity to, to put it crudely, exchange her for a healthier baby. In the end, they made the decision to keep her, and further tests back in the US showed that her health problems were not as serious as they had initially feared. The author concludes:
It’s tempting to think that our decision was validated by the fact that everything turned out O.K. But for me that’s not the point. Our decision was right because she was our daughter and we loved her. We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.
“Genetic Testing + Abortion = ??” is the same issue in different words. It discusses the problems when two core liberal values–reproductive choice and acceptance of diversity–clash in one genetic test. The only difference is that before making the decision whether a disabled fetus has a right to live, the prospective parents do not have a chance to see its face, hear it laugh, or cuddle it. Instead of denying a child a chance to live in the United States or with their particular family, children with “unfavorable” genetic profiles will likely be denied the opportunity to live at all.
Abortion rights supporters — who believe that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body — have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable. And many are finding that, while they support a woman’s right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don’t want to have a particular baby.
Even before my return to Catholicism, abortion made me uneasy, since I hated the idea that the fate of a healthy child hinged on whether or not it was wanted. Two more or less identical fetuses would be a much-wanted “baby” to one woman, and an inconvenient parasite to another. It creates so many ethical lines that are hard to draw. When one supports abortion, what’s the difference, if any, between an unwanted healthy child and a wanted child with an unwanted serious disability? How about gender selection? What happens when people who can’t afford genetic testing have proportionately more children who require expensive health care?
If I had definitive answers to these questions, I’d be in a very different line of work.
