Diogenes has made an important point about unnecessary concessions to anti-life rhetoric:
Archbishop Edwin O'Brien of Baltimore, in a column for his archdiocesan paper the Catholic Review, laments the public image of the pro-life movement:
"How unfortunate it is that the pro-life movement comes across to some as angry, reproachful or excessively judgmental."
"Comes across to some..." Who are these "some" people who see pro-lifers in such a negative light? Why of course it's their political foes, the champions of unrestricted abortion on demand.
See:
An unconscious plug for the other side. Diogenes continues:
Yes, it's unfortunate that the pro-abortion side, amply represented in the mass media, controls the terms of public debate, and distorts the public perceptions of pro-life work. That doesn't mean the archbishop should reinforce their rhetoric.
This is an easy mistake to make when public figures try to appear reasonable and show "both sides" of a debate. Experienced pro-lifers can help speakers avoid this mistake.
2 comments:
The biggest concession the "pro-lifers" ever made was to choose such a wishy-washy, not to say weasly label for themselves. Trying to amalgamate abortion and euthanasia was never going to work, and probably the biggest mistake was John Paul II's trying to hitch his own personal mission to abolish the death penalty to the back of the wagon, wrecking the enterprise's moral suspension in the process and effectively bringing the whole movement juddering to a halt. In fact rather than concentrate on the Real World, where there are real mothers and real babies who need to be loved and looked after, some of the cause's adherents have preferred to retreat into pointlessly circular arguments about the value of human life. Others of us meanwhile have been trying to win an intellectual argument (in favour of the Golden Rule rather than utilitarian ethics) even though the Pope of Rome himself effectively abandoned such principles in the 1960s. Senator Hussein has said that his first act as President will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Will the legalisation of infanticide by the President of the world's only superpower prove to be a wake-up call? Or will campaigners continue to mumble empty abstractions about "life"?
I wouldn't have said the movement has come "juddering to a halt". Of course the struggle continues, with valiant work from thousands of volunteers and the prayers of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people throughout the world.
I would say though that the arguments against abortion, euthanasia and especially the death penalty are all quite different and should not be confused. It's this lack of intellectual clarity, which is itself born of an overly intellectual approach to the issues, that has really hamstrung the "pro-life" movement.
At the end of the day, modern politics is very much about language and slogans. My diagnosis is that it's here that our big problem lies. Real politics is not nice. It's coarse and crude and it's hard work. Just take a look at the people who managed, after a long, hard and horrifically bitter campaign, to get a "ban" on hunting with hounds. Their big battle, which they won, was to re-brand hunting as "blood sports". After that, it was only a matter of time. Pace the polite bishop that Father mentions in his post, what the "pro-life" movement needs is a linguistic coup of that sort of magnitude before it can even start to make real progress.
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