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His Eminence writes:

Cardinal McElroy goes on...

McElroy next turns to revealing, more startingly than any of his critics have, the disastrous end to which his path or reasoning leads.

Hoo boy. Where to begin? 

First of all, is His Eminence genuinely unaware of the categories of sufficient knowledge and full free consent of the will alongside grave matter in determining sin? If a party to the marital act is unaware, for example, that his partner has used chemical contraception, then he isn't culpable of engaging in a contraceptive act, even though on an objective level that is what has occurred.

Leaving that side, far more striking here are the sequels. This is where the Cardinal does all his opponents' work for them, in illustrating how disastrous his moral theology is in its logical conclusions.

It is only just and fair to credit his consistency here. For one reasoning as he apparently does, I suppose it is impossible to condemn wife beating, wage defraudment, racism, or the abandonment of one's children in any objective way. After all, those folks, too, might have all manner of "complex circumstances" making it, I guess, really understandable why they might slap their wives around from time to time. And maybe they are fully convinced in conscience that it's good and wholesome to do so. We certainly wouldn't want to bar them from Communion for such deeds, would we?! After all, it is to their consciences that they are ultimately answerable, not to some outside standard imposed by the Church as to the objective evil of wife beating. 

Of course, a pastor better formed in his intellect, receiving a client in the confessional before Mass who says he routinely beats his wife and isn't sorry for it, and that will probably give her a couple good smacks on the way home from Church for good measure, will send him sternly away without absolution, and also with a remonstrance to keep his ass in the pew at Communion time until he sees his way—in conscience—to repenting of his sins. ​

Finally, the Cardinal concludes by giving a beautiful articulation of the need to repent from one's sins... and then rendering it meaningless:

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Concretely, in the first case, I don't know the circumstances of the woman's grandmother. Maybe she herself was in some sort of abusive relationship and had limited options. These sorts of things we cannot know from the narrative presented. What is clear from that narrative is that the woman's son violated her granddaughter, and then not only was that son sheltered from prosecution but the grandmother also facilitated the "cleaning up" of his crime. Abortion providers participate in this sort of thing more often than we think, judging by the amount of testimony floating around out there. All of the shouting about women being "forced to carry their rapist's child" misses the fact that it is not infrequently the rapist himself who will force the woman to get an abortion in order to cover up his abuse. And all the lobbying Planned Parenthood and others did over the years to try to get rid of parental notification or consent for abortion was a mechanism that made this kind of thing easier for rapists to get away with.

Moving to the second tweet, we see another consequence of this shifting of the moral burden and blame of the crime to its victims rather than its perpetrators. If you look closely at the profile image of the person who posted the second tweet, it says, "I was a walking crime scene." We can set aside for the moment the ethics and morality of abortion itself entirely for a moment, and consider one jarring fact. A movement that is supposed to be, or claims to be, about empowerment and the dignity of women has left this woman feeling that it would have been better if she were never born, and that she is "a walking crime scene." Just let that settle in for a moment.

Again, my heart aches for these two women, really and genuinely. They have been victims of horrible crimes, and more than one in both cases. The child conceived in rape is a victim, even one who manages to be born, because the trauma of the way in which he or she came into being does transfer its weight to him or her inevitably. But no more than we should ever think it right or loving to say to the first victim that it were better if she'd been killed, we should never allow that to be the message that these secondary victims hear. And yet, it is. Loud and clear.

That is why I must also call to mind all those who have been hearing these things shouted by pro-abortion (I'm glad they agree now that we can call them this) activists for decades, but in particular over the past sever weeks and even more loudly on just the last 24 hours. Men and women and children conceived in rape, or born with a disability or deformity, or who for any other reason are only here because they were saved by the laws pro-life advocates fought so hard to establish, have had to face this message everywhere they turn from those supposed ambassdors for "dignity and empowerment" marching around City Halls all over the country this morning: you're a burden, you're a mistake, you're unwanted, you're unloved… you're better off dead. I don't think one need look much further than that to see on what side of this debate true compassion and love lie.

Criminals should be punished. Their victims should be met with all the compassion and practical support we as a society can muster. But we should never, out of mistaken compassion, compound the injury of a crime by visiting more outrages upon the victims and the innocents who are caught up in it. 

No person is a "walking crime scene." No person should be made to feel that it would be better if he or she were never born. And when any movement does make them feel this way, I think we should take a harder look at whether that movement is really all it claims to be.

Today (by the Roman Martyrology)* is the Feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist.

It has also been named as another opinions release day by the Supreme Court this week.

I see a lot of people who seem convinced that today is the day we'll see Dobbs handed down. The question is whence these speculations arise? On the one hand, it could simply be guessing, in which case the person is, after all, playing fairly decent odds. For each opinion day that arrives with Dobbs not having been released, the odds of its release upon that day become statistically more likely. Poor at math as am I, yet even I can figure those numbers. On the other hand, some of the folks I see speculating might have even better reasons, because they are, some of them, a certain sort of people. That is, people who might know someone who knows someone who knows a clerk with whom yet another someone dined last night, and who at one point in the meal looked up over his glass of wine, raised his eyebrows, and heavily cleared his throat and either said no more or, more riskily, mentioned something vague about parking on the Hill. I mean, that sort of thing and this sort of person each have their precedents.

Then again, just because no release days have yet been scheduled for next week doesn't mean they can't be added ad hoc. That, too, has precedent. So all we can really do is wait and watch and see what we will see.

But I had mentioned Saint John the Baptist...

See, there are other characters to this story, beyond the judges and the clerks and the lawyers and the pundits and the activists and the prayer warriors and the protesters. There are the tens of millions lost to the travesty of abortion, voices never heard in this world but which I am convinced are heard before the One who sits upon his throne on high. There are others with them, myriads of myriads uncounted; there are the angels of these little ones, but also so many brothers and sisters who maybe like them never even began the running of the course of earthly life, or who ran it to varying lengths but ran it well. There is, singular and shining amongst all these, that peerless and wonderful Woman, the pinacle of creation, from whose womb we all have life abundant, because she bore Him who saves us. And very close to her in radiance and splendor, there he stands, St. John the Precursor, the Forerunner, the voice that one cried out in the wilderness but continues to cry out in every spiritual wilderness today, the same messages: repent, make straight the way of the Lord, and behold the Lamb of God.

I think this John, greatest of the prophets, has a special connection with all those little ones lost to abortion, and this connection is underscored by today's Feast. The Church only commemorates three Nativities among all the Saints. And ancient tradition holds that the reason for this is that there are three alone who have been born into this world already sanctified and washed clean of the stain of Original Sin: Christ Himself, whom no stain of sin could ever touch; Mary, who was preserved from the moment of her conception from this fate; and John, who at the moment of his closeness to the Mother of God and in hearing her word, was granted the gift of the Holy Spirit, and leapt in praise within Elizabeth's womb just as David danced before the Ark. His witnessing to the Messiah began even before birth; and in that same act he also became a witness to a truth our age has tried to ignore, that the babe unborn is a child known and loved already by God. John also bears this closeness to those brothers and sisters whose lives never even saw the light of this world: he was at once the greatest, and yet lesser than the least. His whole life and mission and purpose was untimely and yet, in God's providential plan, just for the right time. Like Moses before him, he died before seeing the fulfillment of what God had called him to do; just like all those children who never got to experience all that they might have in this life, and yet who we can firmly hope have been given recompense in the greater life to come.

So, it would indeed be fitting, in a cosmic and kaorotic way, if today be the day that all those prayers are answered, those prayers which those little ones have been offering unceasingly along with our more meager ones here below.

But, then again, and by the same token, maybe not. That is to say, God's ways are not our ways, and we can always afford to be reminded of this. And there would be an equal fittingness to God allowing us to wait just a little while longer, and be tested to hope and pray. John once again provides the model. He ended up in prison. Some Fathers of the Church maintained that when he sent his disciples to Jesus to ask whether he was the one foretold, it was for the benefit of those disciples and not John himself. But others have speculated, and I find myself in sympathy with this view, that maybe it was just as much for his own sake that John proffered the question. He'd spent his whole life laboring to prepare the moment. He'd seen and acknowledged Jesus. But it would only have been natural for him to have imagined and hoped for a different end for himself. Here he was, who had been called from the beginning, who had labored so hard and lived a life of such hard asceticism and witness, sparring with the Scribes and Pharisees and even the King, rotting in a jail cell, while the Messiah about whom he knew more than anyone else alive save one was out there hanging about with a bunch of ignorant fisherman and tax collectors and worse types yet. He, greatest born of woman, and yet now reduced to less than the least.

In his prayers from that cell, I can well imagine which particular psalms and lamentations he may have recalled most frequently, asking God essentially, "Seriously? What gives? How long, O Lord... how much longer?" I don't have trouble imagining that he sought consolation for himself in that moment, as well as for his disciples whom he surely loved; that he wanted a word from the Lord to remind him along with them, even though he could little understand the reason of it all, what Graham Greene called "the terrible strangeness of the mercy of God." He might even have struggled with a sort of jealousy of that beloved disciple of Jesus who maybe shared his name, that would be able to lie his head on our Lord's breast, while his own head was destined for a plate at the whim of a bratty child. And yet maybe, in God’s Providential plan, it was partly for this: that he would have that special closeness with those others whose earthly destiny seems so hard to fathom, who were cut short before taking a single breath, who might well ask God, “Why? How could this be even allowed in your will? How was I brought into being for this?”

Anyhow, whatever comes of today, there is every good reason to draw close to Saint John the Baptist and pray with him and in the spirit that motivated him: hope and anticipation, sorrow and lamentation, gazing toward Christ who alone can make sense of it all.

Mighty Forerunner, Voice of the Wilderness, Foil to the Wise and Mighty, Greatest and yet Least: Pray for us!

​Under this, I was tagged, with the simple statment, 

So, let's take a closer look, shall we?

​Before getting into it, I will say up front that I'm prepared to accept the underlying premise about the rate of miscarriage. I have actually heard higher figures in some places. Let us pass over that without argument.

Turning then to the controversial stuff, we need to distinguish that there are technically two different claims. The original is about something that will be happening, whereas the comment claims that it is happening. I am goign to focus primarily on the second claim, not only as the more immediate, but also because I think my answer there will suffice in addressing the primary one.

Now, if there really is evidence that this sort of thing is going on with frequency and in a marked number of cases, I can think of some people who would love to see the data. I, for one, for my own reasons, which I'll get to. But there are others, for their own reasons, who would probably pay good money for this information. I'm thinking, of course, of the very well funded pro-abortion lobby, groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL. These groups have hosts of legal advisors, researchers, interns, as well as very good relationships with Congress critters and their staffers, as well as reporters and media types. Needless to say, this is the kind of data about which they'd be able to make great use in arguing in favor of the legal status quo under Roe and Casey. They'd be wrong—again, something I'll get to—but they'd definitely not let something sensational like this go to waste.

But, see, the odd thing is, I follow those groups and their talking points pretty closely. And though I can't claim that I read every single amicus brief on the pro-choice side in the Dobbs case, I reviewed a good number of them. The thing is that this simply isn't one of their talking points or arguments—or, if it is, it is so low down in the pecking order, possibly because it is based on so rare a frequency of incidence, that it hasn't achieved any real saturation in the discourse around the issue of abortion.

So, that leaves me wondering, is this really the remarkable threat it is supposed to be? Or is this a bit of rhetorical hyperbole, some Margaret Atwood fan fiction intended to gin up fear and worry without a great foundation in fact? I make no bones about saying I think Planned Parenthood, NARAL and others who support broad, lax abortion allowances are wicked and mendacious. But I've never claimed that they're simply stupid. And missing a convenient talking point like this would be stupid. Even if it had a pretty thin basis in fact, given their willingness to lie, I'd imagine they'd run with it. But they don't. That, to me, is somewhat telling.

However, in the interest of fairness, I could conjecture an alternative reason why they might simply forgo use of such an argument even if it were available to them. It would be, perhaps, an outsized cost to them in view of the potential gain. Because talking about spontaneous abortion or miscarriage runs the risk of reminding people of what we're really talking about in this debate, namely unborn human life. After all, women don't tearfully call up friends and family to ask for sympathy and support for their loss of a clump of cells. No, they say they've lost their baby; and it is a tragedy, worthy of sympathy. And that's a hard thing to allow into a conversation when your aim is to show why women should be allowed to hire a doctor to kill a baby at the same age under different circumstances.

So, let's allow at least for the sake of argument that this actually is something that is happening, and liable to happen more often—anyway, proving a negative is always hard. I said above that I would be interested to know about this happening for my own reasons, and that what Planned Parenthood and their ilk might do with data showing this to be happening would still be wrong. So, we can proceed onto that discussion regardless, and make the full allowance of the benefit of doubt. We needn't even quibble over frequency, either, though it is worth noting that I'd doubt very much whether the number of women being legally compelled to justify their spontaneous miscarriages even begins to approach the number of elective abortions done each day. For parity, we'd need to reach the full dire situation of the original claim above, and all 10-20% result in this, since it seems according to the CDC that somewhere between 10-20% of pregnancies are terminated in legal induced abortions. But all this is a digression; as I said, we don't need to quibble over frequency. Let's just suppose the truth of what has been presented, and go from there.

The simple and obvious answer here is: "That's bad, let's try to stop that from happening, either now or in the future." This is why I'd be interested to see some data, because data can help in figuring out how to more finely tune and hone laws to target more precisely the negative outcomes they seek to inhibit. Now, of course, we need to allow that the law is always an imperfect instrument, and a blunt one. But we don't often just throw away good laws based on their minor imperfections. (If you want to geek out on this a bit, check out Thomas Aquinas on the mutability of human law in ST Ia-IIae, Q. 97 passim.)

Consider, for example, gun control legislation. It may be the case that, in a place with more strict gun restrictions and higher goals of enforcement for police that it will happen more frequently that a law-abiding citizen, legally within his rights to carry a weapon, will be subjected to vexatious detainment and questioning to establish his right to possess his firearm, and indeed that this burden will fall disproportionately upon members of minority populations. But I don't think the supporters of the gun control laws would say that, therefore, the laws need to be thrown out. We may need to work to reform them and refine them, of course. But they'd probably argue that the benefit outweighs the cost, because the goal is to save lives by getting illegal firearms out of their communities. How many lives should be left unsaved by throwing out the imperfect statute?

Before anyone throws a fit, I realize the above analogy is of far lesser weight than the instant considerations. But that's true on both sides of the question: that of the privacy and emotional burden concerns on the one hand, and of the cost to human life and innocence on the other. But where the analogy works is at the level of principles and fundamentals. Imperfect implementation and inadequate refinement are not just cause for the wholesale dismantling of a fundamentally just legal dispensation. Where failures in a system propagate, the reasonable thing to do is look for reasons amongst the data as to what risk factors and commonalities cause these failures and plug in fixes, in the same way that it is more reasonable more often to patch imperfect masonry rather than knock down the whole edifice and rebuild it anew from scratch. That’s the kind of legal process I’m willing to work with anyone of good will in order to achieve.

I repeat: any system is going to be imperfect. But, well, while we're on that observation, let's get something else clear: it would be gross understatement indeed to say, for instance, that the status quo of Roe and Casey has its own glaring imperfections. I mean, even leaving aside the mountain of dead children this legal establishment has left in its wake, what about all of the cases of pimps or abusers or other malefactors who coerce women to have abortions against their will? If the logic above followed, wouldn’t people have been calling for the overturn of Roe and Casey based on these exceptional cases as well? Yet, they haven’t; and here is where I’ll actually extend something of an olive branch and say that they wouldn’t have necessarily been wrong on that score. Because a law may be fundamentally sound even when it allows for exceptional aberrations and gross injustices.

The question needs, then, always to go to the fundamentals of the thing. And it is on that ground of fundamental justice and the basic principles of the dignity and inviolability of human life that Roe and Casey went astray, and why therefore they need to go. Exceptions and lacunae under the new established legal order will exist, unfortunately. I, for one, would like to be able to spend my energy fixing those problems and filling in the gaps. But whether I will be able to do so or not will be more a question of whether I’m allowed to do so, however. For I fear that instead I’ll still need to be spending my breath arguing against people calling for the wholesale allowance of the murder of innocent children. Which makes me think that maybe those people against whom I’ll need to argue aren’t as concerned about those exceptional injustices as they might pretend to be.

You see, another thing that gets talked about a lot in debates about abortion is the need to fight the root causes of abortion rather than the thing itself.

Now, I've already pointed out elsewhere how I think this is fallacious and why: how the logic there falls apart when you realize that birth is kind of an irrelevant and arbitrary benchmark for such a debate. If those arguments advance anywhere, they advance too far. They set a bar of justice that, if we were consistent and really followed the logic to its terminus, ought to apply in cases outside the womb as well as inside. (This arbitrary line drawing, incidentally, is one of the elements that ultimately should, for reasonable arbiters, doom both Roe and Casey as very bad and illogical pieces of jurisprudence. Because if the grounds for the supposed right are really granted as true, while on the other hand the denial of a legitimate overriding countervailing interest is made so strongly, then turning around an imposing standards like viability or an undue burden test is too obviously arbitrary and capricious. The Court tried to have it all its own way, have its cake and eat it too, but it doesn't work. It's like if a museum docent, after giving a 20 minute talk on why such and such manuscript is so unique and precious and important, were to fold the thing into a paper airplane and throw it across the room to show how nicely the material it is made of can fly. The conclusion undermines the premises.)

But I've digressed. I was saying, I'm hearing a lot about how we need to focus more on the underlying and root causes of abortion, and more specifically how a lot of these causes lie at the feet of one political party as its fault and responsibility. But then I'm seeing something else alongside this. I'm seeing people talking about how, if this decision comes down, they will need to move to another State. Whole companies are suggesting they may do so.

But what's odd about all that, to me, is the where and wherefore of it all. People, and companies, aren't planning on moving to another State because the newly chosen State has better maternal healthcare, or better schools, or more robust social programs for single parents. They're planning to move because, well, abortion. And there's something else besides. The States to which they seem to be planning to move are States that presumably are going to be keeping abortion allowances in place, and yet they're the very same States that supposedly ought to be where abortion is least necessary. They are many of the States that even now, under the current disposition of the law, have the highest abortion rates—rates, mind you, not raw numbers, but ratios. States like New York, California, Maryland, for example. True, some of the States on the list of highest abortion rates are those that have had Republican control for a while, like Florida. But a higher percentage of the States with the top ten highest abortion rates in the country are those that have been controlled by Democrats.

Now, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But I'm making this observation because I find it curious. See, we should expect, given the arguments put forth about who has the better solutions for fixing the underlying causes of abortion, that Florida would be on that list. But we shouldn't expect, if the hypothesis had predictive power, those other States to be there, i.e. California, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware—or, well, we may as well mention the District of Columbia, which is atop the list. It is, as I say, curious. The logic of the arguments I've seen runs thus: since I care about abortion, and want to see it reduced, I should stop all this lollygagging with trying to ban abortion and supporting policies that limit it, and instead fight for those politicians who want a more permissive abortion regime but support the sorts of policies that make abortion less necessary and common in spite of this. The logic has never fully made sense to me, even in the abstract. But it is even less compelling in the concrete, when I look at the actual track record and numbers of those States that simultaneously uphold the most permissive abortion regimes alongside the most robust social safety nets and services. I am not surprised to see that they have higher abortion rates in actual fact; I am not surprised that I am not surprised. What does surprise me is that those who advance this argument are not surprised, and that they continue to harry me with that argument.

Finally, though, anticipating some pushback, I want to make something perfectly clear, which should be clear enough already but nonetheless bears emphasizing. None of what I have said here can in fairness be construed, and therefore should not be construed, as an argument one way or another about the merits of social safety nets or social welfare programs. My observations here do not approach that issue. Indeed, I'll allow for the sake of argument that if those States on that list had fewer such programs, then their rates of abortions would be even higher. It's at least plausible. The observed evidence doesn't speak to that, one way or the other.

​That would, I dare say, be an interesting discussion; but it would be a separate discussion. What I’m interested in discussing at present, though, is this: that, if I take them at their word, a lot of people seem to be anticipating needing to move to a different State not because of all the benefits that State has for making the bearing of a child more feasible, but because that State will maintain as feasible the recourse of terminating the bearing of a child; and that they therefore anticipate potential making use of that recourse, regardless of how many programs that State has that, some people insist, are the key to making that recourse unnecessary.

​I saw this rather tiresome meme quoting Sister Joan Chittister. The quotation reads, "I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth."

Now, I have just about had it with this very common and very fallacious argument, and so I'm going to respond at length, and hopefully show why it is not only a tedious distraction, but also employs question-begging logic with regard to what "birth" means (or doesn't mean) in this whole discussion...

First of all, let's respond to the thing at face value, and consider the frankly stunning phrase, "all you want is a child born," and simply pause there. Because before we move on to the pathos-laden sequel, we need really to consider what's entailed in this first statement. "All you want is a child born,"—as opposed to what? "Not born," certainly, is the implied opposite. That is to say, a child dead—murdered, in fact. See, normally when dealing with questions of morality and ethics, it is quite natural and intuitive to tackle the large fundamental questions first and then proceed on to the fineries and perhaps more precious, nuanced points. We need to bear this in mind as the crux and lynchpin of the argument. Now, then, we can proceed on and consider the counterarguments in context.

I'll do so by way of metaphorical examples. If, for instance, you were to travel to, say, Pakistan or Afghanistan, and met someone picketing with a placard protesting against women being beaten or killed by their husbands with impunity, a good first instinct would be to say, "Right on, friend." It would, on the other hand, be somewhat strange and frankly perverse, to march up to that other person and launch into a tirade of whataboutism, e.g., "Well, what about women's education? What about women being allowed to drive? Or to vote? Or [so on and so forth]? You're not really pro-woman, you're just against women being beaten and murdered!" Or, say, it were the antebellum United States, and you were to accost an Abolitionist about what his or her plans were to ensure freed slaves equal opportunities of housing, employment, and education, or to demand as a prerequisite to the Emancipation Proclamation first a full and sweeping establishment of equal civil rights writ large. That Abolitionist likely wouldn't see you as an ally. He or she might even suspect that you were pro-slavery. At the very least, he or she would see you as missing the more urgent and pressing point in the matter. You would be, as the phrase goes, "majoring in the minors," and dismissed as an obstructionist nuisance.

Note, please, that both of my hypotheticals here are not even very strong as metaphors, though, but also why. Because in both of the above cases, the nuisance arguments don't necessarily imply their opposites, that women should go on being beaten and murdered in the one case, or that people should go on being enslaved in the other. One could imagine, rather, both of these arguments being made in good faith, albeit misguidedly. But in the antecedent to which the metaphors apply, this is not the case. Here, the upshot really is the stark opposite. The "therefore" that follows the counter-examples in the primary argument is: "Because of all these other considerations, *therefore* we must uphold a robust legal right for a child to be murdered before it is born." And here we can divert to considering the extension of this logic. Because I don't see how birth is a necessarily relevant fact in the matter at all. The argument, after all, is predicated upon the conditions facing born children, i.e. that some of them lack feeding, lack education, lack housing. These are granted in the premises to be things that *born* children suffer. So, why does it not follow that, if we cannot solve this for a three-year-old that is already born, then the same brutal consequence of our failure holds? If society won't help a mother feed, educate, or house her three-year-old daughter, then why shouldn't we make it legal for the mother to drown that child in her wading pool? If legal abortion really is the necessary relief to these issues, then abortion is obviously insufficient on its own, because so many would-be needy kids slip through the cracks of that laudatory solution and manage to be born in spite of society's incapacities. So we need to extend legal child murder beyond the womb to cover all the cases where pro-birthers have failed to be "truly pro-life," and allow that all unfed, unschooled, homeless kids be allowed to be killed. Limiting this merciful relief only to that class of kids that are not yet born seems prejudicial and cruel. It's quite unfair to the born kids not to allow them to benefit from this act of charity, too.

Before we get over excited with our final solution, however, we should stop and interrogate the premises to see if they even hold. If we look more deeply at the thing, we actually find that—alas for the program of merciful child killing—pro-lifers are not actually the abysmal failures they're supposed to be. The last time I myself had an opportunity to consort in-person with a bunch of these pro-birthers, for instance, the program for the day belied the stereotype that Sister deploys. We did gather first to pray and witness outside an abortion clinic. Many of those in attendance were families, some of whom had adopted kids who were rescued from the fate of abortion, including some special needs kids. These kids, lucky to have been born, had the fortune after being born to be fed, educated, and housed by the very same people who had endeavored to ensure their births. Not only that, but after our prayer vigil the whole lot of us then went out into the City where, while meeting with people and offering to pray with and for them, we also provided homeless people with meals and wellness kits including things like clean socks and dental care products and the like. Now, perhaps Sister has never seen this sort of thing going on, but I personally find this rather remarkable, because in all my years of experience with the pro-life movement, I have found this kind of charitable outreach to be the norm rather than the exception.

Actually, though, there is a line that has been elided from the quotation from Sister Joan that helps to shed light on the matter. Before the concluding remark that, "That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth," Sister had said, in the full statement, "And why would I think that you don't [want the aforementioned things]? Because you don't want any tax money to go there." So, actually, Sister might know that this sort of private charitable activity goes on, but what she's really worried about is government programs sufficiently provided for to do these things. Here, I'm prepared to grant Sister a bit of grace. I think maybe we can come up with more public funding to do the sorts of programs she has in mind. The devil is in the details, however. Speaking personally, for example, I'd propose that one place we should take this public funding from first of all would be from taxpayer funds that subsidize groups that already have an income stream from abortion, like Planned Parenthood. I’d suggest, too, that if we all put our heads together and tried to be a bit clever about it, a careful look at current allocations for the funding of public education might reveal ways to find resources to educate more born children. Perhaps not every kid would be able to have a laptop in the classroom. We’d need to make the tough decision of whether it’s more important for young Johnny to be able to look at TikTok during math class than for younger Johnny to have been pulled apart with forceps and vacuumed out of his mothers womb and thrown into an incinerator, but I think just maybe this is a calculus tha real good-faith actors could reach consensus on if they tried hard enough.
​
At the end of the day, though, as interesting as these later considerations are, we need to get back to the fundamental and most basic facts. Even if we granted that Sister’s criticism were true and that those who are ‘pro-birth’ aren’t *really* pro-life, we need to turn the consideration around and ask about the implicit opposite. Are those who are *anti* birth any *more* pro-life? Haven’t ‘pro-birthers’ at least achieved the first and crucial part of being pro-life, the sine qua non, “if all [they] want is a child born”? It seems to me that they have, because it’s very hard to feed, educate, or house dead kids. And it seems to me that anyone who wants to moralize about the feeding, education, or housing of children loses somewhat his or her credibility if countenancing the killing of children at the outset. There is always more we can do. But, hey, call me crazy: if it simply comes to down to comparing the kids the pro-lifers I know have saved from abortion and gone on to provide for with the kids Sister Joan and her ilk have killed under the full support of the law, I am inclined to think the former set are, on balance, better off.