Abortion: More Than a Moral Issue

"And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them." _Jesus in Luke 11.

The more I think about it the more frustrated I get with politics. There is all this discussion about what the next candidate will do and should do, there is all sorts of discussion about so-called "moral issues," the most controversial of which is abortion. There is this assumption that if you want to legislate against abortion then you must be morally against it and if you don't want to legislate against abortion then you must be morally okay with it. This assumption has arisen all over the place in political conversations.

We are more concerned with asking "what" than with asking "why." We ask what's happening and we treat it with legislation. For example, some have made plans to build a wall along the Mexican-U.S. border. They asked "what"... and the answer was that imigrants are entering the country illegally and so they build a wall, they legislate, they create a law without lifting a finger to help. They don't actually treat the real issue because they never go beyond the "what," they never asked "why." If you were to ask why then you'd be more responsible for the problem. If you ask why you'd see that the problemes are systemic, people are coming here because of huge economic problems to which the United States are unfortunately linked. If you were to ask why then we would see that the real solution is way too much work, it'd just be easier to build a wall. In the end it's easier to care more about the preservation of borders than it is to care about people. Since the Church is not in the buisiness of protecting borders, we are in the business of loving people, we have a difficult task at hand and we should be the last people getting excited about building a wall.

Believe it or not but the wall along the border is a good example of what's going on with abortion. We ask "what"... and the answer is that women are aborting their preganancies left and right, lives are being taken, life is being denied and so we build a wall, we legislate, we create a law without lifting a finger to help. We don't actually treat the real issue because we never go beyond the "what," we never ask "why." If you were to ask why then you'd be more responsible for the problem. If you ask why then you'd see that the problemes are systemic, women are often forced into this decision, they don't have the money to raise a child, they don't have the means, they need to finish college in a culture that presssures them to succeed and make money at any cost, they were raped and their scars go deeper than their wombs. If you were to ask why then we would see that the real solution is way too much work, there is way too much pain that we don't want to deal with, we might actually have to help women all the way up to the delivery room, it'd just be easier to legislate and feel moral. In the end it's easier to care more about the preservation of morality than it is to care about people. Since the Church is less in the buisiness of protecting morality and more in the business of loving people, we have a difficult task at hand and we should be the last people getting excited about simple legislation.

We feel more moral if we create more laws but we have seen that more laws don't actually solve the problems. the issue of abortion is a symptom of greater economic and cultural issues. We can't simply legislate and then walk away. We must have more compassion than that. There is no compassion in laws that are not truly about solutions. Jesus cared more about people than he did about laws. Jesus realized that laws exist for people not people for laws (see Mark 2:27).

So don't assume that someone who is "pro-choice" politically is not "pro-life" morally. In fact, you may be surprised to find that they might even care about ending abortions just as much as you do.

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