Presidential Election 2024: Consistent Life Perspectives
We offer three different takes on last Tuesday’s elections. As usual, we don’t necessarily endorse everything said in our blog, since we encourage individual writers to express a variety of views. This is especially so when analyzing elections.
Carol Crossed
Peter Sonski is who I early-voted for at the Susan B Anthony House. Sonski is with the American Solidarity Party. Some say I “threw my vote away” and I guess I did.
Susan B. Anthony voted too, illegally in 1872, before the 19th Amendment passed. Because of the Republicans’ opposition to slavery, she voted for “the party of Lincoln.” While to my knowledge the term was not in parlance, she could have been called a “single-issue voter.” She was accused of being too singular in her support for “enslaved persons,” and to that she responded that she was for “human rights” – making the case that slaves were humans, like women were. Some retorted that slave owners were humans too and therefore had rights. Therein was the 19th-century struggle to define rights which continues today.
Carol Crossed
Today again we are asked to evaluate people’s rights. Are all rights equal, and what makes them unequal? The difference is some are civil rights and some are human rights. Susan made it clear that one’s humanity or one’s sex or one’s race fit into the category of a human right. They were not chosen and could not be violated by someone’s choice, whether that choice was to own a slave, to own a woman or to own another human being to misuse for your own purposes. Hence as civilization progressed, slavery, rape, and abortion were considered crimes against humanity, and laws prohibiting them were established or strengthened all within the same 8-10 year period.
Paradoxically, the crime of abortion is morphing into a “right” to the point that the State is called upon to give it legal recognition and make it available through the free services of health-care personnel.
Human rights are therefore not explicitly denied, but rather expanded to cover violent actions against human beings: instead of protecting human persons against violence, here human rights have evolved to include protecting actions against a person’s dignity or against a person’s life.
Its not surprising that the Democratic Party has dropped from its platform opposition to the death penalty. Using violence as a right to solve a problem normalizes despair and elevates irresponsibility to a right.
I couldn’t vote for Trump because I believe he’s a narcissist, an illness that makes a person’s actions unpredictable and wholly dependent upon one’s own self-absorption. I see Trump as dangerous in the short term and Harris as dangerous in the long term. As I see it, there is no “better of two evils” in this election.
Lisa Stiller
As I watched the returns coming in, and as I kept staring at the New York Times website as their election meter stayed in the red zone for much of the evening, a feeling of dread set in. My fears were being realized. A return to the Trump era of enabling hate, emulating fascist and authoritarian leaders, and cutting programs and funding that help our most marginalized people was, for me, unthinkable.
Yes, neither candidate was a consistent life candidate. Both had a lot of flaws. But saving what’s left of our democracy and preserving some sort of decency in our national conversation was also important enough to be a large factor in deciding which of the lesser of two evils should become president.
And Kamala Harris blew it. Instead of her being the candidate that would save us from a descent into a repressive government that will again enable hate and violence, turn its back on the poor, and enact a horrendous immigration policy, she basically ran a campaign centered on abortion. A campaign focused on the right to take life, rather than a campaign focused on those things that give life and help people thrive.
She started her campaign with an abortion tour. “Protect Our Freedoms” was simply a euphemism for abortion echoed by Harris and her supporters throughout her campaign. Democrats saw their attack on the Dobbs decision succeeded in 2022, so they thought they would do it again.
Meanwhile, they neglected to listen to what people were saying: concerns about economy and democracy topped the list. But Harris and her surrogates kept saying how great the economy had become under Biden’s American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan Infrastructure Act. While she loudly sounded the alarm over another Trump presidency, Heather Cox Richardson led the rose-colored glasses parade. But too many people were being seriously negatively impacted by inflation, including soaring rents, health insurance costs, food prices, and utility costs. Harris turned her back on that until too late.
Harris was too busy “preserving our freedoms.” Abortion was front and center of her campaign. She didn’t link abortion to the other issues it’s so closely tied to: lack of resources, fear of not being able to afford a child, lack of emotional and financial support. Abortion for Harris and the Democrats is a freestanding issue: a right, a freedom, an entitlement. The Democrats have held abortion as the cornerstone of their campaign efforts for years, without a thought to the fact it isn’t a choice most women make lightly, without a thought addressing the economic factors that lead to having an abortion.
Lisa Stiller
Most polls had the economy and inflation as the number one concern of Americans. Biden didn’t put our economy on the track they celebrated. Ordinary Americans are struggling with soaring costs — .housing, food, utilities, basic necessities. The Democrats failed to address it head-on. Instead they embraced abortion.
What for me is so sad is that once upon a time, the Democrats did hold up economic well-being and addressing poverty as priority.
Harris actually had some good ideas when she did talk about the economy, too late in her campaign. And a determined purpose to bring about a ceasefire in the Middle East, and stand behind Ukraine and seek peace. And fairly and humanely deal with immigration.
But these weren’t her focus. She didn’t address them much until too late.
A lot of people had moved on from casting their votes as a response to the Dobbs decision. They wanted a better life.
Harris failed us. And we are doomed to 4 years that aren’t very pro-life in so many ways.
Just some ramblings late at night when I was way too upset to sleep.
Rachel MacNair
There are many ideas about why Harris lost this election. I’ll cover what I see through my consistent-life lens.
War
Under Biden-Harris, we now have serious carnage in Ukraine and Gaza. The carnage of war is also in other hotspots now and was during Trump’s first term, but those two major wars were on voters’ minds.
Trump’s rhetoric was more anti-war than Harris’s. This doesn’t mean it was suitable for us peace activists. It was more from the view of military professionals and their families who believe in “peace through strength.” They regard being prepared for war as a way of preventing it through deterrence. That’s not my take on it, but it’s still an antipathy to wars happening.
Early on, Trump’s supporters were disgusted with the war in Iraq. Many of them had fought in it, and felt (rightly) that their political leaders had let them down. It was a failure by elites.
Discussing this, Democrat Pete Buttigieg said this in The New York Times:
Certainly, I think the complicity of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the Iraq war continues to be something that really helped set America onto the political trajectory that we’re on right now . . . The Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq War were still kind of pretending to be OK with it, because they thought they had to be.
The war in Gaza was also explicitly one that distressed many voters who refused to vote for either candidate.
When it comes to actual wars happening now, Harris’s rhetoric was more belligerent. That didn’t get noticed much by the press because these were conventional pro-war thoughts.
This is an interesting take in The Washington Post: The right way for Trump to play peacemaker.
Rachel MacNair
Abortion
At the very least, it’s clear that Harris emphasized abortion more than polls show people indicated an interest in. She could have been talking about topics they were more interested in.
But I think there’s more to it. Her extremism was great enough to attack pregnancy help centers. Her extremism asserted that conscientious objection to participating in abortions shouldn’t be allowed.
There are millions of people who voted for pro-abortion measures who also voted for Trump. That means their commitment to abortion wasn’t total. It’s easy to vote for something when you’re voting anyway, and many of them were taken in by the rhetoric that women suffering miscarriages weren’t getting medical care.
In other words, they were voting against what was presented to them as an extreme that’s more extreme than what’s actually happening. That didn’t mean they supported the other extreme – even though that’s what they voted for. I live in Missouri, so I kept seeing the pitch for our pro-abortion measure: “Missouri’s abortion ban goes too far.” They never delineated how far Amendment 3 went in the other direction.
I think there’s a discomfort with Harris’s rhetoric that so totally ignores and discounts killed babies. Many won’t articulate that to pollsters, and I don’t think they’re articulating that to themselves, either. Therefore, I can’t document this idea, and could rightly be accused of wishful thinking. But I’ll maintain it all the same: I think, poetically speaking, that the ghosts of all those children are haunting the public discourse now, behind the scenes.
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For more of our recent posts on election politics, see:
Summary of Results: Peace & Life Referendums 2024 (for far more detail, see our project website: Peace and Life Referendums)
Oh My, How the Election Conundrum Has Changed (2024) / Rachel MacNair
Abortion on the Ballot / Lisa Stiller
Slavery: Removing the Exception
What History Shows: The Consistent Life Ethic Works for Pro-life Referendums
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
Summary of Results: Peace & Life Referendums 2024
compiled by Rachel MacNair
For details on the referendums and explanations of why consistent-lifers have an interest in them, see:
Peace and Life Referendums
Good News
West Virginia passed a state constitutional amendment to protect patients from assisted suicide. However, it was a squeaker — 50.4%.
Joining the trend for states with state constitutions that abolish slavery – to remove the exception for those convicted of a crime: Nevada.
Minimum wage increases and paid sick leave together passed in Alaska and Missouri. Paid sick leave alone passed in Nebraska.
Updating official language to be less dehumanizing passed by huge margins in Nevada and North Dakota. We’re concerned about this because practices of dehumanizing can be lethal, and even when they’re less than lethal, they can be one of the root causes leading to violence against the targeted population. We’ve put this under “discriminatory practices” on our website. That’s our issue of opposing racism, but also expands to other marginalized groups – women, those with disabilities, etc.
On abortion state constitutional amendments to enshrine it as a “right”:
- It was defeated in Florida, but only because it required 60% for a constitutional change and only got 57%..
- In South Dakota, it was defeated decisively, with 61% voting it down.
- In Nebraska, it was defeated, and the alternative measure that prohibits after the first trimester with the normal caveats (which is current state law) was passed.
Bad News
State constitutional amendments that overturn some form of abortion ban: Arizona and Missouri. For Arizona, it was a decisive defeat. It was much closer in Missouri. Since Missouri only had one abortion facility left at the time Dobbs came down, and since it has the example of neighboring Nebraska with its alternative amendment passing, and since the main pitch of the side for the amendment was “Missouri’s abortion ban goes too far,” without reference to how far that amendment went, it seems likely that Missourians will come up with another ballot measure for 2026.
Amendments that put the “right” to abortion in the constitution, but legal status was already secure in state law: Maryland, Montana, New York, Nevada. And Colorado passed abortion funding.
Arizona passed harsher rules on immigrants, who are often fleeing war or similar horrific violence
California turned down a minimum wage increase, but that was to put it up to $18 per hour, which is far higher than other proposals. Current minimum wage is $16, which is also higher than most of the country.
South Dakota trounced a move to change the language in its state constitution to be gender-neutral rather than masculine when not merely masculine is meant.
Overall Commentary by Our Issues
Euthanasia isn’t often on the ballot, and when it is, it’s usually to allow it where it’s currently not allowed under the euphemisms of “assisted suicide” or “medical aid in dying.” Fortunately, there were none of those on the ballot this year. There was a measure that took the opposite tack, protecting patients from it. This was framing the point well, and in West Virginia it did pass. But only by a small margin.
The death penalty wasn’t on the ballot anywhere this year.
War is rarely on the ballot, to the point that when we put measures under the war category, they can seem more ambiguous. Harsher treatment of immigrants could clearly go under either poverty or racism as well. We put it under war because so many immigrants are refugees are fleeing war, including gang war. But in Arizona, the measure passed.
Poverty is mainly addressed in referendums with minimum wage raises. Also, we’re especially enamored of paid sick leave because of the long-standing link of family and medical leave to a more humane workplace that fosters fewer pressures to abort, as Henry Hyde explained eloquently. These generally do well on the ballot, and all but one (California) passed this year.
Racism, expanded to “Discriminatory Practices” to include additional marginalized groups, included one trend that we’ve had before and will hopefully cover again: finally abolishing all slavery by removing the exception for those convicted of a crime. This passed handily in Nevada this year. Another common trend is to update language for people with disabilities, and that passed handily in Nevada and North Dakota.
As for the biggy, abortion, results are mixed. Though the media is likely to talk about how most of the “reproductive rights” measures passed, we can see that they mainly passed in places where pro-abortion sentiment is strong and their passage will cause no immediate difference whatsoever in the law. For those places with some sort of ban (that is, protection for children) in place, that ban remains in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota. That will by iffy in Florida since a majority did vote for it but not a large enough majority. But results were strong in Nebraska and even stronger in South Dakota.
Human Rights: Making Exceptions “With Cause”
by Ms. Boomer-ang
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, animals take over a farm and paint on a wall “an unalterable law by which all animals” there “must live forever.” This law was a list of commandments, one of which was: “No animal shall kill any other animal.” But eventually the leaders began having other animals executed. And one day, the commandment against killing other animals was noticed to have at its end two extra words, “without cause.”
Likewise, many of those who proclaim commitments to human rights, protections, and respect for everybody for all time, in practice come up with “sufficient causes” to reduce or deny these rights for at least some people at least some time. Some even appear willing to give up some rights in order to wipe out other rights efficiently.
Examples and observations follow:
Torture and Guilt
The US Constitution, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Geneva Convention, and other standards prohibit cruel punishments and torture, require humane conditions for prisoners, and require presumption of innocence until proven guilty. No exceptions.
But early this century, US agencies held alleged terrorists and alleged terrorist enablers in inhumane conditions and tortured them, without a trial.
Some of the torture centers lay in formerly Communist countries , even though during the Cold War, Americans had been told that one bad thing about Communist countries is that they had terrible prisons and tortured people.
The US also rendered people to openly brutal countries for torture.
Some support torture as a way of getting information or a confession. But people undergoing torture often make up false information or confess falsely. These do not bring investigators closer to the truth. And what about the presumption of innocence until proven guilty?
Several American officials claimed that the Geneva Convention did not apply, because the suspects were “enemy combatants.” What about that label is exceptional? In violent fights, all sides are combatants, and all call their adversaries “enemies.”
Could we see it coming? From 1984 to 2000, the US Army ran the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained Latin Americans how to torture people in their own countries. (Though the curriculum did also include some lessons on human rights.) Did some North American mouths water? From Fort Benning to Abu Ghraib, is not the line logical?
Elections
Every country has a right to hold elections without outside interference. But the US and other countries have been trying to influence each other’s elections for over a century.
In 1970, presidential advisor Henry Kissinger claimed, “[We don’t] need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves!”
And what if the election still does not go as powerful outsiders want? For Chile in 1973, it was a violent coup.
Right to Bear Children
The western media has acknowledged forced abortions, infanticide, and other violence during China’s one-child regime. But Singapore, Vietnam, and sometimes India have also imposed family-size limits and declared them sufficient cause for reducing human rights for “excessive” children, mothers who carry them to term, and families who do not disown the mother. Punishments and discrimination include fines, surcharges, dismissal from jobs, and denying children admission to schools. In about 1990, I heard somebody who had lived in Asia report that in Indonesia when government officials call on homes, the family hides their children except the first two.
Meanwhile in the US, when I was in undergraduate college in the mid-1970s:
- In a Political Science class, the professor asked whether it was okay for a government use undemocratic techniques and to violate human rights to bring about development. The student who answered said, “Yes, because there are too many people.”
- About nine months after Indira Gandhi had left office, another fellow student, the daughter of a European Catholic and Asian Indian Buddhist, who lived in northwestern Europe, told me that Gandhi’s successor was a fascist because he had canceled some family-size restrictions that Gandhi had imposed. Calling such restrictions necessary, her voice suggested self-righteous contempt for bearing more than a certain number of live children.
Minorities and Unworthiness
Sometimes membership in certain groups is considered sufficient cause to deny equal rights. Race, ethnic group, religion, economic status, age, family member behavior, presumed “wantedness” before birth, abilities, and health can define these groups, depending on the country and community. A previous blog post goes into this.
Observed Attitudes
Many “causes” used to justify human rights violations include:
- Rights for “us,” not necessarily for “them.”
In college, a Political Science major told me that some “less developed” countries “aren’t ready for democracy.” She didn’t specify what qualified a place as ready for democracy.
- Rules for “them,” not necessarily for “us.”
Illustrated by the US torturing people in formerly Communist countries.
In addition, Mr. Kissinger “time and again displayed contempt for the idea that the powerful can and should be constrained by democratic safeguards.”
- Those who made the standards didn’t have this case in mind. Illustrated by the “enemy combatant” claim.
- Something like this has never happened before, so rules made ‘before’ don’t apply.
- Since the rules were made, morals, ethics, and lifestyles have changed.
- New technology, scientific discoveries, and medical practices make any standards made ‘before’ obsolete.
- The standards don’t take into account the inherent “rights” and “duties” that have been “recognized” after they were made.
- Some standards, like the UDHR (adopted 1948), were reactions to Naziism and World War II. Now enough time has passed for us to leave their shadow.
- Getting rid of a right or protection by simply declaring it an arcane reactionary “religious” practice. This flips the right, in the eyes of the “educated,” into an “oppression.” This has happened to the right to live from conception to natural death.
- Reversing definitions. Claiming the right to oppress another and convincing the world that being oppressed is the other’s “right.”
When officials and experts tell you that it is your “right” and “best interest” to die, that if you stay alive beyond a certain point you will lose your “dignity,” and that to want to stay alive in your condition is “irrational,” they really mean “it is the majority’s human right to live in a world unpolluted by burdensome you.”
Another example is the young woman’s calling someone “fascist” for tolerating large families.
- Willingness to give up other human rights in order to practice the “right” to violate certain other rights.
Illustrated by the two examples of college students accepting population control.
Actually, rejecting “human rights” as a goal, in order to keep abortion, recognizes that living from conception to natural death is a human right. More likely, they will redefine “human rights” to include sentencing dependents to death. In that case, it will be for people (like me) who object to this change to come up with a new term for what we now call “human rights.”
These attitudes are what human rights activists are up against. They are challenges to confront.
Defining and Redefining Human Rights
Over the ages, there have been many definitions of rights, protections, duties, and responsibilities. This can be the subject of many essays.
The violation of some human rights can make the violation of others less unattractive, but the presence or absence one human right does not guarantee the presence or absence of others. For one thing, democracy — the people having a major say in making the rules — is not a synonym for freedom or human rights. People can democratically vote to kill people for belonging to a certain ethnic group or having a certain disability. For another example, one can maintain free speech while waging a campaign to kill these people. In this case, we can say, write, and broadcast that the killing is wrong, without being arrested, as long as we are willing to be told, “You make logical points, but you lost!”
Are commitments to human rights for everybody for all time meaningless, because of how they are modified as circumstances and morals change? Are “rules” protecting human rights as meaningless as Animal Farm’s law against killing other animals became when they added “without cause”?
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For more of our posts from Ms. Boomer-ang, see:
Political Homelessness is Better than a Wrong Political Home
“Shut Up and Enjoy it!”: Abortion Promoters who Sexually Pressure Women
Asking Questions about Miscarriage and Abortion
Denying Personhood to Human Beings
by Fr. Jim Hewes
Historical Examples of Dehumanization
The denial of personhood isn’t a new concept. Throughout history, certain groups of people have been denied their humanity to justify their exploitation, oppression, or even extermination.
One of the most infamous examples is the Dred Scott decision. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled black slaves weren’t considered citizens or “persons” under the law. This decision allowed for slavery and dehumanization of African Americans.
The same type of thinking has justified genocides throughout history. In the Holocaust, Jews, along with other marginalized groups, were dehumanized and labeled as “non-persons.” By stripping them of their humanity, the Nazi regime was able to justify their extermination.
The same logic applied to the Rwandan genocide. The Hutu majority dehumanized the Tutsi minority to justify mass slaughter.
In each of these cases, those in power determined certain human beings weren’t worthy of the rights and protections afforded to persons. This dehumanization allowed for their mistreatment, oppression, and, in some cases, their complete annihilation.
The same logic is applied in the abortion debate. By declaring the preborn aren’t persons, society allows for their destruction. Just as in historical examples of dehumanization, the preborn are denied their humanity based on arbitrary criteria set by those in power.
What Defines a Person?
One central controversy in the abortion debate is whether the preborn child is a person. This question isn’t just philosophical or theological—it has profound legal and moral implications. If the preborn are considered persons, they are entitled to rights and protection under the law, including the most fundamental right: the right to life. However, if they aren’t considered persons, these protections may not apply, allowing for their destruction through abortion.
Personhood has been debated for centuries, with various definitions proposed by philosophers, theologians, and legal scholars, based on such traits as:
- consciousness,
- sentience,
- self-awareness,
- rationality and feeling (balance also),
- self-determination,
- ability to choose,
- minimal intelligence/certain level of IQ,
- reasoning,
- has interests or desires or purpose or sense of the past (memory),
- self-motivated activity,
- communication,
- ability to change,
- connection to society and to relate others and concern for others,
- self-control,
- sense of time,
- curiosity,
- to envision a future,
- to use language,
- recognize continuity of time,
- to solve problems,
- idiosyncrasy,
- electrical activity which will develop into the heart or the brain,
- certain point of development within the womb,
- when a soul enters,
- when one feels pain,
- when viable outside the mother’s body,
These criteria measure up to certain standards of perfection or usefulness, and what follows is whether they are valued with rights when they have attained such traits.
Who decides which definition or standard is used, and at what point the human individual originates? Philosophers like Mary Ann Warren, Michael Tooley, and Peter Singer argue personhood requires certain cognitive functions. Without traits like these, a human being cannot be considered a person. They don’t qualify as persons. Therefore, they don’t have the same rights as those who have been born.
This functionalist view of personhood is deeply problematic. If personhood is determined by cognitive ability, then what happens to individuals who lose these abilities due to injury, an accident, illness, or age? For example, a person in a coma or suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease may no longer meet these criteria for personhood, but we don’t deny their humanity or their right to life. Similarly, a newborn infant doesn’t have the self-awareness or rational thought that some philosophers require for personhood. This thinking, taken to its end, can be used to justify infanticide as well as abortion.
These perspectives open the door to dehumanizing vulnerable individuals who cannot meet their arbitrary standards of cognitive ability. These views are determined by adults who are deciding from an adult perspective. Those who have power decide who is a person or who isn’t, rather than the pre-born child’s perspective of powerlessness.
Such thinking allows society to determine who is worthy of protection based on vague, arbitrary, subjective, speculative, self-serving criteria. How many criteria or traits are necessary? How do you measure them?
Inherent vs. Achieved Personhood
At the heart of the abortion debate is the question of whether personhood is something inherent or something that must be earned through development. Pro-abortion advocates often argue personhood is something achieved when certain cognitive or physical milestones are met, as if one can gain or lose personhood at different situations in one’s life, depending on what one can do rather who one is, with an inherent legacy, whether that is recognized or not.
This view implies also that personhood can be lost if these abilities are lost. It creates a dangerous precedent where certain human beings are considered more valuable or worthy of protection than others. This achievement-based view of personhood is, in essence, a form of elitism. Pre-born children become “outcasts” or inferior humans – not persons. It suggests some human beings are more important than others based on their abilities, achievements, or the stage of their development.
In contrast is the view that personhood is inherent in every human being, regardless of stage of development or abilities. From the moment of conception, a unique human life begins with its own DNA, distinct from both the mother and father. This human life will grow and develop according to her or his own nature, moving through the various stages of development from embryo to fetus to infant and beyond. At no point does this being ceased to be human, nor does he or she become something else.
If the mother wants the child, then the life in the womb is a person, but if the child isn’t wanted by the mother, then there’s no person within the womb. Perhaps later the same child within the womb becomes wanted, and thus becomes a person again.
Being a person doesn’t depend on if he or she is significant to others or not. It’s a continuous process of growth, not a transition from non-personhood to personhood. The inability to fulfill their nature at one moment doesn’t negate or destroy the nature itself.
In other words, personhood isn’t a matter of something or someone being “more of,” or “less of.” It’s not . something “you have or don’t have,” or something “too broad or too narrow.” Personhood in fact is an intrinsic reality of a human being (both actual and potential).
Why Personhood Matters in the Abortion Debate
The question of personhood isn’t just a theoretical issue. It has real-world implications, particularly in the context of the abortion debate. In the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court famously sidestepped the question of when life begins, stating the judiciary wasn’t in a position to resolve this issue. However, the Court noted that if the preborn were recognized as persons, the case for abortion would collapse. The right to life of the preborn would be protected by the Constitution.
This highlights the central importance of personhood in the abortion debate. If the preborn are considered persons, they’re entitled to the same legal protections as anyone else, including the right to life. Denying their personhood allows for their destruction through abortion, but recognizing their personhood would extend to them the rights and protections afforded to all human beings.
From a legal perspective, the burden of proof should lie on those who argue the preborn are not persons. In any case of doubt, it would be prudent that the benefit of doubt should be given to the preborn, just as it would be in any other case involving human rights. Just as we wouldn’t take the life of a person in a coma or a newborn infant simply because they cannot currently exercise certain functions, we shouldn’t take the life of preborn children because they haven’t yet reached a certain stage of development.(for in-depth legal writings see Robert P. George, Joshua Craddock, and John Finnis or view (Rallyforpersonhood.com).
Conclusion
The debate over personhood is central to the abortion controversy. Denying the personhood of the preborn is a dangerous and dehumanizing philosophy. It has been used throughout history to justify mistreatment and destruction of vulnerable groups.
Recognizing the personhood of the preborn is a matter of justice. Every human being, regardless of their stage of development or abilities, deserves the right to life and the protection of the law. In a society that values human rights, the most vulnerable among us—the preborn—should be no exception. This sentiment is clearly summarized by Dr Seuss which simply states: (“Horton Hears a Who”)
Because after all,
a person’s a person
no matter how small.
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Fr. Jim Hewes
For more of our posts from Fr. Jim Hewes, see:’
Death Penalty and other Killing: The Destructive Effect on Us
A Personal Reflection on a Just War
Consistent Life History: Being Across the Board
Reflections from My Decades of Consistent Life Experience
The Consistent Life Ethic: My Christian Perspective
Abortion and Other Issues of Life: Connecting the Dots
When Immigration Is a Life Issue
by Julia Smucker
Immigration Statuses
and Why They Matter for the Protection of Human Life
Working as a community interpreter, it can be easy to take for granted my adjacency to the U.S. immigration system and people affected by it. So when overgeneralizations and misconceptions appear in public discourse, or when even some consistent-life advocates object to the naming of mass deportations as a life issue alongside forms of killing, it’s jolting. My own views are surely affected by the fact that most of the immigrants I encounter have fled serious danger, which isn’t the case for all immigrants. But for those who have, the consequences of being forced out of a place where they’d sought safety can be deadly.
What follows is an attempt to explain some of the immigration statuses that people seeking safety in the U.S. might have, which can be easily confused or conflated. This information is based on my work experience and verified through government websites and conversations with immigration lawyers.
Julia Smucker
Refugees. Many people, including many immigrants, use this term broadly to refer to anyone seeking refuge, but its legal sense is more narrow, referring to a pre-set number of people who have been admitted to a country for safety reasons before they arrive (specifically, fearing or already experiencing persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion). People officially admitted as refugees come with travel documents through official ports of entry – in the U.S., usually an airport.
Asylees and asylum-seekers. To apply for asylum in the U.S., one must be physically present in the country for up to a year before applying (although people typically apply sooner) and fear persecution based on the same categories as refugees. Someone can declare their intent to seek asylum either after entering legally with a visa, or when being detained by border patrol agents – or, since earlier in 2024, after making an appointment for an interview at an official port of entry using the CPB One app, an ambiguous program meant to replace unauthorized border crossings.*
If someone is detained and claiming asylum, the normal process (apart from legally questionable interruptions under both the Trump and Biden administrations) is to give them a credible fear interview and, if passed, release them with a document called a Notice to Appear, showing when and where they entered and when and where to report to their first immigration court hearing. In the meantime, they must fill out an asylum application and mail it to United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS). Following an arbitrary six-month waiting period after the application is received, the applicant can receive legal authorization to work in the U.S., along with a social security number for tax purposes, while their asylum case is pending, regardless of how they initially entered the country.
Eventually, if asylum is denied, the removal proceedings process moves forward. If asylum is granted, the asylum-seeker is given the status of “asylee” and, like refugees, can apply a year later for permanent residency (a green card).
Temporary Protected Status (TPS). This status is for people from specific countries that the U.S. government has designated as having unsafe conditions. Though not automatic (people from TPS-designated countries must still apply for it and then reapply whenever their country’s designation is extended), it’s often the easiest immigration status for people from qualifying countries to get. It can also be the easiest to lose, if the U.S. government decides not to extend TPS for a particular country – which it can do at its own discretion, whether because that country has become safe to return to or simply for political reasons. Additionally, having TPS protects someone from deportation during the designated time period (normally 18 months at a time) but cannot lead to permanent residency or citizenship. For these reasons, it’s common for people to apply for TPS and asylum at the same time, which they’re eligible to do if they come from a TPS-designated country and also fear being personally targeted for torture or death.
Humanitarian Parole. Like refugees, people granted humanitarian parole are admitted with official travel authorization before arrival. But like TPS, this status is temporary and based on urgent humanitarian reasons. Although the process is inherently urgent, those seeking parole to the U.S. must apply and be vetted for need, national security concerns, financial support, and other “discretionary factors” decided by USCIS. Currently, there are special parole processes in place for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (collectively called CHNV), meant to decrease unauthorized border crossings by people fleeing severe instability in those countries, and separate parole programs for Afghans and Ukrainians because of the recent and ongoing wars. Except for Cuba, these countries are also part of the longer list of current TPS-designated countries. Parole for Venezuelans is set to expire at the end of October without being renewed, and the entire CHNV parole program is on the verge of becoming a casualty of political battles to appear “tough” on immigration, despite being a legal path that reduces border encounters.
Statuses for minors. It’s currently most common for immigrant children to be listed on their parents’ applications for a particular status. Otherwise, the best-known status for people who entered the U.S. as minors (partly because of high-profile legal battles) is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which applies to those who arrived between 2007 and 2012 sometime between birth and age 16. Although DACA requires a complex application process, it’s officially considered deferral of removal rather than a legal status and cannot lead to a permanent status. A more narrowly-applied but more secure status is Special Immigrant Juvenile status (SIJ), for immigrants already in the U.S. who have been abused, abandoned or neglected by a parent (in practice this can include a death), who apply for this status before turning 21. Unlike DACA, SIJ is an official legal status that can lead to permanent residency or citizenship. And of course, those with the simple luck to have been brought into the U.S. in utero become U.S. citizens at birth.
Undocumented. Legally, someone with a Notice to Appear and a pending status can be considered undocumented, although they may have some documents such as a work permit and social security card. This may be the case if someone is applying for asylum (typically a long process) without having another shorter-term status, or is in removal proceedings that have been deferred through programs like DACA or Deferred Enforced Departure. In the past several years, situations like these have become more common than remaining undocumented in a more total and literal sense. Someone who evades border patrol and has no documentation cannot legally work or receive any public assistance and is extremely vulnerable to exploitation (conversely, those eligible for benefits must have a social security number and pay taxes on their income).
The Stakes of Expulsion
There are other categories of immigrants and visitors, not all of whom have fled danger. But it’s often those most at risk of harm if sent back to their countries of origin who are most at risk of being sent back.
For people who aren’t regularly exposed to these immigrants’ stories, “expelling migrants” might sound relatively innocuous. Because of professional ethics, I can’t share specific stories I’ve heard beyond what’s been published with permission, and I don’t wish to perpetuate stereotypes. Everyone’s story is different. But based on my overall exposure to personal histories of people I encounter in my work, what I hear when people talk about expelling migrants – especially those most routinely vilified – is a strong possibility of sending people to be tortured, raped, or killed. While deportation isn’t direct killing, in many cases it may be only one step removed.
If someone who fled danger is facing deportation or being turned away without due process, and is then told, “But it’s the right to life that’s fundamental; without that, you couldn’t have any rights at all,” they might reasonably respond, “Yes, of course – that’s why I’m here.”
* The CPB One app has received criticism from pro- and anti-immigrant perspectives, with some saying it facilitates illegal border crossings and others saying it makes it harder to get an interview with border officials. In any case, contrary to Senator JD Vance’s description, it is not an asylum application. It only provides a means of making an appointment for an initial interview to begin the asylum-seeking process.
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For more of our posts on immigration, see:
Would My Grandparents Have Died in the Pogroms?
Not Caring about Guilt or Innocence: An Execution Case that Illustrates a Pattern
by Sarah Terzo
On September 20, 2024, Freddie Owens was executed by lethal injection in South Carolina.
A Retracted Testimony
The state of South Carolina executed Owens, who took the name Khalil Allah while on death row, even though the chief witness against him retracted his testimony and now claims Allah was innocent.
According to the witness, Steven Golden, in his affidavit, “I don’t want [Allah] to be executed for something he didn’t do.”
The court convicted Allah of the murder of Irene Graves during a robbery at a convenience store. Graves was 41 and a mother of three. The murderer shot her in the head.
There was no physical or forensic evidence connecting Allah to the crime. Security cameras showed two men in the store with guns, but their faces were covered, and no one could identify them.
Police arrested Golden, then 18, days after the robbery. He told investigators that Allah had been with him and was the shooter. Golden, who claims to have been high when police questioned him, says prosecutors told him that Allah had already confessed and was ready to testify against him.
Golden recalls:
They told me I might as well make a statement against [Allah], because he already told his side to everyone, and they were just trying to get my side of the story. I was scared that I would get the death penalty if I didn’t make a statement.
Prosecutors then promised Golden that if he said that Allah was the shooter, Golden wouldn’t receive the death penalty or life in prison. Terrified of being executed or locked up for life, Golden agreed
A Deal Kept Secret from the Jury
But a few days before Allah was scheduled to be executed, Golden submitted an affidavit, admitting that he lied out of fear. He also said the prosecutors hid the agreement from the jury. In fact, they instructed him to lie and falsely testify that there was no deal.
When Allah’s public defender, Gerald “Bo” King, attempted to get clemency for Allah, the attorney general’s office claimed there had never been a deal. Golden, they said, was making the whole thing up.
However, King proved they were lying. He produced paperwork that Golden’s lawyer had drafted verifying the agreement. The paperwork clearly said that if Golden testified against Allah, he would be spared the death penalty and life in prison.
King also verified that prosecutors never disclosed the deal to the jury that convicted Allah.
King says:
[Allah’s] conviction and sentence were premised on a witness whose testimony was obtained through an agreement that wasn’t disclosed, and that should give everyone pause.
Golden’s murder charge was changed to voluntary manslaughter. His sentence was 28 years in prison. Allah’s sentence was death.
Golden says another reason he testified against Allah was that he was afraid the actual shooter or his buddies would kill him if he named him:
I [testified] because I knew that’s what the police wanted me to say, and also because I thought the real shooter, or his associates might kill me if I named him to the police. I am still afraid of that. But Freddie was actually not there.
The attorney general’s office pushed for Allah’s execution despite Golden’s affidavit. They claimed that Golden’s retraction was “not credible.” They maintained that his original testimony was the truth, and he was now lying.
King appealed to the state Supreme Court, and the justices sided with the attorney general. They ruled that Golden’s confession that he lied did not amount to “exceptional circumstances,” and didn’t warrant calling off the execution.
Ironically, Golden’s word was considered credible enough to sentence a man to death, but not credible enough to save his life.
Golden didn’t have a compelling motive for confessing that he lied. It did not reduce his sentence and left him open to an attack from the actual shooter. He had an obvious motive for testifying against Allah. However, the justices didn’t take this into account.
The Murder of Christopher Lee
Although Allah may not have killed Irene Graves, he killed someone else. The day he was (possibly falsely) convicted of murder, he killed a fellow inmate named Christopher Lee. The murder took place during the hours between the guilty verdict and the sentencing.
In his confession, Allah said he beat Lee to death because Lee taunted him about his conviction. Whether Allah meant to kill Lee or just give him a beating is unknown, but his guilt is not in question. He was never prosecuted for that murder.
Details of the killing come from an article in the Post & Courier that casts Allah in a very negative light. Its headline calls him a “notorious killer” and reporter David Ferrara states he killed Irene Graves, giving no credence to any other story.
Ferrara also claims that Allah committed other violent acts while on death row, but I couldn’t verify whether this is true with official documents, as he didn’t link to a source.
Abuse Throughout Life
Allah was brutally abused from early childhood and sexually abused as an adolescent. At his trial, a social worker, teachers, and mental health experts all testified that he grew up in a tumultuous home in abject poverty, frequently watching his mother being beaten by her boyfriend.
Allah suffered his own physical abuse as a child as well as neglect. When he was very young, he was found with his siblings abandoned in a house without electricity, heat, or food.
Multiple sources also state that Allah experienced sexual assault and physical abuse while in juvenile detention as a young adult.
Allah took a life, but he was only there in that cell because he was convicted in an unfair trial where prosecutors withheld an important fact from the jury. The only witness against him admitted to lying. It’s very likely he was executed for a crime he didn’t commit.
Freddie Owens / Kalil Allah
Reactions to the Execution
After the execution, the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Western District of North Carolina said in a statement to Fox Carolina:
Freddie Owens did not kill Ms. Graves. His death tonight is a tragedy. Mr. Owens’s childhood was marked by suffering on a scale that is hard to comprehend. He spent his adulthood in prison for a crime that he did not commit. The legal errors, hidden deals, and false evidence that made tonight possible should shame us all.
In an email from September 21, South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty reminded recipients that the true killer of Irene Graves is still out there, unpunished. It states, “This is an insult to victims of violence, and it is an insult to the family of Irene Graves, whose family deserves to know her real murderer.”
It also says:
We are not here to make excuses for the harm Khalil did cause during his life. He is responsible for the death of Christopher Lee, and we grieve with Mr. Lee’s loved ones who did not deserve to lose him.
But there is also no justice for young Khalil, a child who experienced physical harm in his household, as well as physical and sexual harm in juvenile prison facilities.
More often than not, those on death row are the victims of someone else’s violence long before they commit violence themselves. This is why we stand against all executions. At its core, the death penalty is a declaration that some victims of violence matter more than others.
Allah’s killing is set to kick off a spree of executions in South Carolina. His was the first execution in the state in thirteen years. In the coming months, five other people are set to be executed there.
That the first person executed in this new series of legalized murders may well have been innocent didn’t trouble the Attorney General’s office, the original prosecutors, or the justices on the South Carolina Supreme Court.
It should, however, trouble those of us who support the value of all human life and anyone who cares about justice and fairness.
Allah’s case isn’t an isolated incident, but shows a systemic problem with capital punishment. Those of us who have been following individual cases over the years have seen others where there was great doubt about a person’s guilt, but they were executed anyway. The recent execution of Marcellus Williams is another tragic example.
It often seems that our justice system doesn’t actually care whether the person executed is guilty, only that the killing takes place.
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For more of out posts on the death penalty, see:
Why Conservatives Should Oppose the Death Penalty
Assisted Suicide as the Next Roe v. Wade: Time to Pay Attention
by Jacqueline Harvey Abernathy, Ph.D. MSSW
Those committed to protecting human life at all ages celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 2022, after 49 years of legalized lethal violence claiming millions of babies across the United States. The sheer carnage of universal access to abortion in every state demanded pro-lifers’ attention. Yet another form of killing, assisted suicide is slowly gaining acceptance. What was once considered a non-viable threat because of bi-partisan opposition has become a reality in 11 U.S. states. .
There are countless parallels between the euthanasia lobby’s landmark court cases and those that validated abortion (Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton) and later re-validated abortion in the first trimester but empowered state regulation of it (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). When pro-lifers lost their attempt to overturn Roe but were given the green light to regulate it at the state level, they did so promptly and thoroughly.
The euthanasia lobby is finally gaining momentum, but the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) can instantaneously change that. The likelihood of it prevailing in the present court is slim, but divisive issues among states (abortion, gay marriage, capital punishment) seem to end up settled by SCOTUS inevitably. Furthermore, the court’s makeup could shift by the time a case can be made.
Rachel MacNair and author Jacqueline Abernathy, University Faculty for Life conference, 2024
Historically at the Supreme Court, the euthanasia lobby (led by Compassion & Choices in Dying, formerly the Hemlock Society) has both failed and prevailed. In 1997’s Washington v. Glucksburg attempt to unilaterally strike down assisted suicide prohibitions enacted by the citizens — imposing their will on the unwilling nation — establishing a constitutional right to assisted suicide would have succeeded had SCOTUS respected the precedent they concocted that supposedly imbued a right to abortion. Unlike with abortion, SCOTUS was not comfortable nullifying all state laws against assisted suicide, so the euthanasia lobby’s case surprisingly (but fortunately) didn’t become a second Roe v. Wade.
No additional states had been reformed by 2006 when the Supreme Court handed the suicide lobby a victory with Gonzales v. Oregon by ensuring states access to the lethal poison prescribed in assisted suicides that execute patients (the same drugs are used in capital punishment to execute condemned criminals). At this point, Oregon’s law had been enforced for 12 years and was reaffirmed in the highest court nearly a decade earlier.
It would be another two years before Washington joined Oregon by ballot initiative in 2008. In the first 15 years, the number of states with assisted suicide increased to a total of three due to judicial activism in Montana in 2009. 2009’s Baxter v. Montana made it to that state’s highest court and has not been successfully answered by state lawmakers despite attempts every session to overrule it and reaffirm protections for humans at the end of life. The assisted suicide lobby has persistently and now successfully passed bills through state legislatures.
Vermont became the first state legislature to pass an assisted suicide bill in 2013, the only bill of 177 proposed up to that date to ever see the governor’s desk. This was, sadly, the first of many successful bills to follow in other states just 2 years later.
October of 2014 marked a significant shift in public opinion on assisted suicide, which some experts consider the beginning of the end for holding back the tide when it came to state assisted suicide bills gaining political viability. A national PR campaign highlighted the tragic case of Brittany Maynard, a young newlywed with terminal brain cancer who moved from California to Oregon to obtain a legal prescription of lethal drugs and kill herself on her chosen date that November. Maynard posed for the cover of People magazine, and Compassion & Choices (C&C) enabled caring strangers to sign her sympathy card not knowing their names were being added to the C&C mailing list and exploited for petitions in favor of assisted suicide for their respective state.
Polling that followed that campaign showed a significant increase in public opinion favoring legal euthanasia. The next year, a second state succeeded in passing an assisted suicide bill. The 2015 California Assembly initially rejected the first proposal, SB 128, but euthanasia lobbyists and their allies abused a special session intended for transportation issues in order to bypass committee opposition and full legislative scrutiny such as the hearings and debates that destroyed SB 128. Despite an outcry to then-Governor Jerry Brown begging him to veto legitimate bill ABX2-15, it became law in September 2015.
Rachel MacNair and Jacqueline Abernathy, University Faculty for Life conference, 2014
For political scientists, California is a leader in policy innovation, an early adopter of progressive legislation that laggard states later adopt, either after the majority of other states have followed suit or when federal powers like Congress or SCOTUS have intervened. Colorado also became an early adopter of legalized killing in 2016, much like it was the first state to legalize abortion before Roe. Hawaii ushered in assisted suicide in 2018, New Jersey and Maine in 2019, and the latest state added to this roster is New Mexico in 2021.
Fortunately, Democratic Governor John Carney Jr. vetoed HB 140 on September 20, 2024, the first of a decade of assisted suicide bills to finally pass the Delaware legislature. Otherwise, the total number of states with legal assisted suicide would be 12, not 11.
Governor Carney represents a small faction of euthanasia opponents in a Democratic party that has essentially championed assisted suicide as the logical extension of someone’s right to choose. After all, if bodily autonomy justifies killing someone else, one’s own child, for inhabiting their body, surely they have the autonomy to kill their body also.
Growing social acceptance in general, coupled with the issue of settling down party lines, means bills introduced in statehouses with a sufficient Democrat supermajority are passing assisted suicide bills at an exponential rate, often with little Republican resistance. Though Republican lawmakers lead the opposition, they are likely to break rank, abstain, or be absent from voting on assisted suicide bills when they don’t wish to answer for supporting or rejecting these proposals.
The heroic work of state-level coalitions is all that holds back legalized euthanasia and liberalized expansion bills year after year There’s an urgent need for yet more of such work.
States with sufficient Republican majorities to protect the unborn are not vulnerable to assisted suicide bills, but they fail to acknowledge that growing acceptance and legalization by other states often leads to SCOTUS which could, like with Roe, unilaterally and immediately strike down laws protecting the vulnerable from assisted suicide in their state.
Highly polarized social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage that segregate states into two factions tend to be resolved by constitutional challenges under the 14th Amendment. A claim could be made against state assisted suicide prohibitions that inequitable access to euthanasia available to residents of other states affronts the plaintiff’s rights to equal protection afforded to them as a U.S. citizen.
This was attempted shortly after Oregon legalized assisted suicide and its constitutionality was ruled upon by the high court in Washington v Glucksberg. Justices stopped short of striking down state laws against assisted suicide by declaring it a constitutional right, but this reflected the climate during a much different time. Only one state sanctioned assisted suicide, public opinion in favor of euthanasia was much lower, and the issue had no ideological bias. Now we have states embracing legal euthanasia year after year, supported by a well-funded and powerful national interest group that easily overwhelms the utmost heroics from grassroots activists fighting back state-by-state.
Judicial activism is a major strategy for vacating and expanding assisted suicide laws nationwide. One common expansion tactic in states with legal assisted suicide still immediately threatens the lives of those in states where assisted suicide is still illegal. New Jersey courts just refused petitioners from out-of-state who challenged the assisted suicide law’s prohibition of services beyond New Jersey residents.
Two states reformed their laws to remove residency requirements, effectively sanctioning suicide tourism. Only thanks to passionate testimony in Colorado did the recent SB 68 have this amendment omitted before it expanded its assisted suicide law to cut the waiting period in half and decrease qualifications to allow non-physicians to prescribe lethal doses of barbiturates.
Even if assisted suicide is not legal in someone’s home state and the political climate makes this unlikely, their neighbors are still at risk. Like Roe, only one plaintiff needs to convince a judge in their state, or a majority of SCOTUS justices in Washington, D.C.
It took decades and millions of dead children before Roe was reversed. We must not allow such a travesty to happen again.
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For more of our posts focused on euthanasia, see:
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean?
Testimony Opposing the End-of-Life Options Act (Maryland)
Beneath Layers of Lies: The Surge in Efforts to Legalize Euthanasia
Euthanasia by Poverty: Stories from Canada
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill
Will I be Treated the Same Way Now?
The Danger of Coerced Euthanasia: Questions to Ask
Another Blind Spot: Win Without War
Win Without War broadcast an email with a pro-Roe position. Here’s an excerpt:
With the stroke of a pen, five people curtailed the rights of millions when they overturned Roe v. Wade two summers ago , , , If you care about self-determination, justice, and freedom, it’s been a difficult moment. But the good news? People are pushing back . . .
We can carry this amazing momentum to Congress, where Rep. Nikema WIlliams (D-GA-05) will introduce a resolution that would affirm abortion as a human right in just a few weeks. Passing a bill like this will be an uphill challenge — and that’s why we need it to come out of the gate with resounding support from dozens and dozens of original cosponsors. Can you help us build that power?
Several of us responded to their email, and then shared our responses with each other. We would love for the staff at Win Without War to take this feedback seriously, but this is unlikely. We can at least give the writing a broader audience:
Bill Samuel:
I find this very disturbing. My interest in Win Without War is because I believe in nonviolence. I don’t believe in violence as a “solution” to problems. I am a Vietnam-era draft resister. I happened not to be prosecuted, but I was ready to serve a prison term for refusing to participate in a system of mass killing if necessary. I oppose violence across the board. I not only oppose war, but also the death penalty and abortion (a type of death penalty). It is profoundly inconsistent to oppose the killing of human beings in international conflicts and yet to support the idea of a “right” to kill innocent children.
The term “reproductive rights” would literally mean the right to reproduce, which I support. The immense personal cost of childbirth in the U.S. severely limits real reproductive rights in this country. Almost all other affluent countries (and many countries which are not affluent) provide free childbirth, have mandatory paid parental leave for anywhere between 6 and 24 months, and often provide a cash payment and/or supplies needed to take care of the baby upon birth. These I vigorously support. I am outraged by the misuse of the term “reproductive rights” to mean a supposed right to kill children in the womb. All human beings have an inherent right to live.
I cannot support “Win Without War” as long as it supports the war against unborn children. I strongly urge Win Without War to adopt a policy of nonviolence.
Rachel MacNair:
You’re actively supporting the war on unborn children? Mass killing is OK so long as you have euphemisms you can use to pretend it’s not happening?
You’re proposing that mothers are somehow supposed to benefit from being pressured into killing their children. They’re to raise no objection if their needs as mothers and children aren’t met, because they can use this piece of violence to get rid of those needs, and they can be blamed if they don’t. You’re facilitating men who are sexually irresponsible to feel self-righteous about even meeting minimal child support duties. You’re telling good fathers who want to participate in their children’s lives that they have no say about those children being killed instead. You’re supporting the abortion facility as accomplice to pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes those practices more likely to happen.
You’ve lost my support, and you’ve lost it permanently absent a major turnaround.
Carol Crossed
I am a Democrat Party member and have been because they generally oppose military spending as opposed to the militant Republican Party.
Your position on “reproductive rights” is not aligned with nonviolent principles. “Rights” language erroneously justifies violent solutions. Like war, abortion is a violent solution.
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For more of our posts on organizations contradicting their own principles by supporting abortion, see:
Amnesty International’s Blind Spot
An Example of Why the Peace Movement is in Deep Trouble
Violence Bolstered by Professional Contradictions (American Psychological Association)
Unconnecting a Dot? (Campaign Nonviolence)
Worthiness Concept Threatens Equality
by Ms. Boomer-ang
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, animals take over a farm and paint on a wall “an unalterable law by which all animals” there “must live forever.” This law was a list of commandments, one of which was: “all animals are equal.” But eventually the only commandment remaining read: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Likewise, many of those who loudly sign on to human rights, protections, and respect for everybody nevertheless designate some humans as less worthy of these rights and therefore less equal.
The concept of worthiness and unworthiness arose when Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman observed the media considering some murdered activists more “worthy” of praise and attention than others.1 In addition, Dr. Jacqueline H. Abernathy’s June 6, 2023 Consistent Life blog post noted that different political parties consider different people more “worthy” of government support. Meanwhile society and policymakers tend to consider some people less worthy of respect and human rights than others.
Examples follow:
Ethnic and Racial Minorities
In 2009, I visited a prestigious European Union secondary school. One corridor displayed student artwork and posters, in English, for a project on diversity, equity, inclusivity, and tolerance. Along with their calling for accepting all sexual habits, some also recited phrases against racial and religious prejudice. The posters could have passed for products of a North American school.
But people in the same European school repeatedly warned me to avoid Roma. They blamed all crime on Roma.
And when I traveled around the area, a stationmaster warned me to keep my possessions in sight, because “the Roma steal.”
Back in the US, I would have guests from an international peace organization that boasted about embracing all nationalities and lifestyles. One who came from the European Union (a different part than that school) also called Roma dangerous and claimed they prefer stealing to working.
Orphanage Children
In 2011, I took a class at New York University School of Continuing Education about Keeping Children Healthy and Safe, where we did presentations about discipline opportunities we had experienced. I did mine about an episode in a foreign orphanage four years earlier. The orphanage stood in a field where wild descendants of housecats were as ubiquitous as squirrels are in some American neighborhoods. One day, a little boy in the orphanage grabbed a cat, punched it, and threw it roughly on the ground. I tried making him know his action was wrong.
To my surprise, the NYU teacher and a few fellow students said things like: “This class isn’t about children like him,” and “orphanage children are out of our scope.” Really? The course description implied it was about all children. The teacher and fellow students weren’t sympathetic to the cat either.
Did they consider half of the problem that the cat’s mother was not spayed and the other half of the problem that the little boy had been born? Despite the fact that it happened in a place where abortions have exceeded live births for decades?
In about 2018, I told an informal amateur writing group in upstate New York the story of the boy and the cat. I then told how the NYU class had responded to the story. And one of the group’s participants reacted, “Those Nazis!”
Political Prisoners or Criminals?
Angela Davis
Once I attended a lecture by lawyer Alan Dershowitz, where he recalled playing a role in getting American Communist Party leader Angela Davis acquitted. She had gone on trial in 1972, officially for buying guns which other people had used in a fatal courthouse raid. At that time, her allies had been calling her a political prisoner.
Then in 1979, Mr. Dershowitz continued, the Soviet Union awarded Ms. Davis the Lenin Peace Prize. As she went to Moscow to accept it, Mr. Dershowitz reported, he asked her to asker her hosts to free specific individuals imprisoned in the Soviet Union for political reasons. In response, her office told him that the Soviet Union had no political prisoners and that those people were criminals and deserved to be in prison.
The United States also has political prisoners, whom officials designate criminals. People are sentenced for non-violent pro-life activism.
Refugees
United States policy classifies some people fleeing oppression as either “political” or “economic” refugees. It considers people from “favored” countries less worthy of the label “political refugee” than those from “disfavored” countries. And it considers “political” refugees more worthy of asylum than “economic” ones.
People Society Declares Never Should Have Been Born
At first, as countries imposed abortion, they gave total amnesty to people born before the axe date. But by 1989, with the brutal aggressive overnight imposition of abortion on Romania, American media portrayed Romania’s already-born children whose mother they implied would have aborted them if they could have as if subhuman and potentially dangerous. It suggested that the fact they are alive is a crime against humanity. How have teachers, governments, potential employers, the European Union, the UN, and human rights groups treated them?
In Singapore, children born to women who have already borne two children have been denied schooling. In the 1990’s an “illegal third child,” by the time she was 24, had walked to Cambodia, spent 3 years in Spain, and finally arrived in the United States seeking asylum because in China, she was a “non-person,” “denied many rights of Chinese citizens.”2
In the US, how will public schools in abortion-promoting states treat a child showing up who was born in an abortion-restricting state after Dobbs from a pregnancy retroactively declared unworthy of carrying to term?
And what about children with “flaws” detectable before birth?
People Society Wants Dead
Disturbingly, the media, popular culture, pundits, and officials are embracing the concept that individuals in certain physical conditions need to be dead.
Under this mentality, people proclaim that “there is no abuse” in places that allow death-hastening. Do they mean that officials and authorities do not proactively suggest death-hastening for people who do not meet the MAID-recommended criteria?
But what about families, friends(?), social workers, caregivers, creditors, relatives’ creditors, insurers, nursing homes, hospices, and clergy people pressuring a person who does meet the criteria to submit to death-hastening? Claiming “this isn’t abuse, because these people need to die” (i.e., are unworthy of life) brings to mind apologists for a regime claiming that it has no political prisoners and anybody it incarcerates deserves to be locked up.
Blaming the high consumer price of medical insurance on the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, and the “slowly” dying encourages society to see these individuals as “our affliction.” That is one thing the Nazis called the Jews.
Praising a relative or friend for “choosing death over suffering” brings to mind Herman Goring’s endorsement of Austrian Jews committing suicide after the Anschluss.3
How will people who are declared better off dead but who refuse death hastening be treated, legally and socially? Examples of involuntary euthanasia in America and Europe could fill an essay. In a work party early this millennium, when someone brought up the topic of euthanasia, and I asked what about people who met the criteria but refused death-hastening, one of them promptly answered, “Shoot them anyway.”
When laws and treaties are meant to protect everybody, does “everybody” mean only those considered “worthy?”
REFERENCES
1. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 2002.
2. Teresa Puente and Tribune Staff Reporters, “Bid for Asylum a Tortuous Path,” Chicago Tribune, August 2, 1998.
3. Piers Brandon, The Dark Valley. Vintage Books, 2000, p. 539.
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For more posts from Ms. Boomer-ang, see:
Political Homelessness is Better than a Wrong Political Home
“Shut Up and Enjoy it!”: Abortion Promoters who Sexually Pressure Women
The Danger of Coerced Euthanasia: Questions to Ask
Oh My, How the Election Conundrum Has Changed
by Rachel MacNair
A reminder: The Consistent Life Network doesn’t necessarily endorse everything said in its blog, since we encourage individual writers to express a variety of views. This is especially so when analyzing elections.
I’ve been through several presidential elections now. Consistent-lifers have this conundrum (as this post details for 2020): The Republican is terrible on many things but at least better on abortion. The Democrat is better on many of those things but absolutely horrendous on abortion. People who vote for a minor party instead may stay cleaner, but they aren’t helping to decide which one wins.
But as I posted and documented earlier, several conservatives who would normally be enthusiastic about supporting Republicans have noted that Trump is sabotaging the pro-life movement. Since then, the situation has gotten even worse, to the point that mainstream media is taking notice.
Which Candidate is Worse This Time?
Here I expand this with comments from people who would normally assertively support the Republican for president on anti-abortion grounds.
Ramesh Ponnuru asks this cogent question in The National Review:
Ramesh Ponnuru
I’m also wondering how the political parties will interpret the election results. If Harris wins, will they take it as a vindication of the Democrats’ strategy of being all in for abortion? If Trump wins, will both parties take it as a vindication of his strategy of running as far and fast as he can from the issue? Which would be worse for the pro-life cause in the long run?
The National Review also quotes Lila Rose of Live Action:
Lila Rose
“Vance has come out and said that [Trump] would veto an abortion ban, that he supports abortion pills, that he supports ‘reproductive rights’ without clarifying what that means,” Rose said, adding that Trump “was behind the RNC platform being weakened on this, which for four decades was strong on life, and now it’s been weakened.”
The activist said that she, as it stands, would not cast a vote for either Trump or Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. It’s “not the job of the pro-life movement to vote for President Trump,” she said, but it is “the job of the pro-life movement to demand protection for pre-born lives.”
Other Republicans disagree . . .
But Rose said she doesn’t buy the “idea that you are morally responsible to vote against Kamala Harris by voting for someone like Donald Trump.”
“In some cases, you can make the argument that it can be the right move to vote for the lesser of two evils,” Rose said. “But part of our job is not to just accept whatever position we’ve been handed — especially from a politician who, in the past, has counted on our vote and has indicated that he is pro-life [before] changing his position. It’s our job, if we want to be an effective lobbying group in any way, to demand more and to say, ‘If you want my vote, I need to see more from you.’”
“This is how politics works,” she continued. “This is how any advocacy or movement works . . . if you will always be happy to support a candidate provided that they are just a fraction better than the next candidate, you will never achieve your goals for the group that you’re fighting for.”
The Babylon Bee, a humorous satire site like The Onion, explicitly for conservative Christians, put it this way: Pro-Lifers Excited To Choose Between Moderate Amount Of Baby Murder And High Amount of Baby Murder.
Another important point is that the Trump administration couldn’t have arranged for a stronger backlash to the overturning of Roe if such a backlash had been its plan. We can count on it that any repeat Trump administration would provide extra energy to keep that backlash going.
Euthanasia
Meanwhile, on euthanasia – which I don’t recall Trump ever expressing opposition to – is now an issue on which he’s made especially cringe-worthy remarks against a member of his own family – William Trump, the son of his nephew Fred Trump III. From The New York Times,
Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities . . . he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle . . .
After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”
The remark wasn’t a one-off, according to Fred Trump. A couple of years later, when he called his uncle for help because the medical fund that paid for his son’s care was running out of money, Fred Trump claims his uncle said: “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Other than Trump
As for the other major candidate, extreme abortion advocacy is just one of the problems. Biden has been rightfully subjected to intensive war protests on sending weapons being used against Palestinian children, and Harris shows no signs of having better policy. And that’s only one of the horrific wars being supported by the U.S. now. The 2024 Democratic platform has dropped previous opposition to the death penalty and support of reduction in military spending. Moving away from anti-violence positions is happening in both parties.
graphic from our member group Rehumanize International
I’m thinking the third-party option (say, for our member group the American Solidarity Party) has the advantage of clearly communicating why the major parties lost your vote. That may make more sense this year than usual.
Meanwhile, we can certainly feel comfortable working on referendums – while they’re generally single-issue by nature, there are quite a few that cover several of the consistent-life issues.
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For more of our posts on election dynamics, see:
What History Shows: The Consistent Life Ethic Works for Pro-life Referendums
Elections 2020: Three Consistent-Life Approaches
Pro-life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
My Difficulty in Voting: Identifying the Problem (about the American Solidarity Party)
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting