Friday, March 26, 2010

Katholic Kennedy: Abortion’s a Health Issue

Thus does Pat carry the blood-stained torch lit by his father Ted.

Do you still think abortion is not murder? Consider this: 38 states now have fetal homicide laws. If killing an unborn child against her mother’s will is murder, then killing an unborn child is murder with or without consent. You can’t have it both ways.

The abortion-as-health-issue canard began in 1964. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article outlining how church leaders coached the Kennedys on how to distract the public from the moral aspects of abortion:

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing “cover” for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a “clear conscience.”

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

And that, kids, is how it’s done: avoid the moral aspects of killing babies by reframing the discussion in terms of “rights” or “health” and concentrate instead on the feasibility of enacting protective legislation thereof. It’s also why today you have Pat Kennedy saying,

It’s not a question of morality or anything; it’s a matter of health — public health. Our mothers, our sisters, our spouses, I mean, this is a simple issue. It’s not making any judgment on people. It’s just a matter of providing — making sure that they’re safe. And there’s only one way to make sure they’re safe, and that’s making sure that it’s legal.

That article is here.

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