Why are you a Catholic at all since you, by your own admission, pick and choose what to accept? Where is the genuineness in that?

The last time the country really got behind one moral rule for everyone was Prohibition, and I think we should all have learned that it is not the model to follow.

I think it is very difficult to construct a moral defense of, say, a 6 or a 15 week abortion ban on anything other than a utilitarian basis. If abortion for the sake of convenience is wrong at 15 weeks or 6 weeks, it is very difficult to come up with a good reason why it isn’t also wrong at 14 weeks or 5 weeks. Heartbeat laws are clever, but I don’t even think that their advocates believe that elective abortion is morally acceptable the day before the heart starts beating.

You can certainly justify a 6 or 15 week ban, parental notification law, or whatever else on the grounds that it is the best you can get in the current political climate – i.e., on utilitarian grounds. But this that sets up the “worst of both worlds” scenario for pro-lifers.

First, the law is a teacher, so if elective abortion is legal after 6 or 15 weeks, people are going to become acclimated to the idea that elective abortion is a-ok before that time. Next, since there is really no meaningful difference between 6/5 or 14/15 weeks, I find it very hard to believe that the time-based bans will last, especially in the US where opinions on the pro-abort side are so extreme and so deeply held.

On the other hand, pro-lifers are going to struggle to get any credit or slack from the electorate for moderating. Because the 6/15 week bans are only utilitarian, pro-aborts are going to argue, correctly, that pro-lifers would really prefer to ban elective abortion altogether because that is what their principles require.

Lastly, similar to my first point, I think that history tells us that political accommodations to abortion always lead to more political accommodations to abortion, and eventually to the pro-abort position. Bob Casey Sr. was a principled pro-lifer. His son initially tried to split the baby and is now indistinguishable from Kamala Harris. Mario Cuomo’s “personally opposed” position was, in my view, a serious (albeit seriously flawed) attempt to grapple with the politics of abortion. But it also was a dead end. If you are accommodating evil, you must not believe that it is really evil. And I would argue that Mario Cuomo’s children learned that lesson well. I fear that our children will as well.

Unfortunately abortion involves more than a woman’s “own” body. There’s the rights of the baby, and the rights of the baby’s father, which you are just waving away.

We have a right to do what we want with our own property*, but we no longer consider that we can have “property” in human beings and you can no longer justify slavery by talking about a man’s “own property” and waving away the rights of other humans.

Likewise we ought not to consider a baby as a woman’s “own” body.

*Some restrictions apply…