Is Right to Life a State or Federal Issue?

1 Comments

1. Ryan on August 22, 2024 at 3:46 PM

   I fail to see the moral distinction you’re trying to make between passing a law lowering an abortion limit from a previous standard and establishing a federal limit without reference to a prior standard. Moving from 15 weeks to 6 weeks at the state level still contains that same implicit statement you are wary of with a 15 week federal limit, namely, that regardless of your intention to save lives by passing a 6 week bill you are making the same implicit teaching with force of law that anything before 6 weeks is not Life, a fact that cannot be mitigated by merely citing comparison to the previous law.

   There is surely a difference in moral weight in an action if it is reactive or corrective in nature as opposed to an independent occurrence. For example, if we were to pass a law, with no previous legislation of its kind in existence, where as a town we kill one man a year, that is certainly wrong. Passage of that same law as a corrective measure against legislation passed previously that we kill 5 men a year certainly communicates a different message. In the former case the law says it is ok to kill one man. In the latter case the law says it is bad to kill 5 men, but ok to kill 1. Probably not the most well conceived example, but the point is passing a 6 week limit in a state that was previously 15 weeks, under your framework, still communicates that anything before 6 weeks is ok, adding the one caveat that the previous 15 week standard was bad. Your concern that the the law is a pedagogical tool and informs the people on what is right and wrong is certainly well placed, and difficult to grapple with, but your interpretation would lead to pro-life inaction at the state level if followed to its logical conclusion.

   For disclosure I am in favor of a 15 week federal limit that explicitly allows states to pass limits go even further than 15. The law would merely be a baseline. The federal position on abortion (albeit tacitly) is that states can regulate abortion all the way until the moment of birth as they see fit. As I think about it now it could be better to think about a federal 15 week law as a “mitigating”, corrective law and not “new” legislation as you put it, in the same way that you might view a reactive state law at 15 weeks. As the federal law would not raise the limit to 15 weeks in states that have more ambitious pro-life laws, and would only lower the limit down to 15 weeks in the most abortion permissive states, the law in itself would be reacting to the laws and standards passed in states with the most permissive abortion laws. Thought of in this way the federal law would not come about in a vacuum as a “new” law at the federal level, but come about as a “mitigating” response to the states that are the most permissive. If the standard truly is that the law is “mitigating” a previous law, a 15 week federal bill should pass the test. I don’t know about all that though, maybe a stretch.

   All this being said with high respect for your pro-life work and your office and vocation as a priest (I very much enjoyed this discussion!) – this is the most fracturing issue for the pro-life movement. Should we remain principled and hold out only to pass laws that recognize Life at conception with no exceptions, at the immediate cost of our brothers and sisters in the womb? Or work with the political process we have and pass what we can to save as many lives as possible, but resign ourselves to the fact that we can’t save them all? I tend to fall in the second category, but with the hope that we one day can save them all. God help us in the meantime.

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