Response to Tom

The point I was trying to make is that the principles of non-violence and human inviolability require us as a community to reject all killing (I would include euthanasia and the death penalty though the topic of my blog entry was abortion) not just to make it less common. Ordinarily, this is done but making killing criminal, although one can imagine unusual situations where this need not be so (e.g. in a community committed to anarchism).

I'm open to proposals other than criminalization, but I'm not sure they work. Germany, for example, has experimented with excluding abortion from public health insurance, as an "unconstitutional act of killing", and even requiring the media not to defame the humanity of the unborn, i.e. leaving abortion in some sense nominally illegal but yet not punished as long as prior pro-life counseling has occurred. But my German relatives tell me that these measures have little effect.

I think I'm making the same point that the 1975 German Constitutional decision made (which was reversed in 1993 in this regard): That even if counseling could prevent more abortions than criminal prohibitions, respect for life applies to each individual life, not to life in the aggregate. That is, one cannot withdraw legal protection from some human beings even if the result (getting women to come in for counseling) saves more lives. One cannot say "Just go in for counseling first and then your abortion will be legal", because that would withdraw respect and protection for unborn children as soon as their mothers have gone through counseling.

It's not just preventing deaths by abortion that's the issue. It's the idea that some people get less respect and protection. For example (though thank goodness this is NOT a proposal by DFLA) suppose that we could prevent ALL abortions by pushing true contraception. It would still be wrong to leave abortion legal, because we would still be saying that some of do not get equal respect and protection. (To reduce abortion by means of contraception is like reducing the number of acts of anti-Mexican racism by sealing our borders. Even if it works, it misses the main point.)

I worry that DFLA might let politicians off the hook as long as they commit themselves effectively to minimizing abortions. I want them to come out effectively AGAINST abortion, which at least means coming out against it as a constitutional right under Roe, before they receive any pro-life votes.