BEING REALISTIC ABOUT EFFECTIVE PRO-LIFE WORK.(Brief Article)

NRLC's goal is to secure the full legal protection of the right to life. A constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to life and the personhood of children in the womb would be the most desirable way to achieve such legal protection. Another way, less ideal but still vastly preferable to the current situation, is to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions and get Congress and the state legislatures to pass laws safeguarding the right to life.

Working towards these goals is the pro-active part of our work. The defensive part is to combat all attempts to promote and expand anti-life policies.

Moreover, the battle is in the "public square" because it deals with public policy and laws and judicial decisions. As a moral right--as an endowment from God--the right to life already exists; what we are fighting for is the public and legal recognition of that right. This requires us to participate in the process of formulating public policy--and to work with "real" public officials and candidates for public office. Some pro-lifers have reservations about that.

Professor Nathan Schlueter of St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, examines the matter in the October 2001 issue of First Things ("Drawing Pro-Life Lines"). To illuminate the problem, Schlueter quotes a pro-lifer who has become well-known through her intensive fundraising campaigns:

"Every abortion is a direct attack on God, as Pope John Paul II pointed out in Evangelium Vitae, and therefore a politician who favors this violence, even in only limited circumstances, is not pro-life. He or she is at odds with God's commandment: `Thou shalt not kill.' I cannot in good conscience cast my vote for someone who favors the total destruction of even one baby, even when I am challenged with the argument that the `other guy' is even worseE. It is not E our job to get `the lesser of two evils' elected."

Professor Schlueter observes that this sentiment, while "attractive" on the surface, "is based on a principle that is deeply flawed and therefore politically dangerous." And under "the seductive guise of moral purity, it represents a failure to distinguish between degrees of cooperation in moral choice and collapses an ethic of political choice into an individual ethic. In doing so, it virtually removes pro-lifers from effective engagement with politics, and surrenders `the world' to moral evil." (It is worth noting that Evangelium Vitae is not guilty of such simplistic thinking.)

He then applies the tools of moral theology and logic to (1) lay bare this confusion about "degrees of moral cooperation" and (2) demonstrate that a vote for George W. Bush (whose pro-life stand was not quite "pure" enough for the pro-lifer quoted above) was morally justified. Along the way, he demonstrates that the failure to grasp the moral categories under which voting in an election operates and the expectation of "perfect consistency and goodness as necessary attributes for office" would lead to practically every vote being "sinful."