The USA Does Not Sustain A Culture Of Life. Here's Why...
Bush has declared that we Americans support a culture of life just like the Pope. Well we don't. The culture of life refers to a consistent ethic of life. The consistent ethic of life does not separate the abortion issue as the most important life issue nor the euthanasia issue. All the life issues go together. You can't value one life issue over another. The late great Cardinal Bernardin, a wonderful activist theologian made great inroads into the debate about the sanctity of life. The top scholars and theologians don't have a grading system.
One of the reasons you cannot separate abortion from the culture of life issue and why bush is completely out of line and off base when he says he's in with the catholics, is because you cannot sustain a society that values all life when your very society is the largest creator of nuclear weapons on the planet! Whether we like it or not, we must be very subconsciously afraid as a people. We are paranoid. We are the most paranoid nation in the world. We're more paranoid than the Cubans. We kill each other with guns more than anywhere else on earth, a vast number of people care more about their right to bear arms than just about anything else, we invade countries, we execute people on flimsy evidence, we have a sordid history of lynching, we systematically opress women, black and minorities... so it's only natural that we'd have a high abortion rate too. We simply don't value life in this country. You can't pick and choose which lives to value. It's not fair and it doesn't make sense.
What kind of culture of life do you have if people are working full time jobs and they are still poor and their kids aren't getting a proper education? Bush thinks it's cute that a mom has to work a couple of jobs to feed her family. How quaint. At least she didn't have an abortion. How come she can't support her family on one job in the greatest industrialized nation in the world?
We wonder why we have high crime rates and murder. Why work at McDonald's when you can make more money selling drugs? Sure it's risky, but at least you can afford some bling that you saw peddled on corporate TV. You didn't learn enough at your school to get a job anywhere else. Some want to force women to have unwanted babies but no one wants to see that that woman or that child sees a doctor. Once the baby is born, no one cares about it anymore. And isn't it strange that our great country has such a high infant mortality rate?
Pope John Paul II unlike george bush called upon scientists to work towards the promotion of life rather than the destruction of life. The USA is creating even more weapons of mass destruction right now. Who is bush planning to invade next? Why are the pharmaceutical companies making drugs to make men more virile? We have plenty of people being born. There is no reason to have 6 kids in this day and age. We don't need kids to milk the cows. The earth's population is about to explode, thank you very much. Why not try to take care of the ones who are already born? Why not take away the fear of the unknown and the fear of war and poverty so that women won't even have to think about abortion?
Why aren't they making drugs to make women less susceptible to breast cancer instead of war machines? War is more profitable I suppose. The breast cancer rate is 1 in 7 where I live. Why? No one knows why women are dropping like flies on Long Island. Luckily the men here can stay hard for hours thanks to modern medicine. But we are in the top 10 of overpriced real estate. One can barely afford to live here. Where are our priorities?
I am not at odds with the church's teaching about a consistent ethic of life at all except that I believe that people should learn how to avoid pregnancy in the first place because abortion shouldn't be used as birth control. In many instances that is a little baby being aborted, not just a clump of cells. It's traumatic for women too. So why not promote birth control, for goodness' sake! Other people's morality is not an issue right now when we are the killingest nation on earth. Who cares about morality when our country is producing nuclear weapons, raping and pillaging the land, depleting natural resources, melting glaciers, letting its own people starve or die because they couldn't afford to see a doctor even though they have a job, or they can't even afford to buy antibiotics because a healing dosage costs over $100, we're killing innocent people abroad, training poor or ignorant young men to do their dirty work and allowing our schools to fall behind the rest of the industrialized countries...
We have to work as a society to erase fear, to eliminate poverty and weapons while building a culture that truly values all people. Then and only then can any one claim without sounding ridiculous that America is a country that cares about human life.
Once humanity begins to regard the already born as worthy of dignity and human rights, there will be a marked change in the abortion rate. When differences are settled by negotiation rather than brute force, the regard for human life will change. When people put down their guns, the politics of fear, and the love of money, the culture of life will flourish. Until then, the killing will continue.
The worst part of it is that the conservatives have adopted the jargon for the culture of life when in fact it is the liberals who have always embraced the culture of life. Liberals are not pro-abortion. Being "pro-choice" is just about as pro-abortion as "Pro-life" is about pro-life when you vote republican.
