Love and Responsibility

Social Responsibility for the Least of These defining campaigns.

An article appeared in todays Dallas News indicating that there is more to living the Gospel than shouting down Abortion:

"Any movement starts out as, you're against something," he said. "It's kind of like the middle-school years. You define yourself by what you hate, what you're not. And as you grow up, you have to start defining yourself by who you are, by what you want to build. That's where we are right now."

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/religion/stories/012408dnpolevangelicals.2b6d111.html

Anti-Abortionists are taking a more global approach for maximal effectiveness: change the socio-economic structures to make the country more hospitable to pregnant women carrying their babies to term and they will be far less likely to abort. A woman with no skills or education in her teens or early 20s who is pregnant without any familial infrastructure of support is far less likely to want to keep her child than one who has paid for health care, housing and educational opportunities. Change the environment, they argue, and you will change the "choice" equation.
Merely coercing under criminal penalty someone to maintain a healthy pregnancy could have the opposite effect of causing someone to jump off a bridge- The matured element of the movement is looking at the incentive structures carefully in society. Coercion always has a way of backfiring. Republicans who traditionally didn't want to create any pregnancy related incentives because they view that as paying someone for their assumed immorality, are now looking more compassionately and less judgmentally at the "unfunded mandate" aspect of compelling someone to maintain a pregnancy without any support mechanisms making it truly possible. Whereas the more neanderthal judgmental assumption is that someone's pride or selfishness caused an abortion, the socio-economic realities of skyrocketing foreclosures, homelessness, hunger and unemployment compel a more honest look at the economic disincentives to maintaining a healthy pregnancy to full term.
A woman so emotionally or financially desperate that she kills off her offspring if under a coercive legal regime is just going to go into her bathroom and shoot herself up with 407 cleaning solution or any other toxin potentially wrecking herself for life. There are a thousand under the radar ways to induce a miscarriage. Society as a whole fails women who fall into the desperate choice of abortion where it should fill in the gaps left void by familial neglect or abuse.

That is why evangelicals are looking closely at fighting Poverty as a moral mandate- a Matthew 25 mandate that separates the bleating goats from the sheep.

Taking care of people unavoidably involves economic assessments and incentives.

George Soros has an article worth reading in the Financial Press- he is concerned that we are seeing the worst economic market melt-down in 60 years: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1a7af090-c956-11dc-9807-000077b07658.html