I'll never be able to support your current patronage of Planned Parenthood, or the contradiction of saying that abortion is a right even though it clearly destroys the right to life of the unborn on the bogus pretext that they are not persons or are not valuable enough as persons to be protected. I'll not agree that utility is the value of a human being. Human life is intrinsically valuable and no one has the right to trump that most fundamental right with less fundamental ones.
Mother Teresa rightly told officials of Calcutta that the value of those she cares for, even if they can't work, is that they can love. They can bring more love into the world. That, more than anything else, has saved this world. As Sting sang convincingly (in my view), "..the Russians love their children too." Children bring us to reason and to truly weigh what is worthwhile. Abortion devalues the innocent and helpless who give us that invaluable ethos -- that loving those who have nothing immediately to give us back is what investing in America is all about. The beginning of that is protecting life.
We can look at Russia and Europe to understand that national health, welfare and security is at risk because of underpopulation and ideological distortions of family life and faith. For eighty years ideologues of one-party rule forced hundreds of millions of people to live in conflict with their own mass common sense. It nearly destroyed an entire culture by damaging women and families with this oxymoron of "abortion as health care."
Despite this current, fundamental difference, I look forward to working across our disagreements not only to end abortion, but to end wars that aren't about defending human life but about securing resources that we could otherwise do without through the exercise of ingenuity, courage, resourcefulness and intelligence. These are the same issues. Elective abortion is, as eugenicists use it in the main, a resource war against the unborn by those who argue that unwanted, unborn children are an obstacle to prosperity.
The state of mind that doesn't want a child that was invited by conduct and its known risk; that is related by blood to the parents; that will bring joy to blood or adoptive parents; that will increase love in the world, is the problem not of the unborn child but of the society at large which tolerates these narcissisms to point of distorting the law with them. Enough said for now. It's a central issue and it isn't a "one-issue" matter.
Despite this big difference, and if it may be resolved creatively and with common sense; if we can put away your party's tendency to let its extremists label pro-lifers as fools not to be heard; and if we can take each other as seriously in political forums as we do when we need each others' help in everyday life, we will have become not just a great America but a good America. We can't have the first without the second.
