NCR:"Palin Family Values and the Abortion Debate"

"Perhaps the most absorbing element of this election season is the spectacle of abortion activists and media analysts grappling with both Gov. Sarah Palin’s decision to spare the life of her Down syndrome child and her teenage daughter’s decision to continue her pregnancy and marry the father of her unborn child.

As a group of talking heads on television expressed their amazement at the state of the Palin household, I thought of William May, my moral theology professor at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, and his penchant for poking holes in the tortured logic of abortion advocates. May could nail the source of abortion supporters’ present discomfort in a nanosecond: Palin’s family choices directly challenge arguments that justify abortion as the “lesser evil.”

Since the ’60s, reproductive rights activists have presented abortion as perhaps the best solution for the scourge of teenage pregnancy, inner-city poverty, gender inequality, and the suffering experienced by disabled infants and their families. But May didn’t buy those arguments: “If abortion is the ‘lesser evil,’” he used to tell our class, “then the alternative — keeping the baby — constitutes the ‘greater evil.’ But how can that position be proved?”...more