On abortion- some intrinsic evils are worse with other sins

Some have recently, due to my positions on charity and Health Care, accused me of "compromising with evil" on abortion.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I agree with the Roman Catholic Church that abortion is *always and everywhere* an intrinsic evil, and nothing can change that.

But there are levels to evil. The number of people affected is one. Who is to blame is another.

For abortion due to incest or rape- the full blame MUST fall on the man committing incest or rape. Any abortion the woman has to go through to maintain sanity, health, or avoid suicide, is his fault, and his fault alone.

For abortion to save the life of the mother- this is triage. And while being forced into the choice is evil, ethical doctors in emergency room or battlefield conditions are often forced to make this very choice- there are TWO patients here, and if you do nothing, both will die. I don't even call this truly abortion- the ethical doctor in this case *MUST* do a cesarean birth, and if the child fails to survive, well, it isn't entirely his fault. Ectopic pregnancy is the classic case of this, but it doesn't make the abortion any less evil, just less fault.

Having said that- abortions paid for by state health care systems, abortions that are solely for the "future economic conditions of the mother" (including teenage pregnancy), or worse yet are forced upon the woman by the father or grandfather of the child, are the shame of all of America, and all of us who earn a profit from capitalism and avoiding our duty to the poor and hopeless, are to some extent guilty of this great evil.

In a different economic system, every woman would have access to an ultrasound machine *and* the data it gives, before making the decision for abortion. Every woman would *be guaranteed* food, clothing, shelter, pre- and post-natal care for the first 5 years of a child's life (America currently only guarantees food). This is the shame of abortion. It's not only an intrinsic evil, it's a failure of charity, a failure to give the poor their due. It's a failure of subsidiarity at the lowest level where it would do the most good- the family. And it is those souls; the ones abandoned by parents and grandparents, and to some extent abandoned by the very system that sucks up the resources they would have used into bank accounts in New York City on Wall Street, that I mourn the most.

A million children a year are aborted in the United States, less than 2% of those are for the first two reasons above. The other 98% were abandoned, not just by their parents, but by all of us. That's why I support the Stupak Amendment. That's why I'd like to see WIC expanded to cover clothing, shelter, pre- and post-natal medical care. But most of all, it's an explanation as to why I don't think just making abortion illegal will work (much as I'd like to see that also)- because in doing that, we turn our back on these other great sins that are as much of a cause of abortion in this country as Planned Parenthood's genocide of the poor itself.