Enshrining the right to murder. . .

While folks are still sorting out what happened in Ohio, the reality is that this state has joined California and New York in the most liberal abortion laws in the country.  What is shocking is that this is a constitutional amendment and therefore hard to reverse.  What is even more shocking is the clear majority of voters who have decided that abortion is a woman's decision alone and that nothing can impinge upon her choices.  When this standard is used, it literally makes it impossible to restrict the right to kill the unborn child.  Every reasonable person must mourn for what happened in Ohio.

Remember that only a couple of generations ago our nation was uniformly certain that abortion was a radical choice, one which must only be used as a last resort and then to save the physical health of the mother.  Even during most of the debate post Roe v. Wade, the mantra was safe, legal, and rare from those who supported the decision of the court.  Now we are entering a new period in which a significant majority in Ohio and other predictable states as well as in most urban areas has grown up with abortion as normal and who insist that it remain safe, legal, and, for most, free.  It is the rare part that has disappeared and with it much of the heady enthusiasm from the decision of the Court to overturn Roe.

We live in at a time in which what was once deemed unthinkable has become the new normal.  Certainly this is true for the multiple choices of attraction and gender but with it comes the radical right to take a life because it was unplanned, inconvenient, or unwanted.  This goes well beyond the life in the womb.  It now applies to assisted suicide and to the euthanasia of the aged or infirm.  The cause for life was never simply about abortion but extends to all life from the womb to the tomb.  The more we take life out of that context and leave it to the science of reproductive technology and the whims of desire, the more fragile all our lives become. 

Of course, the woman is more than her womb but she is at least that -- her particular gift is an inherent part of her body and who she is.  The separation of the the self from the body has had far reaching consequences for the state of things in America.  This is the path ahead of us and we will have to each look deep inside ourselves to decide if this is who we are.  While the Christian already knows that answer, the rest of America cannot tender slogans as the currency of death.  Already there are places in America where the numbers of abortions are higher than the number of live births.  Is this what we want?  Is this who we are?