In California, a consortium of abortion-advocacy groups and individuals has taken the name CA FAB. Abortion, though, is fabulously miserable — and stone cold evil.
It’s actually fabulously miserable — and stone cold evil.
C alifornia has declared that it wants to be a “sanctuary” for abortion. The group that the state has formed of abortion clinics, advocates, and government officials to ensure that dark future is called the California Future of Abortion Council, or CA FAB Council. Someone should have checked the acronym. What’s fab about it? Fabulously devoid of the moral sense Bill Clinton at least acknowledged with his “safe, legal, and rare” language. Long ago, Democratic advocates of abortion did not celebrate abortion — they at least bowed in their rhetoric to the fact that no one aspires to have an abortion. Not so much anymore.
One of the FAB priorities is to “meaningfully address misinformation and disinformation and ensure that access to medically accurate, culturally relevant, and inclusive education about abortion and access to care is widely and equitably available.” Would that instead we prioritized informed consent — that a pregnant woman or girl knows what her options are besides abortion. We’ve got to a point in our culture where abortion often appears to be preferred — by medicine, education, law, finances, families. The pressure is often too great even for a young woman who wants to be a mother, who knows she’s already a mother. Pretending that abortion is mere health care and necessary for women’s life in this world is lying to young people and insisting on repeating the mistakes of the last half century. Women deserve better than abortion: That’s one of the pleas from the pro-life movement in its attempt to save lives and rally America to its senses. Our young people deserve better from their elders, too. President Joe Biden, who was once pro-life, should be wiser than the most radical elements of his party. Instead, he is joining in their rampage on innocence and innocents.
“Working with the FAB Council, my colleagues and I will ensure [that] Californians and people from every state can get the reproductive health services they need in a safe and timely way — and that all our rights remain enshrined in law,” said the president pro tempore of the California senate. “This is crunch time, but we will not be dragged into the past. California will keep leading for the future.”
The future ought to acknowledge the bad science that undergirds legal abortion in America. The future shouldn’t let us all off the hook. We have a duty to help the girls and women in our lives receive the gift of life, even when it is not planned. Outside the Supreme Court on the day that the Mississippi abortion case was argued, mothers told stories of extraordinary things they were capable of after giving birth. Pregnancy is not the end of dreams. It’s the beginning of new ones, with the hope of new life and creation.
California governor Gavin Newsom uses the word “sanctuary” to describe what he wants California to be for abortion. There’s no sanctuary for the unborn babies whom he wants dead. Based on the times I’ve seen ambulances take women from an abortion clinic in Manhattan, safety doesn’t necessarily apply to the women either. Remember Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor whose clinic was barbaric to women? That should have been a moment that united us in loving women and their children better as individuals and as a society — by which I mean not only laws but all of civil society stepping up to the plate. Abortion is a brutal thing we pressure women and girls into. Newsom clearly doesn’t see the Orwellian nature of his language, but it has become ubiquitous in the mainstream Democratic Party. That Donald Trump of all people easily became an anti-abortion voice speaks to the excesses of the Left.
As the California FAB Council was making its recommendations on how California could keep competing with New York for the dishonorable distinction of being America’s abortion capital, the first step in the process of recognizing Dorothy Day as a saint was completed in Manhattan. Dorothy Day was radical in the best of ways — on fire for the gospel and truly living it, opposing war and all kinds of injustice, including abortion. She had an abortion early in her life and forever regretted it, long after she received God’s mercy for it in the sacrament of reconciliation. In 1971, she wrote in a letter:
I have seen such disastrous consequences, over my long lifetime, such despair, resulting in suicide, such human misery that I cannot help but deplore the breakdown of sexual morality. After all it involves life itself. We are aghast at the continuing and spreading warfare in the world — the waste of human life, and at home too with abortion used to save the resulting consequences of our acts from suffering, from the cross we impose upon them.
That’s the kind of wisdom we need to heed with courage, to embrace women with alternatives to abortion. You don’t even have to have a position on abortion to stake common ground on this good. What a fabulous change that would be.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.