Violence Begets Violence

A man was arrested on his way to murder a Supreme Court justice. And it was a footnote the next day in a major national newspaper. Was it because it was Brett Kavanaugh, and that the particular newspaper isn’t happy he’s on the Court? That same paper had an above-the-fold “Inside an Attack on Democracy” story, referring to the January 6, 2021, hearings in Congress. That was an obvious attack. But what about this more recent assassination attempt on a Supreme Court justice? Reporting it beside a story on the January 6 hearings might be a wake-up call alerting us that we have a bipartisan problem in our country today.

Besides being one of the few to have a seat on this coequal branch of our national government, Kavanaugh is a husband and father to young children. It’s a chilling and abhorrent reality that people who serve in government are being targeted, protested, and threatened at their homes.

Later that night, when the arrest of Kavanaugh’s attacker was in the news, the president of the United States appeared on a late-night comedy show and talked about how “ridiculous” it was that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. This is a man who has claimed in another forum — a Catholic magazine, speaking to a priest — to be personally opposed to abortion. There is nothing in Joe Biden’s rhetoric lately that even suggests a modicum of respect for anyone who opposes abortion. And yet he is the president of the United States, a nation that includes us, too — those of us who look at sonograms and don’t pretend that we are not seeing what we are clearly seeing, a developing human baby. Biden recently even slipped and said that abortion is about having the right to abort “a child.” Thank you for the honesty, even if it was a slip. Children die in abortions.

When we face that reality, a whole lot else in our culture makes sense. We see the faces of children who die in school shootings. There is an image of a girl from Uvalde, Texas, in her First Communion dress a week or so before that I hope I never get out of my mind. Such innocence. We’re right to want to take measures to protect children from something like that ever happening again — a troubled young person getting his hands on a powerful firearm and making his way into a school, and being there, unchallenged, for so long. But how about reflecting on the violence of abortion? We have no consistency when it comes to protecting human life.

Being a mother is the most remarkable gift. It’s also a life-changing challenge. Single mothers are remarkably courageous. So are birth mothers. It’s amazing to recognize that there is life in your womb and to discern that you are not ready to raise that child and then to give birth to her anyway in a culture that pretends that killing that child is just another choice in life or a simple health-care choice. She is overcoming such pressure and making a beautiful sacrifice for life. We should celebrate women and girls who acknowledge their motherhood, and we should do all we can in civil society and policy — in our own lives — to support them. Rather than “shouting your abortions,” we should rally around women in the style of a group called BraveLove — they have events thanking birth mothers. There is no shame in choosing adoption for your child. There is no shame in choosing life for your child.

There is such extreme violence in our culture because of abortion. And it’s gotten to the point that the targeting of a Supreme Court justice for assassination doesn’t earn universal condemnation because he’s likely to vote to undo the Supreme Court case nearly a half century ago that — on a basis of bad law, bad science, and bad reason — made up a supposed constitutional right to abortion in all three trimesters of pregnancy. The end of Roe is not the end of abortion in America, as much as I would be grateful if the evil were eradicated. It will mean debates in the states.

There are people in New York City who blockade churches regularly now, when some of us try to leave Mass to pray outside nearby abortion clinics. They shout, and some of them get very close to violent. Could we actually talk rather than watch abortion advocates cheering on a performance artist simulating an abortion in front of the church — once burnt down by people who hated Catholics? Otherwise, the activists seem to be making the point of an upcoming book by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. When you sever the bond between a mother and her child and pretend that this is simultaneously no big deal and a foundation of women’s rights, freedom, and health care, we have got a terminal problem in the United States of America.

There are reports that there is going to be an uptick in violence if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Already we have seen attacks with graffiti and arson on modest pro-life ministries around the country. These ministries are often run on donations, and they exist to make sure that pregnant women in need actually have the chance to choose life. So a group claiming revenge attack places that help women. You’re not about women if you do that or support similar violence. You’re about abortion.

Reasonable people can have a debate about abortion. We can come together on policies to help women be moms, or to choose adoption. We don’t all have to agree on ending all abortion — though I hope reason and science and good law and human decency and generosity might get us there. Let’s work to protect innocent human life and motherhood — and grieve the losses and acknowledge the pain of so many millions of abortions over all the decades since Roe.

Joe Biden predicts a political “revolution” if Roe is overturned. How about a revolution of love? John Paul II mapped it out three decades ago in his Gospel of Life. What a historic opportunity to reject violence and give it a try.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.