From Inhabitatio Dei (a great blog I just discovered), Moral Equivalence, War, and Abortion:
Read the whole thing.I am utterly against the liberal platitudes that would seek to minimize the importance of abortion within our public discourse. But likewise I am utterly against the sort of ethic of innocence that is utilized to establish abortion as an utterly unique instance of horrific violence that trumps all others. What makes forms of violence morally serious cannot depend on the innocence or non-innocence of those who suffer them. What makes violence morally serious is not that it falls on people who are innocent, but that it falls on persons who are human.
As such I get uncomfortable at the way many conservatives seek to elevate the issue of abortion to a pedestal above all other issues of violence and coercion in our culture. To use the seriousness of abortion as a shield against having to think about the moral severity of militarization, torture, and genocide is just as reprehensible as those who use such issues to downplay the seriousness of abortion. John Paul II was correct to include all of these horrors within his indictment of the “culture of death.” Seeking to do some sort of moral algebra within the culture of death to determine which is the “worst” seems like an utterly wrong question.
