I will give you a Catholic's point of view on pro-life issues. I feel that I have no right to inflict my morals on another person. After reading a Gary Hart Op-Ed I learned this is a Jeffersonian viewpoint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/opinion/08hart.html
We need to link all pro-life issues together in the same sentence, especially capital punishment. Whenever somebody mentions abortion in a talk show or in an article they show say that in order to instill a real culture of life in this country then we should value ALL life. That means the unborn and those who are currently on death row. Yes, these people have commited nasty crimes, but how do you show value for life by taking life? That is the old testament way of doing things. The New Testament does not value retribution. It values forgiveness. Yes, these people should be held accountable for their crimes, but they should be put away in prison for the rest of their natural lives. It might even give them a chance to think about the wrong that they have committed. As a nice byproduct it would also save us money.
Many victims of crime who have to wait many years for their perpetrator to be killed don't feel any sense of relief after that person is killed. Their recovering has just been delayed by up to a decade. They will only recover when they can let go of their hate. If we can kill the culture of retribution then maybe that would help our world politics of retribution and fear also.
Next we need to emphasize improving the economic conditions of low income females. Abortions went down to the levels of 1970 under Pro-Choice Bill Clinton (that is before Roe V Wade in 1973) but increased under pro-life Bush. The only category that it increased under Bush was low income females.
http://www.e-thepeople.org/article/35976/view
We need to be heard on being proponents of adoptions instead of abortions, contraceptives and abstinence when possible instead of abortion and educating people on alternatives before they have abortions in a non-threatening manner.
We need to make people realize that women take getting an abortion very seriously. It is not a simple choice like choosing what blouse to where today. There is a lot of thought and soul searching involved. It would be nice if we could get some statistics to demostrate this.
We need to emphasize that some women might think it is more responsible to not have a baby if she can not care for and feed the baby appropriately. After all is it pro-life to have an economically poor woman have a child and not be able to afford to buy the baby food? Is it in the baby's interest to have the baby torn away from the mother by social services because she can't economically take care of the baby? How is that in the best interest of the baby?
I am not advocating that low income women not have babies. I just want to illustrate to people that many things need to be considered when deciding to give birth to a child. Maybe we should require that all abortion clinics give pregnant women literature that shows alternatives to abortion like adoption. Maybe we should give these low income women better pre-natal care. There are a ton of people out there who are just begging for a baby to adopt. Maybe we can have a program that connects these people together and the prospective adoptive parents would pay for the mother's pre-natal care. There are a whole host of ways to tackle this other than making it illegal.
To further illustrate the point is it pro-life to choose the life of a baby over a mother if giving birth to the mother will kill the mother? Who are we to choose who gets to live? Who gave a us permission to play God?
We should also talk about war and poverty as pro-life issues. We need to broaden the discussion to instill a true pro-life attitude in this country and not a culture of retribution.
