I’ll get to the rest of your comment later this morning. God bless.

The italics should go off after “you” in the last sentence of the first paragraph response to premise 1. In the second paragraph of that response, first sentance, “telos” should be italicized and nothing else. In the fourth line of that same paragraph, “means” should be italicized and nothing else. Same paragraph, line 13, “raison d’etre” should be italicized and nothing else. That should do it. Thanks again.

I can edit your remarks to get your italic under control if you let me know where.

I think part of the struggle is where to draw line. The pro-life movement seems pretty comfortable working with 3 exception folks and in fact has a lot of them in their leadership. This compromise is ultimately in the long run untenable, but prudence dictates we tolerate it and save it for a day when we can effect that change. As has been made manifest over the past half dozen months by prolife activists, a President Obama would have the opportunity to cause harm to progress that has been made in the fight for the unborn. Without the expectation that Obama would ban say third trimester abortion – which by the way no one expects McCain to do or even propose – are there policy goals we could seek with a President Obama to help the unborn? Are there not things he could do that could help our cause? I think a lot of Obama supporters are looking for that, hence some of the tortured reasoning. Ultimately what they are trying to achieve is breaking the dichotomy of being anti-abortion and pro-abortion and instead introduce a scale where we are progressing toward eliminating abortion or regressing from that task.

I’m not exactly sure what you are getting at with regard to the application of positive law to abortion. From what I gather, your argument is roughly the following: (please correct me if I’m wrong- I don’t want to be attacking any straw men here)

Nearly everywhere and at every time abortion has been illegal, positive law did not punish abortion and murder equally, even though the two are morally equivalent. This shows that even in times and places where abortion has been outlawed, there has been a conviction on the part of society, reflected in its positive law, that abortion is not what the Catholic faith claims it to be- murder. Since even the most unborn-protective legal regimes have not perfectly reflected Catholic doctrine on this matter, it is unreasonable for the pro-life movement to set, in the context of contemporary society, a primary and non-negotiable [i.e., it cannot be set aside until a more auspicious time] goal of the legal protection of all unborn persons.

Again, I hope this is a fair representation of your argument. I believe that implicit in this argument are several hidden premises.

1) The established pro-life movement has set a benchmark for itself which is practically unattainable.

To this I would say that every economic, political, and societal movement is animated by a telos which is practically unattainable. The anti-war movement is animated by the ideal of worldwide peace. The women’s movement is animated by the ideal of perfect equality between the sexes. The pro-life movement is animated by the desire that the dignity of human life be perfectly reflected in the political and social order. That these movements have not succeeded in enshrining their respective ideals in positive law doesn’t mean that all their striving in the legal sphere has been in vain and should be abandoned. Nobody says that since legal measures haven’t brought full equality to women we should abandon all anti-discrimination legislation and simply change hearts and minds. Nobody says that since we have not achieved peace in the international order that we should scrap international law and simply focus on changing hearts. [Ok, maybe some people believe this, but you don’t do you?;)]

At this point someone may make the objection that we should reframe the telos of the pro-life movement- the ideal should be to prevent any and all abortions. Having framed the end of the movement in this way, we are free to will whatever means it takes to achieve that end. Therefore, we can abandon legal remedies (since they are practically unattainable [for the sake of argument, lets assume that this is true]) and focus entirely on other non-legal remedies, such as attacking the causes of abortion and attempting to change people’s minds. To such an objection I would say this: the rise of the Catholic pro-life movement has been a direct response to changes in the social and political order, not to abortion itself (which, alas, has always been with us). Casti Connubii sounded the alarm on these (then incipient) changes in the social and political order and a flood of life-related papal documents have followed in its wake. Therefore the raison d’etre for the movement is not simply to end abortion [a societal imperative which has always and will always be with us] but to change the political and societal order to reflect the dignity of the human person. This is absolutely crucial. Many of the vehement disagreements with regard to abortion here at VN are, at their root and source, a disagreement with regard to the proper end of the pro-life movement

There are other hidden premises in the argument above but I will have to save them for later…

Not all murders are treated the same by the positive law. Abortion should be treated like a particularly heinous kind of premeditated murder, because it objectively is in fact a particularly heinous kind of premeditated murder.

Fair enough if you do, but that would be a first in history (or maybe a second..)

The Magisterium of the Church seems to disagree with you about the facts.

“There is no country where legislation does not forbid and punish murder. Furthermore, many countries had specifically applied this condemnation and these penalties to the particular case of procured abortion.”

And how in God’s name did you twist this text to claim abortion is more morally grave than infanticide? They are equal in moral gravity.

Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception. In this regard the reproach of the Prophet is extremely straightforward: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Is 5:20).

MM wrote:
So there is no requirement in the positive law to punish equally, just because they are equally grave violations of the right to life under the natural law.

EV again:

“But today, in many people’s consciences, the perception of its gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behaviour and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake.”

[...]

“The moral gravity of procured abortion is apparent in all its truth if we recognize that we are dealing with murder and, in particular, when we consider the specific elements involved. The one eliminated is a human being at the very beginning of life. No one more absolutely innocent could be imagined. In no way could this human being ever be considered an aggressor, much less an unjust aggressor! He or she is weak, defenceless, even to the point of lacking that minimal form of defence consisting in the poignant power of a newborn baby’s cries and tears.”

Get that: the moral gravity of abortion is even greater than that of infanticide, because the unborn child doesn’t even have the defence of crying.

It’ll be a couple hours before I am home and have time to respond to your last post. Until then…