The state of California has declared that it wants to be a "sanctuary" for abortion. The Golden State powers-that-be have assembled the California Future of Abortion Council (FAB) to make that wish a reality. Someone should have checked the acronym. What's fab about it? It's fabulously devoid of the moral sense that Bill Clinton's "safe, legal and rare" language at least acknowledged. Not that long ago, Democratic advocates of abortion did not celebrate the life-ending procedure, at least in public. Not so much anymore.
One of FAB's 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 gotten to a point in our culture where abortion often appears to be preferred -- by medicine, education, law and families. Women deserve better than abortion; the pro-life cause knows this. 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.
Outside the Supreme Court the day the Mississippi abortion case was argued, mothers told stories of the extraordinary things they were capable of after giving birth. Pregnancy isn't the end of dreams, but the beginning of new ones, with the hope of new life and creation.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom uses the word "sanctuary" to describe what he wants California to be for people seeking to have an abortion. There's no sanctuary for the unborn babies. Remember Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor whose clinic was a grisly house of horrors? That should have been a moment that united us as a society in loving women and treating their children better -- not just legally but in every sense. Abortion is a brutal thing that we pressure women and girls into. Newsom clearly doesn't see the grim nature of his language, but it's become ubiquitous in the mainstream Democratic party.
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As the FAB Council was making its recommendations on how California could keep in competition with New York for the capital of abortion in the country, the first step in the process of recognizing Dorothy Day as a saint was completed in Manhattan. Day, a journalist, activist and anarchist, was radical in the best of ways -- loving the Gospel and truly living it, opposing war and all kinds of injustice, including abortion. She had an abortion early on, and forever regretted it.
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 if we want to embrace women and provide true alternatives to abortion. You don't even have to have a strong position on abortion to appreciate Day's common sense. If only more people were in the market for it.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.
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