Persuasion preferred

...If Catholic prelates have sometimes been intemperate in their attacks on prochoice Catholic politicians, the alternative is not silence on an important moral issue about which the church has a definite teaching...

...Many people on both sides of the issue argued that the money would better be spent on direct help to women and children...

...Until relatively recently this silent crowd included a number of my Orthodox coreligionists...

...They have a point there, but they lose me when they act as if there were something inherently evil about the use of advertising or public relations...

...In the case of people seeking to lead, it is not only important it is an obligation, one that has not been met by people afraid of elections, and the reason it has not is, pretty obviously, a combination of moral cowardice and amoral ambition...

...I stick with "prolife" and "prochoice...

...It is important for anyone who believes this to try to communicate that belief, whatever the legality of the choice might be...

...One of those successes has been in convincing a large number of people that the primary issue here is choice, as if the simple freedom to choose were in itself a moral category, one so important as to eclipse completely the question of the fetal life (which is surely human life, even if its personhood can be philosophically questioned...

...The most obvious recent use has been by those who support the legal right of a woman to choose abortion under any circumstances, as opposed to those who would limit access to abortion to women whose lives are in some way endangered by pregnancy, or those who have suffered rape or incest...

...I am sure she is right...

...Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon has pointed out that the United States has the most permissive abortion laws in the industrial West and at the same time offers the least help to women and children...

...C. S. Lewis, Christian Behaviour This quote, lifted from A. N. Wilson's very good new biography of C. S. Ixwis, made me think of the use of choice as a moral category...

...They also miss the fact that the prochoice movement has achieved considerable successes using precisely the medium of advertising and public relations...

...I have thought for a long time that pro-life people should not concentrate on the legal arena but rather the area of persuasion...

...Under current U.S...

...The point should be to suggest that, however important the legal right to choose may be, the things we choose to do, or refuse to do, define us as individuals and as a society...

...While freedom of choice may indeed be an important political principle, it is not in and of itself moral...

...In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of abortions continue, there is not enough simple honesty about family planning in official Catholic quarters, and most people in our truly weird culture stand around doing nothing, as if the issue were a merely religious quarrel, or embarrassing...

...Law is coercive by nature, and coercion is a bad place to begin a discussion...

...Of course, I should not choose them but I may do so...

...this has not yet been argued well, by Governor Cuomo or anyone else who takes that position, but I think it could be done...

...law a woman may choose to have an abortion...

...And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life you are slowly turning this central thing into either a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...

...The possibility of civil dialogue has been limited here by prochoice people who refer to their opposite numbers as "antichoice," and by prolife people who refer to their opposite numbers as "antilife" or "pro-abortion...

...But the choice of abortion exists for complex reasons which too many prolife people have ignored...

...The prochoice movement has reacted to attempts to limit access to abortion as if they were morally equivalent to earlier attempts to limit access to contraception, and as if there were a simple sort of moralistic and religiously inspired continuum here...

...There was an outcry from a number of prochoice people when the Catholic bishops announced an expensive public relations campaign to try to persuade people that our society's approach to abortion is wrong...

...I have the legal right to spend all day reading dreadful romances or watching television, to name two brain-rotting activities, or I may drink myself to death, or believe in racist theories...

...They should not be faulted for turning to professionals...

...Civility demands more respect for your opposite number's point of view than that, at least an assumption that she or he has assumed it in good faith...

...Nevertheless, abortion is at the very least a brutal form of retroactive contraception, and does in fact destroy a life which in another instance might be cherished...

...A recent New York Times story mentions the efforts of Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee who, on this subject and a number of others, listened to the concerns of women in his diocese and responded with more sensitivity than we have been accustomed to from either side of the issue...

...In a confused climate confused not least by politicians more eager to follow poll results than to take the risks real leadership involves I can see why the Catholic bishops have turned to public relations...

...Those of their own number who, through ill-considered denunciations of prochoice Catholic candidates, have managed to get them elected...

...but this ignores the interesting and conveniently forgotten fact that Planned Parenthood once opposed abortion as a form of baby-killing, an evil that resulted from limiting access to contraception...

...now several of our bishops have begun speaking more publicly about abortion, and are active in the prolife movement, as are a growing number of Orthodox clergy and laypeople...

...I think it can be argued that someone who opposes abortion personally may still support prochoice legislation, on the lesser-of-two-evils principle...

...Fat chance of that, as long as the uncivil people on both sides prevail...

...Pharmaceutical technology may make the whole issue irrelevant at the legislative level...

...I would like to suggest that rather than a concentration on what ought to be forbidden under force of the law, the emphasis should instead be on what it is we mean to encourage in our society -among families, within families (both stable and dissolving ones), and between families and the larger societal structures...

...She sees a connection between these sad facts...

...I do hope, though, that the campaign is centered not on legislative issues, but on the attempt to persuade people that abortion is not a humane decision, in the great majority of cases...

...It will remain an important moral choice, and if the Catholic bishops have not been able to get that message across by other means, I really can't fault them for trying this one...

...All of these options are mine to choose...

...The widespread choice of abortion is a tragedy, something the most vocal prochoice people either ignore or downplay...

...If the proposed campaign is conducted in this spirit, it will be a genuine advance.nuine advance...

...Rude folks, all of them, and letters from any of them (to the tune of "How can you not call them [fill in the blank prodeath, antilife, antichoice whatever insulting term you like]") will not be answered...

...None of them are good choices, though laws forbidding me to do any of them would be dangerous...

...OF SEVERAL MIHDS John Garvey PERSUASION PREFERRED EDUCATING FOR CHOICE Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before...

...But when Michael Dukakis was running for president, there was not a word forthcoming from Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos about the inappropriateness of Dukakis's prochoice stand...

...Planned Parenthood's earlier opposition to abortion has been well-documented and the organization really ought to deal with it more honestly...

...Who should they turn to...