Starting to Get Answers on What Happens post-Dobbs
Evidence has now come in on two of the predictions in our July 2022 blog post, Post-Roe Stats: the Natural Experiment.
The first prediction: women dying
“We can be sure if there ever is a death from an illegal abortion, it will get major media coverage. Here, absence of evidence is evidence of absence . . . In the far more likely event that a woman dies from a legal abortion, it will probably remain as unmentioned by the media as has become customary throughout these decades.”
While the death of a healthy young woman happened on September 28, 2022, it’s only now coming out, in local news only, on September 22, 2023.
The second prediction: maternal mortality
As happened in Poland and Nicaragua, and in those states in Mexico with bans compared to those states without, we now know that post-Dobbs, maternal mortality went down.
In all cases, other things help account for that – in the U.S., maternal mortality went up because of Covid and is now going back down.
But the prediction that abortion bans would make maternal mortality go up has no evidence, since what happened is the opposite.
The Second Republican U.S. Presidential Debate
As with the first debate, euthanasia never came up. And while all candidates oppose racism and poverty, their ideas on solutions remain arguable.
The death penalty, however, made a major appearance. It was never a question, but Mike Pence veered off a question on healthcare to say he wanted mass shooters to have expedited executions. Aside from our opposition on moral grounds, this ignores that mass shooters often get shot dead during the incident. That danger already doesn’t deter them. No one on stage commented further.
Most discussion of war showed the customary lack of understanding its immorality, but a new point was offered by a couple of candidates – using the U.S. military against drug cartels in Mexico. As Jim Geraghty commented on this in the pro-military National Review “Using the military to blow up drug labs or bases of operation isn’t quite like trying to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, it’s more like using a flamethrower to kill mosquitos. I mean, you might get them, but you’re going to create a lot of new problems in the process.” Not to mention the impracticality of lobbing attacks on another country without that country’s government’s permission, which is unlikely to come.
Abortion was asked about once in the context of winning the swing state of Arizona when it might have a pro-abortion measure on the ballot. Again, neither the consistent life ethic nor pro-life feminism was on display and their presence would have been a major improvement. But at least Chris Christie emphasized being for life “for the entire life,” and added that all the discussion of fentanyl should include the importance of treatment.
Our Latest Blog Post
Because they often come up in discussions of abortion – by some as desirable alternatives, and by others as undesirable alternatives – Fr. Jim Hewes discusses Adoption and Foster Care.
Quotation of the Week
The Editors
“The Gospel of Life and Peace”
The Sign of Peace: Journal of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, page 3
Spring, 2009
When people in the peace movement dismiss or fall silent on pro-life issues, they reveal the extent to which they have been co-opted by US political culture and the long reach of the nation-state. They neglect the fundamental principle on which all peacemaking is grounded: the principle of nonviolence.