TaxProf Blog: NY Times Op-Ed: ‘You Can’t Protect Some Life And Not Others’

New York Times Op-Ed: ‘You Can’t Protect Some Life and Not Others,’ by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year)):

With over a year to go until the presidential election, I am already dreading what this next political season will feel like — the polarity, the vitriol, the exhaustion, the online fighting, the misinformation, the possibility of another Trump nomination. I already know that I won’t feel represented by the platforms of either party. I know I’ll feel politically estranged and frustrated.

People like me, who hold to what the Roman Catholic cardinal Joseph Bernardin called a “consistent ethic of life” and what the Catholic activist Eileen Egan referred to as “the seamless garment” of life don’t have a clear political home. A “whole life” ethic entails a commitment to life “from womb to tomb,” as Bernardin said, and it also champions policies that aid those who are vulnerable or economically disadvantaged. Bernardin, who died in 1996, argued that a consistent ethic demands equal advocacy for the “right to life of the weakest among us” and “the quality of life of the powerless among us.” Because of this, it combines issues that we often pry apart in American politics.

The whole life movement, for instance, rejects the notion that a party can embrace family values while leaving asylum-seeking children on our Southern border in grave danger. Or that one can extend compassion to those children, while withholding it from the unwanted child in the womb. A whole life ethic is often antiwar, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-euthanasia and pro-gun control. It sees a thread connecting issues that the major party platforms often silo.

For example, in his encyclical “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis blamed “throwaway culture” for both environmental degradation and widespread elective abortions. These are not divergent political ideas to him; they share the same root impulse. Throwaway culture “affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish.” …

[I]f those of us who hold this view actually live out a consistent ethic of human life and persistently articulate it as the rationale for our political engagement, it has the capacity to help depolarize our political system. …

Those of us who articulate a whole life ethic make it possible for others to give voice to their own alienation and dissent from the dissatisfying nature of our present political discourse.

As the saying goes, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” There is no reason that the current bundling of political issues must continue interminably. Those of us who feel morally alienated from both parties must speak up and offer hope for a different sort of politics in America.

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Other New York Times op-eds by Tish Harrison Warren: