Some years ago, Sr. Joan said (to the delight of the
pro-abortion establishment):
I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
A person on Facebook asked a question that The
Blogger Who Must Not Be Named reprinted: “Would you accept a 50% income tax
if it ensured that no woman would ever feel compelled to have an abortion
because of financial worries?” It’s the same question Sr. Joan asks from a
different angle — how far is the pro-life movement prepared to go to diminish
the incidence of abortion?
Despite
what Leslie Salzillo of the Daily Kos thinks, there are plenty of
pro-lifers who support government safety-net programs, especially those geared
toward poor single mothers. Contrapositively, there are also those who plug
abortion to save tax money paid in welfare; so it’s not as if the pro-life movement
has a monopoly on anti-tax tightwads.
Still, as Elizabeth
Stoker Bruenig points out, “If a woman considers herself too destitute to
care for a child, there is no transvaginal ultrasound demoralizing enough and
no accompanying narration excoriating enough to make her decision [to abort] seem
any less plausible.” So are we prepared to pay higher taxes if by doing so we
could see a reduction in abortions?
Wealth is Ephemeral
This is generally where Christians, especially Catholics,
start reading Christian social doctrine through ideological filters. “Did Jesus
mandate a welfare state?” a friend asks rhetorically, forgetting that arguments
from silence are at best equivocal. A recent discussion I had on Facebook with
another Catholic saw the libertarian shibboleth “involuntary confiscation of
wealthy [sic] by Caesar” turn up as
an inflammatory synonym for tax; it’s
almost as if the writer was begging me to refer to Luke
20:25 — “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” — so he could lay down some
devastating gloss that would trump all talk of safety-net programs.
No, Jesus didn’t mandate a welfare state, as far as we know;
but, by the same token of silence, neither did he forbid it. If Jesus didn’t
mandate a welfare state, neither did he mandate “means testing”, or restricting
our efforts to the “deserving poor”: giving to the deserving is not charity but rather justice. As
G. K. Chesterton said in another context, Jesus “never used a phrase that
made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in
which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral,
including the things that Aristotle thought eternal.” (The Everlasting Man, p. 195.)
Everything is ephemeral, including wealth. Christians really
have no business speaking as though they have a “right to be rich”, as the
world accounts riches; our treasure is supposed to be laid up in heaven (Matthew
6:19-21), and our lives do not consist in the abundance of our possessions
(Luke
12:15-21). We’re not required to be poor; as
I’ve argued elsewhere, only the “haves” can provide for the “have-nots”.
But wealth is no special sign of God’s favor, and may hold its possessor back
from Heaven (Matthew
19:23-24).
Avoiding the Challenge
Now, the Chittister Challenge is flawed in that it assumes
the only way to support a woman who would otherwise choose abortion is through
creation of government intervention programs. While an “absolute and
untouchable” right of property isn’t part of Christian tradition (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the
Church 177) — indeed, at the very beginning, Christians lived in common
and shared their means (Acts
4:32-37) — neither is what St. John Paul II called the “Social Assistance
State”, which as he said “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate
increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of
thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied
by an enormous increase in spending” (Centesimus
Annus 48; cf. CSDC 187). And, in fact, the Church
through its various agencies does provide means by which young single mothers
can be relieved of the financial pressure to abort their children.
Nevertheless, we’re arguing technicalities in order to evade
the thrust of the challenge. Would we be prepared to support by our taxes
government intervention if that
government intervention could assure us that no children would be aborted? (Let’s
grant, causa argumenti, that it
would.) How much of a tax burden would we cheerfully bear? Or are we only “pro-life”
to the extent that the life of the newborn doesn’t discommode us? What is more
important — the child’s right to live or our right of property?
The welfare state that we have exists because we haven’t
spent nearly the time, energy, or ingenuity needed to create and establish an
economics system that takes better care of our poor and gives them more
opportunity to rise out of poverty. Instead, we spend an inordinate amount of
time and endless pages of print on defending
the “wealth gap”, on defending a system that’s not only keeping the poor in
poverty but sucking wealth out of the middle class and replacing it with debt.
The welfare state is a standing indictment upon us as Christians, that we have
to have the State step in to make up for the shortfall in our voluntary programs.
Put up or shut up
Regardless of what you may think of Sr. Joan Chittister, the
fact remains that we have been challenged to “put up or shut up”. It’s the same
challenge St. James the Just posed to us over nineteen centuries ago: “If a
brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to
them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things
needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no
works, is dead.” (James
2:15-17)
For my own part, I would cheerfully accept any tax rate that
left me enough disposable income to live on if
those extra taxes were used by the government to insure that no woman would
feel pressured into abortion by her own financial situation. Bruenig, a
pro-life Catholic, supports a no-strings-attached child allowance of
$300/month/child. Her husband, Matt
Bruenig of Demos, has run simulations that demonstrate such an allowance
would reduce child poverty by 42%; similar payments have a track record of
success in the UK and the Nordic countries.
What would it cost? Who knows? But unless and until we
create a better economic system, one that makes a Social Assistance State
unnecessary, it’s still better than allowing financial pressure to push women
into the abortion clinics. And the money does does really belong to Caesar.
