More on Being Pro-Life and Anti-SCHIP Expansion

Notre Dame law professor Rick Garnett has a good post at Mirror of Justice titled "Pro-Life, but against S-Chip expansion?", which details the efforts of some outfit calling itself "Catholics United" to call into question the "pro-life" credentials of 10 members of Congress who voted against the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Rick quotes Ryan Anderson's response at The Weekly Standard titled "A Hijacking in Progress", which asks "How did S-Chip become a pro-life issue?":

... IF YOU DON'T support using federal funds to help middle-class families get health insurance, then you can't call yourself pro-life. Or so says Catholics United, a "non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting the message of justice and the common good found at the heart of the Catholic Social Tradition."

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What this group has really done is to take its favored policy and baptize it in the name of the church. We can expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in 2008, as Democrats search for religious voters and progressive religious organizations do the leg work. These groups claim to rise above the fray of partisanship, dedicating themselves to elevating the national conversation from the mud-slinging of the "religious right." But if you disagree with them about the prudence of this particular bill you're not really pro-life. Everything is now a moral issue. And there is no room for disagreement.

The pro-life jabs are particularly distasteful and destructive. They are nothing more than gross moral equivocation and the intentional hijacking of language. If every poverty-fighting bill under the sun becomes a "pro-life" bill, then the words lose all meaning. According to its website, Catholics United is a pro-life group dedicated to protecting the 1.3 million Americans killed every year by abortion. Yet it is leading the charge to eviscerate the clear meaning that the words "pro-life" have had in the American context for the past generation: opposition to legalized abortion coupled with support for mothers facing crisis pregnancies...

(emphasis added)

Rick, who is also a contributor at Vox Nova, should post this over there, although I'm guessing the reaction of Tony A / Morning's Minion would be fairly predictable. He is already on record that coming out against the expansion of SCHIP means that one is insufficiently "pro-life", lacking in "family values", and unworthy of being called "compassionate". And, after all, Tony has assured us that, while "banning abortion often does not really impact on its incidence", the expansion of SCHIP "will do more to lower the abortion rate in the US".

This, despite the fact that a watering down or outright removal of existing pro-life provisions, as well as an end-run around the federal law banning the use of tax dollars for abortion services, has led the National Catholic Register to describe the Democrat Congress' SCHIP expansion as a pro-choice "Trojan horse".


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
A "Truce" on Abortion?

National Catholic Register: "Vetoing Children’s Health Care?"

"S-Chipping Away Pro-Life Protections?"