A Consistent Life Ethic: Comments on Joe Schriner

I promised to comment on the Joe Schriner answers, and was hoping to put a few more posts between the original and this, but life is getting very busy, and I’m having a harder time getting things posted than I’d hoped. So, here we go.

The first thing I want to say is that I love his strong belief in a “Consistent Life Ethic.” Relatively early in my interest in politics, I came across certain articles that strongly affected me. One of them was an article in “Christianity Today” talking about the damage done by the “death movement” in the US, and cited the three main parts of that movement as abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. I spent a lot of time rethinking that. Being at the time a good Republican, I was all for condemning abortion and euthanasia, but I found it difficult to condemn capital punishment. I still, actually, struggle with that one.

What it did, though, is get me thinking about what it means to be “pro-life.” It’s a nice catchy label used by the anti-abortion movement, but how many of us are really pro-life? I’ve talked about the difference between pro-life and anti-abortion stances in a few different posts, and won’t recap that here. I think it’s obvious.