{"id":5242,"date":"2006-01-22T11:42:50","date_gmt":"2006-01-22T11:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/saletan-right-but-so-wrong.html"},"modified":"2006-01-22T11:42:50","modified_gmt":"2006-01-22T11:42:50","slug":"saletan-right-but-so-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/saletan-right-but-so-wrong.html","title":{"rendered":"Saletan, right but so wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

It would be interesting to meet and talk with Will Saletan. To watch him work through his obviously divided mind on the abortion issue. To make him defend statements like this:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Roe is 33 years old today. It freed us from ham-fisted criminal laws that pretended to solve the abortion problem. But it didn’t solve the problem, and it never will. It gave us the opportunity – and the challenge – to help women exercise choice before, not after, fetal development. In the moral arc of history, abortion was a step forward from infanticide.<\/strong> Abortion pills that act early in pregnancy are the next step, followed by morning-after pills, which prevent implantation. The ultimate destination is contraception or abstinence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The point of his piece is that the abortion rights movement ignores abortion, and should address it forthrightly- should make decreasing the instance of abortion a part of its package, as it recognizes the reality that while most Americans do not support total criminalization of abortion, neither are they happy with the procedure.<\/p>\n

But Saletan himself commits the very sin he names. For he ignores abortion – the reality of it. His framing of the moral issue blasts this loud and clear, indicating that he doesn’t see abortion as the taking of a human life but as pregnancy, er, prevention. This is not the cause of the un-ease with abortion which he addresses. The un-ease is rooted in the unspoken knowledge of what abortion is and does, the reality of death that haunts the culture and warps it more with each passing year. <\/p>\n

And, as we’ve discussed here before, no way no how that the core of the abortion rights movement is ever going to agree to describing abortion as anything but neutral in its public face.  <\/p>\n

And Saletan, your moral arc reaches all the way around and consumes itself. <\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Mark Stricherz is harsher in his assessment, calling his post on this piece "When a Pro-Choice Intellectual becomes unhinged."<\/a><\/p>\n

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Mr. Saletan\u2019s thesis is shot through with false statements, absurdities, straw men, and propaganda. If his previous writings were not smart and lucid, I would conclude that his Times<\/em> piece was written by a spokesperson for Sen. Hillary Clinton. But since there is no reason to think it was, my guess is that this was a momentary flight from reason. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It would be interesting to meet and talk with Will Saletan. To watch him work through his obviously divided mind on the abortion issue. To make him defend statements like this: Roe is 33 years old today. It freed us from ham-fisted criminal laws that pretended to solve the abortion problem. But it didn’t solve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSaletan, right but so wrong - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/saletan-right-but-so-wrong.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Saletan, right but so wrong - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It would be interesting to meet and talk with Will Saletan. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}