But we need good moral people to make good moral laws and right not people base their decisions on whatever fear they hold and not on the fear of God.
When I said angry, I meant that they know the nurturing side of them dies each time they make the decision of killing a life, but the peer pressure from "friends, the shame of talking to their parents and others, and the guy they loved who doesn't want the baby they created all play a roll in the babies life.  We have had a whole generation of people being taught wrongly on what is Truth.  We have to meet people where they are.  The people who proudly flaunt their abortions are a small group, and I am guessing that they take on this I don't care mentality to cover the actual care they feel.

So how do we make it safe to have unwanted babies?  How do we help the woman get through the trauma (peer pressure, family, the guy not wanting it)?  I just wish I heard more conversations on this.

This is just my two cents.  I am not trying to cause waves I just think it is a lot more complicated issue and people are just handling the physical side of it and ignoring the psychological and spiritual.

We start by telling them to first marry "the guy they loved" and in general to stay very far away, both romantically and socially, from any guy who'd "doesn't want the baby they created". And also stay away from any so-called friends who'd condone such guys. Oh, but she's already got the situation to deal with. Well, it isn't too late to have that conversation with her.

That's how. Till this begins to sink in, everything else is Sisyphean. In general, Traditional Catholics get nowhere by allowing themselves to be co-opted by the discourse of those whom they're hoping to change. Of course, maintain charity and mercy. But never ever concede the boundaries of the battle out of misguided generosity.

But we need good moral people to make good moral laws and right not people base their decisions on whatever fear they hold and not on the fear of God.
When I said angry, I meant that they know the nurturing side of them dies each time they make the decision of killing a life, but the peer pressure from "friends, the shame of talking to their parents and others, and the guy they loved who doesn't want the baby they created all play a roll in the babies life.  We have had a whole generation of people being taught wrongly on what is Truth.  We have to meet people where they are.  The people who proudly flaunt their abortions are a small group, and I am guessing that they take on this I don't care mentality to cover the actual care they feel.

So how do we make it safe to have unwanted babies?  How do we help the woman get through the trauma (peer pressure, family, the guy not wanting it)?  I just wish I heard more conversations on this.

This is just my two cents.  I am not trying to cause waves I just think it is a lot more complicated issue and people are just handling the physical side of it and ignoring the psychological and spiritual.

"Where people are" is placing feelings over thought.  We have had a couple of generations of feminism indoctrinating women that principled decision making is a form of patriarchal oppression.  They (and men too) have lost the underlying philosophical assumptions necessary for understanding that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that we ought to choose what is right.  There is no foundation for people to do hard things because it is the right thing to do. 

It is probably safer and easier now for single women to have babies than at any other point in Western history.  They will get money from the government and not face social disgrace.  But it is still hard because having children, even under ideal conditions, is always hard. I was happily married and financially secure and, nevertheless, raising my children is the hardest thing I've ever done.  The psychological and spiritual issue is that people do not know how to tell right from wrong and how to do hard things. 

One of the main things that people need is the Catholic intellectual tradition: logic, philosophy, and theology.  What we can do is train ourselves to think and to pass this skill on to our children.  Emotions should be guided by intellect which should be formed by Church teaching.  Every person who learns how to think is a point of light in the darkness of our times.  We do not need more worrying about how people feel.  The unbalanced emphasis on feelings is one of the fundamental underlying problems of our culture.  Yet more emphasis on feelings is not the solution.

We don't know how many abortions there would have been if Roe vs Wade were still in place.  Perhaps it would have been far more than actually occurred. 

(It is actually a logical fallacy to assume that something that happened before another thing caused it.  There is even a fancy Latin name for it post hoc propter hoc which you can throw around if you want to impress people  That's what Latin is for, right?)

Not when it is a direct action of the matter in question. Roe being overturned should have a direct relationship to the number of abortions being performed. It is not an indirect side effect like the economy, COVID, etc. 

Not when it is a direct action of the matter in question. Roe being overturned should have a direct relationship to the number of abortions being performed. It is not an indirect side effect like the economy, COVID, etc.

It is perfectly possible that abortions went up because of Covid lockdowns. There was an increase in mental health issues and ѕυιcιdє.  Abortion would fit that pattern. Perhaps overturning Roe prevented the increase in abortions from being as big as it would be otherwise. 

It is perfectly possible that abortions went up because of Covid lockdowns. There was an increase in mental health issues and ѕυιcιdє.  Abortion would fit that pattern. Perhaps overturning Roe prevented the increase in abortions from being as big as it would be otherwise.

Re the graph in Reply #17, note its title references clinician-provided abortions. It does not count self-administered medication-induced terminations.

RU-486 was approved by the US FDA in 2000. In 2021 the FDA approved the use of mailed prescriptions. This past June, SCOTUS overturned a Louisiana injunction against these drugs as controlled substances. (Yes, our vaunted "conservative" SCOTUS.) In early 2023 post-Dobbs, DOJ had already ruled that the drugs could be legally delivered by USPS anywhere in the US regardless of local anti-abortion restrictions. Medication abortions now are the majority in the US (@ 54% in 2020, certainly higher now).

Thus given the above, I'd guess that the uptick during COVID was due to an increase in abortions after the medication limit of 70 days gestation. Long story short, if we recognize that an accurate picture in 2024 must include the full data on medication abortions, then we have to realize that the old calculus about who and why, and how to address it, completely changes.

What does this have to do with the subject line of this thread? It's that proponents of infanticide have succeeded in making it an increasingly hidden act. Women are able to hide it, and thereby politicians are able to hide their true stances on it. Everything is about subterfuge and appearances, subject to the realpolitik needs of the moment.

This follows from the entire (((j-m))) campaign toward "personal freedom", "respect for privacy", and so on. Translation: Do as thou wilt. Meanwhile, the public face of Catholicism is compelled to be self-effacing, except when it gets trotted out instrumentally as a human interest story.

For my part, because I never considered Vance a Catholic to begin with.

You know...you are absolutely right.  Just as I believe an excommunication of Peℓσѕι and Biden would be meaningless. I probably should have never considered Vance's "Catholicism" in the first place.

Here's some positive news :
Musk in his capacity as Czar of Government waste ( or something like that) wants to end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.
That would be excellent!

Yes.  Positive indeed.  Lack of funding would reduce their ability to perform abortions.  And then that decreases the number of abortions even if a state allows for it.