How would criminalization of abortion help black women/children?

FindLaw’s Sherry F. Colb writes about the “Black Children Are An Endangered Species” billboards:

But what might one do to address the abortion disparity? The anti-abortion movement seeks to criminalize abortion and to persuade people to work toward criminalization. In the meantime, the movement also tries to discourage individual women from seeking abortions. If the billboard’s audiences wish to do something to help the “endangered” black child, however, and accordingly seek to criminalize abortion, this move will not obviously do anything to empower the African-American community.

Criminalizing the termination of pregnancy would not provide a magic solution to the disparities. In the wake of legislation banning abortion, black women seeking abortions would not suddenly want to take their pregnancies to term, nor would they find affordable the prospect of an expanding family. Families that are pessimistic about the lives their potential children would face would not magically become optimistic on this score. Rather, the only thing likely to change with criminalization is that an African-American woman who wanted an abortion would have a more difficult time getting one, and, as a result, might fall prey to the back-alley or might give birth to children she did not want and did not feel equipped to have.

Read the rest here.

Stewardship lost

The Guardian’s Juliette Jowit wrote:

For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, [Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature] has warned.

Conservation experts have already signaled that the world is in the grip of the “sixth great extinction” of species, driven by the destruction of natural habitats, hunting, the spread of alien predators and disease, and climate change.

Read the rest here.

Not just the charism of the Legion of Christ

Houston Seventh-day Adventist and one-time Catholic Bill Cork goes to the theological heart of the debate over the future of Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi. The central Catholic theological question is of charism. As Cork explains:

In Catholic theology and spirituality of religious life, founders of religious orders have a unique charism (gift of the spirit) that the church is affirming when it establishes that order. But what happens when it is revealed that the founder was evil? That’s what the Catholic church is wrestling with now in the wake of the revelations about Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi. And it’s also clear that the church knew there were problems from the very beginning. As a young man, Maciel was booted from one seminary to another – formators saw he had problems. He began gathering boys to himself, and grooming them to imitate his spirituality, mandating that they never speak ill of him, but always reverently call him “Nuestro Padre.” He created a regimented order of priests, based on the Roman legions. He mandated their behavior down to minute details such as how they used knife and fork, how they sat, how they dressed, and how they laughed. “The Stepford priests” is how some referred to them.

Read the rest here. It deserves a thorough reading. Especially:

The lesson in all of this for me is that conservatives need to be very careful in reacting to problems in the church (any church). You may be unhappy with things being done in the name of your church, with theological dissent and with those who question traditional morality. You may see those on the conservative edge as being a counter balance. You may be drawn to their zeal, and their orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But beware. Satan can pull people off track to the right as well as to the left. He can appear as an angel of light, so that the very elect run the risk of being deceived. Be careful.