Letter to Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com

On June 12, 2009 Joan Walsh appeared on the Foxnews program the o'Reilly Factor to discuss the killing of Dr. Tiller and abortion in general.

I posted the following letter to her on Salon.com

One Irish Catholic to Another
Violence against innocent human life is a moral evil. The gunning down of Dr. Tiller is lamentable in the extreme even without withdrawing his background of destroying viable preborn children. A vigilante nevertheless cannot deliver justice.
Yet the persistent question echoes in the hearts of many: What is justice then for the tens of millions of children killed by abortion and the women and men deeply wounded by abortion now living post-abortive lives? Ms. Walsh sung from the liberal hymnal that abortion is legal; legal abortion makes a flimsy retort because it is an unjust law; it violates the basic principle that laws are predicated on the nature of the beings it regulates. Abortion always destroys the most vulnerable members of the human family and can never be just regardless of Roe v. Wade.
Moreover, her examples to buttress abortion are fallacious. Dr. Tiller specialized in aborting babies that were viable, i.e. most likely to continue living outside the womb. Hospitals routinely save the lives of babies at 21 weeks or more. Moreover, mothers face far more medical risks aborting rather than delivering their babies in the third trimester. The ban on partial-birth abortion has never been challenged successfully because there are no medical reasons to perform this ghastly procedures. Ms. Walsh simply fails to confront the facts honestly.
Although the act of rape is brutal and hideous, it does not follow that the negative, painful thoughts, feelings, or memories of that episode, however traumatic, justify the intentional killing of another person. Heroic love, not the destruction of another person, is the charitable and responsible action.
Strictly speaking, Ms. Walsh asserting her “catholic” identity and pro-abortion is bats in the belfry self-deception. After all, the Catholic teaching on abortion remains unchanging and clear: killing innocent human beings is always wrong. On what grounds does she hold to be “catholic” and dissent against the most fundamental teaching of the Catholic faith (e.g. Evangelium Vitae)? Ms. Walsh position is irreconcilable. Ironically, she doesn’t care much. In the end, as long as she and her aunts can love one another despite their differences, then who cares about the babies?