Icky pro-life movement?

Hmmm. What am I saying here?

I guess this all ties up together for me with what are all of the life issues: abortion, suicide and assisted forms thereof, euthanasia, the death penalty, and war.

In sheer numbers, abortions must kill the most each year, over a million each year in the U.S. alone, easily dwarfing death penalty and war. Harder to say worldwide, though. Maybe 50 million abortions per year worldwide, according to a quick article scan on Wikepedia, quoting a journal article from the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

But from my own phenomenological perspective, how responsible am I for any of those deaths? As opposed to how much responsibility do I share when my state executes someone, or when my government goes to war and, ostensibly accidentally, drops bombs on and thus kills innocents?

I am responsible for abortion deaths by not marching for life, no doubt. But then I am responsible for state executions and war, by not actively opposing them in whatever marches of vigils are held in or out of town. And then add to that the mere fact that executions and war are state-sponsored activities, states where I am an active member, so I feel like I'm in some way doing the actual killing.

So there's where my disagreement with the usual right-wing characters comes about. This President coöpts the Holy Father's "Culture of Life" rhetoric, while at the same time killing prisoners as governor (and even mocking Karla Faye Tucker's pleas for clemency) and promulgating war in Iraq.

So the March for Life doesn't so much cover the gamut of life for me. It's a March Against Abortion.

Which is not bad, but it's not enough.

I see bumper stickers that say "You can't be Catholic and Pro-Abortion." And, okay, I'll go along with that. But how can you be Catholic and pro-death penalty too? How can you be Catholic and not anti-war?