Volume 3
June 15, 2022
The AP ran a piece this week reporting that abortions in the US have risen from 2017-2020. This is after a long period of decline. The numbers reported by the AP show an increase from 862,000 in 2017 to 930,000 in 2020. In 2020, one in five pregnancies ended in abortion. These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. For example, in the state of Missouri, a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, the number of abortions declined by 96% in the period from 2017-2020. However, the number of Missourians traveling to neighboring Illinois for abortions, a state with robust abortion access and protection, increased to more than 6,500. If you are at all interested in the issue of abortion (and you should be), this kind of data offers up a whole lot of questions that we should be asking. Specifically, how significantly do structural economic conditions contribute to the abortion rate? How effective are abortion bans at reducing the abortion rate?
At a time when Americans are pressed to take a side on virtually every issue imaginable, I am reminded of a saying from Confucius’ Analects: “The superior man in the world does not set his mind either for anything or against anything, but what is right he will follow.” While I am not a superior man, in the Confucian sense, I do believe that the biblical Wisdom Tradition demands the same thing from a wise person. What is “right” for both Confucians and Christians has a lot to do with our social obligations and with that in mind, perhaps Christians should begin with “love your neighbor” instead of “thou shall not”.
“The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” Niels Bohr
UPI reported that a beaver felled a tree that knocked out power and internet service to a few hundred customers in rural British Columbia. I have to be honest here, I’m kind of fond of the industrious beaver for the simple reason that it is a rodent that can single-handedly undo all of the infrastructure we spend billions of dollars to build. Here’s to the mighty beaver, nature’s check on human industry. May you ever spoil human attempts at bending nature to our will and remind of our place in the world.