And so very respectfully, and after careful consideration of the position and the arguments of the bishops for a long time, I've concluded that the approach of a constitutional amendment is not the best way for us to seek to deal with abortion.
I believe that the legal interdicting of abortion by either the federal government or the individual states is not a plausible possibility and, even if it could be obtained, it wouldn’t work. Given present attitudes, it would be Prohibition revisited, legislating what couldn't be enforced and in the process creating a disrespect for law in general. And as much as I admire the bishops' hope that a constitutional amendment against abortion would be the basis for a full, new bill of rights for mothers and children, I disagree, very respectfully, that that would be the result. I believe that, more likely, a constitutional prohibition -- which you can't get, but if you could -- would allow people to ignore the causes of many abortions instead of addressing them, addressing the causes much the way the death penalty is used to escape dealing more fundamentally and more rationally with the problem of violent crime.
Now, other legal options that have been proposed are, in my view, equally ineffective. The Hatch amendment, by returning the question of abortion to the various states, would have given us a checkerboard of permissive and restrictive jurisdictions. In some cases people might have been forced to go elsewhere to have abortions and that might have eased a few consciences here and there, but it would not have done what the Church wants to do -- it would not have created a deep-seated respect for life. Abortions would have gone on, millions of them.
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