I agree with the Catholic Church that abortion is the taking of a human life, but I think it needs to approach this issue with far more compassion and understanding. I also think that if the Catholic Church would ally itself with Planned Parenthood and promote birth control, it could make a dramatic reduction in the number of abortions that take place.

I agree with everybody that the taking out Saddam, Osama and Muammar was the taking of human lives. I agree that the deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza, in Shatila, in Iraq was the taking of human lives. So what am I saying here? Well nothing. So what were you saying? You were doing no more than staking out the same tired old moralising Catholic position. That is more than implicit in your next sentence, which calls for "compassion and understanding". In other words, abortion is wrong but let's try to understand it a bit more. Well this won't do. This is what has got us where we are, with scandalously high abortion rates and all the attendant misery, disease and poverty, especially for women. How about a different starting point. Abortion is not wrong, but there is a lot wrong with the Catholic church's stance on abortion. If we start right there we are beginning to see the light. We are beginning to see what it is we need to attack, and it certainly isn't women, if we want to get abortion numbers down (and I'm convinced that the Church doesn't actually want this. The Church is nothing without its sticks to beat us with). The bottom line is that the Catholic church hasn't got a bloody clue about abortion. It hasn't got a bloody clue about good sex education, about contraception, about raising the status of women, about dealing with poverty. The Catholic church, some time quite soon, is going to make a saint out of someone who preached that poverty is a virtue, not an evil to be confronted, and that abortion is a threat to world peace. When you lionise a person like that instead of meting out richly-deserved ostracism (cf. Jimmy Savile), you just know that the Church will never, ever do anything constructive about abortion. We'll get the same old sanctimony, the same old moralising, the same old institutionalisation of the submissive place of women.