A new abortion law in New York gives unrestricted abortion rights to women even up to the point of birth even if she is in labor. Surveys show that the majority of Americans want to preserve the right to abortion but also support restrictions so that abortion only takes place in the early months of pregnancy. Defenders of the new law say that such abortions only occur if the child is very deformed and unlikely to live or if the birth will be a real health detriment for the mother (though other doctors say that there is no health detriment to the mother in giving birth at that point, and that third trimester abortions are almost never needed.) Amazingly the legislature broke out in cheers after passage. Imagine cheering for having a right to kill a fully formed baby. God must be weeping and indeed ready to judge.
The reaction of conservatives and committed Christians was pronounced. Many Catholics said that Andrew Coumo should be ex-communicated. What is his defense? It is the same as his father. Though he is a Catholic, he cannot make religion a basis for what he supports in law for the larger society. This is a wrong view indeed. In a pluralistic society law reflects the moral consensus of the society. Different populations in the society form their moral views on the basis of their world views, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, secular, or Eastern religious. A society thus has morals, and all the streams of that society contribute toward that moral consensus. Than that consensus is reflected in the law. Since in the United States there is no one religious foundation for our laws, the law reflects the popular consensus, unlike in the past when Biblical morals were the foundation and unlike ancient Israel where God’s revelation was the law. However, the Biblical world view is a legitimate ground for our contribution to that consensus, and we seek to influence society so that the consensus would move toward the Biblical world view.
The law of a society is based in the morals of that society. This is the issue. For Hitler, the morals of Nazism allowed that you could kill those then called retarded or today challenged children. Because they society rejected that all human beings were created in the image of God, some human beings were not worthy of life. Professor Singer at Princeton supports killing fully born babies if they do not measure up and says they have less worth as developed dogs. If Governor Cuomo was a good Catholic, he would seek to see Catholic morals influence the moral consensus and thus the law. I note that killing the baby at the point of birth is not the moral consensus in the United States. It is tragic.
The religious basis of much of the law in the West goes back to the idea of the equal worth of every human being which is a Biblical idea. In classic Indian society, the poor and most needy are that way because they deserve it in their re-incarnation. In the Bible we are called to lift the poor and needy because they have equal dignity and worth. In Communism large populations were killed as a necessary step toward the classless society. The idea that our laws are decoupled from religious values is an incoherent idea. And when that decoupling more and more takes place, we will see society slip to greater barbarism, especially to those who are vulnerable.